JOHN THE BAPTIST, the "forerun ner of Jesus the Christ. He was the son of Zacharias, a Jewish priest, whose wife, Eliza beth, was also of a priestly family. The dates neither of his birth nor of his entrance on his public work can be fixed with unmistakable certainty. For his birth, dates varying from 8 to 4 B.C. have been proposed, and the be ginning of his ministry must have been about 26 to 28 A.D. According to Luke he was born when his parents were extremely old, and the evangelist adds a story of great beauty about the vision of Zacharias while engaged in his priestly duties in the Temple, and the visit to Elizabeth of her relative Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus. Of the life of John before he steps out into public activities we know little. The home of his parents was in one of the hill towns of Judea, but there is no good ground for naming any particular city, as has sometimes been done. From his birth he had been dedicated as a uNazariteDthat is, he was under obligation to allow his hair and beard to grow untrimmed, to refrain from all use of wine and other intoxicants, and especially to avoid every contact with a dead body. He seems while still young to have decided not to take the honored office of priest which would have been his by hereditary right and to have withdrawn to the desolate and lonely desert of Judea, which the presumably early death of his parents would leave him quite free to do. There he lived with the utmost simplicity, dressed in a robe of coarse camel's hair cloth and eating the locusts and wild honey which abounded in that wild region to the west of the Dead Sea. The notion that he was associated with the Essenes, ascetics dwelling in com munities in the desert, though earlier held by some, has nothing in its favor and has now scarcely any advocates.
It is not surprising that when John sud denly began to preach he aroused wide and deep interest amounting to general enthusiasm at first throughout Judea, and then elsewhere as he extended his ministry along the whole Jordan Valley. The very figure of the gaunt arid meanly clad desert dweller must have been striking; his vehement warnings against sin and demands for thoroughgoing re pentance were most impressive, and these were re-enforced by the assertion that the prophecies of the King and divine kingdom to come which had so long sustained the faith and rekindled the hopes of Israel were now near to fulfilment. Never had the summons
to repentance been so vehement, and never had it been re-enforced with such a motive, ((The expected King will speedily set up his promised kingdom of righteousness: repent, therefore, that by righteousness the nation may become fit to receive its King." Throngs of all classes of society flocked to listen to hear the trumpet message of the desert evangelist, and multi tudes were plunged in baptism beneath the waters of the Jordan in token of their obedi ence to his pledging themselves as penitents to the service of the ((One who was to Come?' But the most significant point in the minis try of John was reached when Jesus came from Nazareth and in spite of protestationt insisted on baptism at his hands. The details of the event are hot fully recorded. The later statement of the Baptist that he had not known Jesus before his baptism may mean only that before that he had no grounds for definitely recognizing him as the Messiah whose coming he was foretelling, or it may mean that in spite of their possibly remote cousinship John and Jesus had had no previous personal ac quaintance at all. The hesitation of John to baptize Jesus may have rested on earlier knowl edge of his character, but it may also have developed at the first interview. It is fre quently assumed that the heavenly sight and sound which we are told accompanied the bap tism were shared by the crowds who are sup posed to have been present, but this is nowhere asserted, nor indeed is it necessarily implied that any others than John and Jesus were present at the time. The Synoptic Gospels deal chiefly with the work of John up to the baptism of Jesus, while the Fourth Gospel gives his testimony to Jesus afterward, and so there is no such inconsistency between the reports as is sometimes said to exist. According to the Fourth Gospel, which purports to be by the Apostle John, possibly a relative of the Baptist and at any rate one of his followers, the impression made by the baptismal scene was such that he was convinced that the Messiah had now come, and while he did not modify his preaching, leaving it to Jesus to reveal himself in his own way, he privately pointed him out as 'The Lamb of God who should bear away the sin of the world,' and some of his disciples consequently at once transferred their allegiance to Jesus.