Beheading of John the Baptist

Traditional accounts

Feast day

Related feasts

Relics

John the Baptist's head

• In medieval times, it was rumored that the Knights Templar had possession of the head, and multiple records from their Inquisition in the early 14th century make reference to some form of head veneration.
• During the Crusaders' looting of Constantinople in 1204, Wallo or Walo de Sarton, canon of Picquigny in Picardy, discovered a half-ball of transparent crystal on a silver plate that contained front facial bones of the skull without mandible. The Greek lettering around the plate indicated that the bones were from John the Baptist but he could not read Greek and so went from monastery to monastery trying to get information. Walon sold the plate in order to pay for his voyage back home, brought the relic and gave it to the bishop at Amiens. This made the Amiens Cathedral a major pilgrimage site in France, and was the main impetus for building the magnificent Gothic cathedral that still stands.
• At the beginning of the 17th century there was some confusion about whose relics were venerated in the Basilica of Saint Sylvester the First: some claimed they were bones of St. John, the martyr of Rome, and the others that they were the Baptist's. Pope Clement VIII, to remove all reasonable doubt, requested that the canons of Amiens provide a particle of the relics of St John for the basilica. In 1604, he was given a part of parietal bone that was inserted into a wax skull, and is still kept in the basilica. The Roman Catholic tradition holds that the bone on display in San Silvestro in Capite is a true relic of John the Baptist.
• The occipital bone of St John's skull is said to be kept at the Topkapı Palace Museum together with parts of the right hand.
• The Eastern Orthodox Church of John the Baptist in Jerusalem displays a purported fragment of the Skull of John the Baptist.
• A reliquary at the Residenz in Munich, Germany, is labeled as containing what previous Bavarian rulers thought was the skull of John the Baptist.
• It is also believed by some that a piece of his skull is held at the Romanian skete Prodromos on Mount Athos.
• Islamic tradition maintains that the head of Saint John the Baptist was interred in the once-called Basilica of Saint John the Baptist in Damascus, now the Umayyad Mosque. Pope John Paul II visited the Mosque during his visit to Syria in 2001.

John the Baptist's right arm

• According to some traditions, Luke the Evangelist went to the city of Sebastia, the place of John's burial site, from which he took the right hand of the Forerunner and brought it to Antioch, his home city, where it performed miracles. It is reported that the relic would be brought out and shown to the faithful on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. If the fingers of the hand were open, it was interpreted as a sign of a bountiful year; if the hand was closed, it would be a poor harvest.
• The arm is then said to have been transferred from Antioch to Constantinople in 956. On 7 January, the Orthodox Church celebrates the "Feast of the Transfer of the Right Hand of the Holy Forerunner" from Antioch to Constantinople and the Miracle of Saint John the Forerunner against the Hagarines at Chios.
• * In 1204, after the Sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders, the Frankish emperor Baldwin allegedly gave one bone from the wrist of Saint John the Baptist to Othon de Cicon, who in turn gave it to Cîteaux Abbey in France.
• Having been brought from Antioch to Constantinople at the time of Constantine VII, the arm was kept in the Emperor's chapel in the 12th century, then in the Church of the Virgin of the Pharos, then in the Church of Peribleptos in the first half of the 15th century. Spanish envoy Clavijo reported that he saw two different arms in two different monasteries while on a visit to Constantinople in 1404.
• When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, they seized possession of the relic. In 1484, Sultan Bayezid II sent it to the knights of Rhodes, who held his brother Cem captive in order to obtain the relic back. Two different accounts then exist as to the fate of the relic:
• * The Turks allege that in 1585, Sultan Murad III managed to retrieve a part of the relic from the Christian Knights and had the arm brought back to Constantinople, where it remains up to this day at the Topkapı Palace. The arm is kept in a gold-embellished silver reliquary. There are several inscriptions on the arm: "The beloved of God" on the forefinger, "This is the hand of the Baptist" on the wrist, and "belongs to monk Dolin" on the band above the elbow.
• * The Orthodox Christians, nonetheless, claim that, when in 1798 Napoleon conquered the island of Malta, then the Knight's siege, John's arm was one of the few treasures that Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch was allowed to take with him. On 12 October 1799, after the resignation of Hompesch, it was presented to Russian emperor Paul I, who had been elected the new Grand Master of the Order, and taken to the chapel of the Priory Palace at Gatchina in Russia. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Eastern Orthodox Church authorities had it transferred from the church in Gatchina to the Ostrog Monastery in Montenegro, and from there to its current location at Cetinje Monastery, also in Montenegro, where it is displayed up to this day.
• * The right hand of John the Baptist that is kept in Siena Cathedral was acquired by the first Serbian archbishop Saint Sava, as testified by the inscription on the reliquary, sometime after the fall of Constantinople. It was kept in the Žiča monastery, and around 1290, when warfare made the northern areas of Serbia unsafe, transferred to the newly established archiepiscopal see of the Serbian Orthodox Church at Peć. From there it was presumably relocated by Helena, daughter of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos and widow of the despot of Serbia, Lazar Branković, either to Constantinople or directly to her uncle Thomas Palaiologos, despot of the Morea, who fled to Italy in 1461 and sold his whole collection of relics to Pope Pius II. The pope bequeathed the hand to Siena cathedral in 1464. A special chapel was built for it. The relic is displayed only once a year, on Whit Monday.

• It has also been claimed that a fragment of the right forearm is kept at the Dionysiou Monastery on Mount Athos, Greece. At the beginning of the 19th century, the advisor to Prussia in Constantinople, John Frangopoulos, was in possession of this relic and he adorned it with jewels. On 10 March 1802 it was brought to Dionysiou Monastery through the efforts of its abbot, Joachim Agiostratiti.
• Relics of John the Baptist are said to be in the possession of the Coptic Orthodox Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great in Scetes, Egypt.
• Aachen Cathedral, in Germany, contains a robe supposedly worn by John the Baptist, adored as a relic.
• In July 2010, a small reliquary was discovered under the ruins of a 5th-century monastery on St. Ivan Island, Bulgaria. Local archaeologists opened the reliquary in August and found bone fragments of a skull, a hand and a tooth, which they believe belong to John the Baptist, based on their interpretation of a Greek inscription on the reliquary. The Bulgarian Orthodox bishop who witnessed the opening speculated that the relics might have been a gift from an 11th-century church on the island possibly dedicated to the saint. The remains have been carbon-dated to the 1st century.
• A reliquary with a purported finger of Saint John the Baptist is displayed in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

Biblical commentary

St. John died a martyr to his calling. Having been called by God to be a preacher of penance, he represented Herod's sin to him, and reminded him of the law of God. On this account he died a violent death at the age of thirty-two. To him applies the eighth beatitude: "Blessed are they who suffer persecution, for justice' sake." His soul passed directly into Limbo, where he, like St. Joseph, awaited the arrival of the Messias, and the speedy accomplishment of the work of Redemption. When our Lord ascended into heaven, he was taken up with Him into everlasting happiness. The Church honours him as a great Saint, and on the 24th of June celebrates his nativity, because he was born without original sin.

Wherefore the just vengeance of God burned against all who were concerned in this crime. Herod was defeated by Aretas. Afterwards he was banished with Herodias to Lyons, and deprived of his tetrarchy and everything by Caligula, at the instigation of Herod Agrippa, the brother of Herodias, as Josephus relates. Moreover, the head of the dancing daughter was cut off by means of ice. Hear what Nicephorus says, "As she was journeying once in the winter-time, and a frozen river had to be crossed on foot, the ice broke beneath her, not without the providence of God. Straightway she sank down up to her neck. This made her dance and wriggle about with all the lower parts of her body, not on land, but in the water. Her wicked head was glazed with ice, and at length severed from her body by the sharp edges, not of iron, but of the frozen water. Thus in the very ice she displayed the dance of death, and furnished a spectacle to all who beheld it, which brought to mind what she had done.

Depictions of Salome, Herod, and the death of John the Baptist

• Gustave Moreau:
• * Salome Dancing before Herod, 1874–76
• * The Apparition, 1874–76
• * Salome, 1876Hérodias, Gustave Flaubert, 1877
• James Tissot, 1886–96:
• * The Daughter of Herodias Dancing
• * King Herod
• * The Head of John the Baptist on a PlatterSalome, Franz von Stuck, 1906Salome, Nikolai AstrupSalome With the Head of John the Baptist, Aubrey Beardsley,