Reception and Legacy

The Forerunner’s portrait is given chiefly in the Gospels, but his presence echoes through the rest of the New Testament, the preaching of the Fathers, the hymnography and iconography of the Church, and the breadth of his veneration across the Christian world. This file traces that reception: the persistence of “John’s disciples” in the Acts of the Apostles, the patristic reading of his witness, his place in the Deesis and the proskomedia, and the dedications, pilgrimages, and feasts by which the Church honors him as the greatest of the saints after the Theotokos. It closes on how the Church holds the full Gospel portrait of John together with the thin external record of him.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Forerunner)

The Forerunner Beyond the Gospels

The Gospels carry the fullest portrait of John, but the New Testament does not leave him there. The Acts of the Apostles repeatedly returns to him — and in a revealing way, for it shows the early Church having continually to situate its own life and baptism in relation to the baptism of John. The risen Lord’s words frame the whole book: “John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now” (Acts 1:5; cf. 11:16). John marks the starting point of the Gospel proclamation: the apostolic witness reaches back “beginning from the baptism of John” (Acts 1:22), and Peter dates the ministry of Jesus “after the baptism which John preached” (Acts 10:37).

The pattern recurs in the preaching of Paul. At Antioch of Pisidia he recounts that “before his coming John had preached a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel,” and reports John’s own self-effacement: “I am not he. But after me one is coming, the sandals of whose feet I am not worthy to untie” (Acts 13:24–25). Most strikingly, Acts attests that John’s movement persisted as a living current decades on and across the Mediterranean. At Ephesus, Apollos is described as “competent in the scriptures” yet “knowing only the baptism of John” (Acts 18:25), and Paul there finds “about twelve” disciples who had received “John’s baptism” but had “never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit”; Paul explains that “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus,” and baptizes them in the name of the Lord Jesus (Acts 19:1–7). These passages show the early Church doing exactly what its later theology would systematize: receiving John’s baptism as genuine and providential, yet as preparatory — pointing forward to the baptism of the Spirit given in Christ (see John and the Mystery of Baptism).

The Patristic Reception

The Fathers preached John constantly, and along consistent lines. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew and Homilies on the Gospel of John, dwells on the Forerunner’s humility and on the meaning of his baptism: he reads John’s protest at the Jordan — “I need to be baptized by you” (Matt. 3:14) — as the model of the creature recognizing the Creator, and “the friend of the bridegroom” (John 3:29) and “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30) as the very shape of sanctity (Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 10–12 [NPNF I/10]; Homilies on John 16–17, 29–30 [NPNF I/14]). The exegetical tradition more broadly — Origen among the earliest to comment at length on John in his Commentary on John — wrestled with the relation of the forerunner to the One foretold, and with the distinction between John’s water and the Spirit given by Christ (Origen, Commentary on John 6 [on John 1:19–34]). Across this preaching the Forerunner is read as the hinge between the Testaments: the last and greatest of the prophets, and the first to point with his finger to the Lamb (cf. John 1:29; on his witness, Behold the Lamb of God).

The Hymnographic and Iconographic Reception

Nowhere is the Church’s reception of John fuller than in her worship. He is commemorated on a remarkable cycle of six annual feasts — the Conception (September 23), the Nativity (June 24), the Beheading (August 29), the Synaxis of the Forerunner on the day after Theophany (January 7), and the First-and-Second and the Third Findings of his Head (February 24 and May 25) — a density of commemoration second only to that of the Theotokos and the Lord Himself (see The Cycle of Feasts; on the festal calendar, The Great Feasts). The menaion services for these days are the Church’s own sustained theological commentary on the Forerunner, hymned by such poets as Andrew of Crete and the melodists of the festal canons.

In iconography, John’s reception is no less distinctive. He is shown as the gaunt desert ascetic in his garment of camel’s hair, often holding a scroll and his own severed head, and — in a uniquely Byzantine type — winged, the “Angel of the Desert,” in literal depiction of the prophecy applied to him, “Behold, I send my messenger (angelos) before your face” (Mark 1:2; Mal. 3:1; see The Angel of the Desert). Above all, John stands in the Deesis — the central intercessory composition of the Orthodox icon screen and of the Last Judgment — at Christ’s left hand, balancing the Theotokos at His right, the two of them interceding for the world. This placement is itself a dogmatic statement in paint: of all the saints, John is the one set beside the Mother of God as the foremost intercessor (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982; on the theology of the image, Icons and Iconoclasm).

The Breadth of His Honor

The Forerunner’s standing as the greatest saint after the Theotokos is woven into the very structure of Orthodox worship and devotion. At the proskomedia, the service of preparation before the Divine Liturgy, the first particle removed from the commemorative bread in honor of the saints — the first of the nine ranks — is taken for “the honorable and glorious Prophet, Forerunner, and Baptist John,” who heads the company of the saints commemorated beside the Lamb (Hapgood, Service Book, 1922). The same priority appears in the Deesis and in the litanies, where John is named immediately after the Theotokos. The Lord’s own word grounds it: “among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist” (Matt. 11:11; see The Greatest Born of Women).

That honor overflowed into the fabric of the Christian world. Churches, monasteries, and baptisteries beyond number have been dedicated to the Forerunner from the early centuries onward — the Lateran basilica in Rome was dedicated to John the Baptist (with John the Evangelist), and monasteries bearing his name, such as the great Stoudios monastery in Constantinople, were centers of the Church’s life. The site of his baptizing on the Jordan became, and remains, a place of pilgrimage where Christians descend into the river in remembrance of the Theophany. His relics — above all the several traditions of the “findings of the head” — drew devotion across the Byzantine and later worlds, their attestation pinned and their rival claims reported as tradition rather than asserted as fact (see The Cycle of Feasts). The breadth of these dedications is itself a measure of the place the Forerunner has held in the Church’s heart.

Holding the Portrait and the Record Together

John presents a peculiar shape to the historian and to the believer alike: a figure whose Gospel portrait is unusually full — infancy narrative, public preaching, the baptism of Christ, the witness to the Lamb, the martyrdom — yet whose history outside the Gospels rests on a single ancient witness, the brief notice of Josephus (Antiquities 18.5.2; see Josephus and the Historical John). The Church does not resolve this asymmetry by inflating the external record or by deflating the Gospel; she holds the two together. She receives the full Gospel and liturgical portrait of the Forerunner as the truth of who he is, and she reports the thin external record honestly as what it is — a single corroborating notice, and a reminder that the saints are known to the Church first in her worship and her Scriptures, and only secondarily in the archive (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The reception traced here — from the disciples of John at Ephesus to the figure in the Deesis and the first particle at the proskomedia — is the Church’s long answer to the question of who John was: not a problem to be solved, but the Forerunner to be venerated.

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version. (Acts 1:5, 1:22, 10:37, 11:16, 13:24–25, 18:25, 19:1–7; Matt. 3:14, 11:11; John 1:29, 3:29–30; Mark 1:2; Mal. 3:1.)
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew (NPNF Series I, Vol. 10) and Homilies on the Gospel of St. John (NPNF Series I, Vol. 14). (Chrysostom on John’s humility, the baptism at the Jordan, and “the friend of the bridegroom.”)
  • Origen. Commentary on the Gospel of John, Books 6 and 10 (on John 1:19–34). Trans. R. E. Heine, Fathers of the Church 80, 89. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989–1993. (Patristic exegesis of John’s witness and baptism.)
  • Hapgood, Isabel Florence, trans. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. New York: Association Press, 1922. (The proskomedia and the commemoration of the Forerunner; the order of the festal services.)
  • Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982. (The iconography of the Forerunner and the Deesis.)
  • Josephus, Flavius. Jewish Antiquities 18.5.2 (§§116–119). Trans. L. H. Feldman, Loeb Classical Library. (The single external witness to John, against which the fullness of the Gospel portrait is set.)