The Nativity of John the Baptist

Luke's Gospel narrates that before the Annunciation to Mary, an angel appeared to a priest named Zechariah while he was serving in the Jerusalem temple, announcing that his wife Elizabeth, both of them described as elderly and previously childless, would bear a son to be named John, who would prepare the way before a coming figure of great significance. When Zechariah expresses doubt, given his and Elizabeth's age, he is struck unable to speak until the promised birth occurs, a sign later fulfilled when Elizabeth gives birth and Zechariah, asked to confirm the child's name in writing since he could not speak, writes that the boy is to be called John, at which point his speech returns.

The narrative places John's conception six months before Jesus's own conception at the Annunciation, a chronological detail Luke uses to link the two infancy narratives together explicitly, since Gabriel cites Elizabeth's advanced pregnancy to Mary as evidence that nothing is impossible with God.

John the Baptist grew, according to the Gospels, to become an ascetic preacher whose ministry of repentance and baptism in the Jordan directly preceded and, in the Gospel accounts, prepared the way for Jesus's own public ministry, a role Luke's infancy narrative establishes from before John's birth.

Unlike most of the other events in this cluster of Lukan infancy material, John the Baptist himself is independently attested outside the New Testament: the first century Jewish historian Josephus describes John, his preaching and his execution by Herod Antipas in some detail, in an account most historians regard as substantially reliable and largely independent of Christian sources, giving John a firmer claim to historical attestation than almost any other figure in the infancy narratives.

The specific circumstances Luke narrates around John's birth, Zechariah's temple vision, his enforced silence, and the precise coordination with Jesus's own conception, are nonetheless read by critical scholars as Luke's own literary composition, serving the Gospel's larger purpose of presenting John as the divinely appointed forerunner whose life is providentially woven together with Jesus's own from before either was born.

The feast of John's Nativity, kept on 24 June, is one of relatively few feast days in the Christian calendar commemorating a birth rather than a death, a distinction traditionally explained by the belief that John, like Jesus and Mary, was sanctified before birth, making his birth itself, rather than only his eventual martyrdom, an event worth liturgical commemoration in its own right.