Durandus on the Beheading of St John the Baptist

The Church celebrates the feast of the beheading of blessed John because he died for the truth, but not as solemnly as the feast of his birth, because (when he died) he went down to hell (i.e, the limbo of the Fathers), as Gregory says, commenting on the words, “Art thou the one who is to come, where do we await another?” (in his homily on the Gospel for the second Sunday of Advent, Matthew 11, 2-10.) John began to preach in the 30th year from the Lord’s birth, and was beheaded around Pascha by King Herod in the 32nd year, that is, the year before the Lord’s passion.

The Head of St John the Baptist Presented to Salome, by the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius, ca. 1640; now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. – Fabritius, born in 1622, studied with Rembrandt, and was considered one of his best pupils. In about 1650, he moved to Delft, where he was killed on Oct. 12, 1654, in the incident known as the ‘Delft Thunderclap’, the explosion of a gunpowder magazine which leveled about a quarter of the city. Fabritius’ studio was destroyed, along with most of his paintings; this is perhaps the earliest of his surviving works, which number only about a dozen.

When John was beheaded, his disciples buried his body in Sebaste, a city of Palestine, and his head was buried in Jerusalem near where Herod lived. In the place where the body lay buried, God worked many miracles, for which reason a multitude of Christians used to gather there. Seeing this, Julian the Apostate issued an order, and the gentiles broke up the mausoleum to dishonor Saint John, and they scattered his bones through the fields. But since the Christians continued to come there and the miracles did not cease, the gentiles gathered up the bones and burnt them, but the finger by which he pointed out the Lord as He was coming to the Jordan, saying, “Behold the Lamb of God”, etc., could not be burnt.

However, there were many Christian monks from Jerusalem mixed in among those gentiles, and as they were gathering up the bones, these men saved as many as they could hide, and brought them to Phillip, the bishop of Jerusalem. The latter, through his deacon Julian, send them to Anastasius, bishop of Alexandria, and afterwards Theophilus, bishop of that same city, laid them to rest in the temple of Serapis, and consecrated it as a basilica in his honor.

A painting of a medieval legend in which Julian the Apostate destroys the bones of St John the Baptist, ca. 1484, by the Netherlandish painter Geertgen tot Sint Jans. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

(Our friend Durandus has received from his sources a great deal of confusion about this part of the story. The bishop of Jerusalem during Julian the Apostate’s brief reign (361-63) was St Cyril; the only bishop of that city named Phillip lived in the 120s. “Anastasius” is a mistake for “Athanasius,” in the reign of whose third successor, Theophilus (385-412), the temple of Serapis at Alexandria was indeed dismantled, and a monastery founded on the site, with a church named in honor of St John.)

For this reason, the Church celebrates this feast of the beheading and of the burning of the bones, as if for one who, although already dead, in some sense underwent a second martyrdom in his bones.

Others say that the blessed Thecla brought John’s finger, the one which could not be burnt, from the Outremer (‘ultramarinis – the lands beyond the sea’, the common term for the Holy Land in the age of the crusaders,) to a place called Moriana, and there founded a church in honor of blessed John which was dedicated on this day. Therefore, the lord pope decreed that this day should be kept in his honor through the whole world, and in accord with this, it seems that it should also be called the feast of this dedication. (This is also fairly confused; St Thecla lived about three centuries before the time of Julian.)

A reliquary of a finger of St John the Baptist, from the museum of the cathedral of Florence, where he is honored as Patron Saint of the city. Attributed to Matteo di Giovanni; first half of the 15th century.

Furthermore, the blessed John revealed the location of his head, which had been buried in Jerusalem, to two eastern monks who had come there to worship, and they found it near Herod’s dwelling place on February 23rd. But afterwards, it was brought by others to the city of Edessa (in Syria), and hidden away in obscurity in some cave, until it was revealed again to a priest named Marcellus, and to the bishop of the same city, This took place on August 29th, and from that time the beheading began to be celebrated in that city on the day on which the head was revealed; and thus, this feast can also be called the feast of the revelation.

(Excerpts from Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, VII, 26. The legend of the repeated loss and rediscovery of St John’s head is well known in the East; in the Byzantine Rite, a feast of both the first and second finding of it is kept on February 24th, and of the third finding on May 25th.)