John the Baptist

135:2.1Af­ter an ill­ness of sev­eral months Zach­a­rias died in July, A.D. 12, when John was just past eigh­teen years of age. This was a time of great em­bar­rass­ment to John since the Nazarite vow for­bade con­tact with the dead, even in one’s own fam­ily. Al­though John had en­deav­ored to com­ply with the re­stric­tions of his vow re­gard­ing con­tam­i­na­tion by the dead, he doubted that he had been wholly obe­di­ent to the re­quire­ments of the Nazarite or­der; there­fore, af­ter his fa­ther’s burial he went to Je­ru­sa­lem, where, in the Nazarite cor­ner of the women’s court, he of­fered the sac­ri­fices re­quired for his cleans­ing.

135:2.2In Septem­ber of this year Eliz­a­beth and John made a jour­ney to Naz­a­reth to visit Mary and Je­sus. John had just about made up his mind to launch out in his life­work, but he was ad­mon­ished, not only by Je­sus’ words but also by his ex­am­ple, to re­turn home, take care of his mother, and await the “com­ing of the Fa­ther’s hour.” Af­ter bid­ding Je­sus and Mary good-bye at the end of this en­joy­able visit, John did not again see Je­sus un­til the event of his bap­tism in the Jor­dan.

135:2.3John and Eliz­a­beth re­turned to their home and be­gan to lay plans for the fu­ture. Since John re­fused to ac­cept the priest’s al­lowance due him from the tem­ple funds, by the end of two years they had all but lost their home; so they de­cided to go south with the sheep herd. Ac­cord­ingly, the sum­mer that John was twenty years of age wit­nessed their re­moval to He­bron. In the so-called “wilder­ness of Judea” John tended his sheep along a brook that was trib­u­tary to a larger stream which en­tered the Dead Sea at En­gedi. The En­gedi colony in­cluded not only Nazarites of life­long and time-pe­riod con­se­cra­tion but nu­mer­ous other as­cetic herds­men who con­gre­gated in this re­gion with their herds and frat­er­nized with the Nazarite broth­er­hood. They sup­ported them­selves by sheep rais­ing and from gifts which wealthy Jews made to the or­der.

135:2.4As time passed, John re­turned less of­ten to He­bron, while he made more fre­quent vis­its to En­gedi. He was so en­tirely dif­fer­ent from the ma­jor­ity of the Nazarites that he found it very dif­fi­cult fully to frat­er­nize with the broth­er­hood. But he was very fond of Ab­ner, the ac­knowl­edged leader and head of the En­gedi colony.