Nativity of Saint John the Baptist (June 24)

Everything the feast celebrates is told by Saint Luke at the opening of his Gospel, in a continuous narrative running from the announcement to Zechariah to John's childhood in the desert. The Church receives it as true history, exactly as she receives all the rest of Scripture: inspired and without error^[7]. The Baptist's full biography — his preaching, the baptism of Jesus, his martyrdom — is told in the article Saint John the Baptist: only what founds the feast of 24 June is kept here.

The announcement to Zechariah in the Temple

In the days of Herod the Great, a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah, was serving in the Temple of Jerusalem. His wife Elizabeth, a descendant of Aaron, was barren, and both were advanced in years^[8]. While he was offering incense, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and announced that Elizabeth would bear a son, to be called John: he would be great before the Lord, filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb, and would walk before God in the spirit and power of the prophet Elijah^[9].

Zechariah doubts — "How shall I know this?" — and becomes mute until the day the promise is fulfilled^[10]. This dumbness is no arbitrary punishment: in Saint Augustine's reading of it, Zechariah's silence figures the silence of prophecy before Christ, a word hidden and sealed which will be opened at the coming of the one announced^[11].

The Visitation: John leaps in his mother's womb

Shortly after the Annunciation, Mary hastens to Elizabeth. When Elizabeth hears Mary's greeting, the child leaps in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cries out: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb"^[12]. It is for this leaping that tradition sees in John a child already sanctified before his birth: the Catechism recalls that John was "filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb" by Christ himself, on the occasion of Mary's visit to Elizabeth^[13].

The birth, on the eighth day: "His name is John"

When her time comes, Elizabeth bears a son, and the neighbours rejoice with her at the Lord's mercy^[14]. On the eighth day, as the Law prescribes circumcision^[15], the child is to be called Zechariah, after his father. But Elizabeth declares: "No, he shall be called John." A sign is made to the father, still mute: he asks for a writing tablet and writes: "His name is John." At that instant his mouth is opened, his tongue loosed, and he speaks, blessing God^[16]. Fear then seizes all the dwellers in the hill country of Judea, and all wonder: "What will this child turn out to be?"^[17].

The Benedictus, the feast's first canticle

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Zechariah prophesies. His canticle, the Benedictus — from its first Latin word, "Blessed" — has become the morning prayer of the whole Church: it is sung every day at Lauds, and solemnly on 24 June^[18]:

"Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for he has visited his people, he has come to their rescue and he has raised up for us a power for salvation in the House of his servant David, even as he promised through the mouth of his holy prophets of old."^[19]

The canticle closes upon the child himself:

"And you, little child, you shall be called Prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare a way for him, to give his people knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins."^[20]

"The child grew": the desert years

Luke concludes in a single sentence: "Meanwhile the child grew up and his spirit matured. And he lived out in the wilderness until the day he appeared openly to Israel"^[21]. That is all the Gospel says of the thirty years that follow: the rest belongs to the article Saint John the Baptist. A second-century apocryphal narrative, the Protoevangelium of James, imagines Elizabeth fleeing with the child into the hill country at the time of the Massacre of the Innocents^[22]: it is a pious tradition, not a historical witness, and the Church does not give it the weight of the Gospel.

The feast rests upon a text: the opening of the Gospel according to Saint Luke. Who wrote it, when, and why trust him? The article answers first with the received tradition of the Church, defended by ancient witnesses and internal arguments; modern objections are examined fairly at the end of the article.

The author according to tradition: Luke, physician and companion of Paul

Since the second century, the Church attributes the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles to Luke, the physician of Antioch, companion of Saint Paul^[23]. The internal clues converge: the author accompanies Paul on his journeys — the famous "we" passages of Acts —, Paul himself greets "Luke, the beloved physician" in his letters^[24], and the medical vocabulary scattered through the work fits that profession.

The ancient witnesses are clear and early:

An early dating, defensible

Tradition places the composition of Luke's work before the end of the sixties, and the main argument is internal to the text itself: the Acts of the Apostles ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome, "proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ with full assurance"^[27]. Neither Paul's martyrdom (c. 64-67) nor the fall of Jerusalem (70) is mentioned: for a historian who has just recounted Stephen, James and so many persecutions, this silence is hardly explicable if he were writing after those events^[28]. The Gospel, which precedes Acts and is addressed to the same Theophilus^[29], thus belongs to the sixties, within a generation of the direct witnesses.

The prologue to Theophilus: an investigation, not a legend

Luke opens his work like an ancient historian: "Seeing that many others have undertaken to draw up accounts of the events that have taken place among us, [...] I in my turn, after carefully going over the whole story from the beginning, have decided to write an ordered account for you, Theophilus"^[30]. He claims an investigation among "those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning" — and for the chapters of the infancy, the obvious source is the Virgin Mary herself, whom Luke alone lets speak at such length. It is this investigation that grounds the feast: 24 June celebrates no edifying myth, but a birth reported by a first-century witness.

Six months before Christmas

The date owes nothing to chance or to the seasons: it is computed from the Gospel. When the angel announces to Mary that she will be the mother of the Saviour, he tells her that Elizabeth, her kinswoman, "is now in her sixth month, she who was called barren"^[31]. The Church keeping the Annunciation on 25 March and Christ's birth on 25 December, the Forerunner's birth, conceived six months earlier, falls six months before Christmas: 24 June^[32]. The calculation is ancient and limpid: Mary stays with Elizabeth about three months^[33], then Elizabeth gives birth at term.

The 24th rather than the 25th: the Roman reckoning

Why the 24th and not the 25th? Because the Romans counted the days backwards from the calends of the following month, counting both end days: 25 December is the eighth day before the calends of January, and 24 June is symmetrically the eighth day before the calends of July^[34]. Christmas and Saint John's Day are thus built as mirror images, six months apart, by the same ancient manner of counting.

The solstice and the Forerunner's word

One striking fact remains: 24 June touches the summer solstice — after it, the days shorten — while 25 December touches the winter solstice — after it, the days lengthen. The Church has always read in this the sign of the Baptist's word: "He must grow greater, I must grow less"^[35]. The liturgy itself carries this meditation: the hymn of the Office for 24 June sings of the Forerunner: "Your light is waning, another is revealed; it is God who rises and goes before you: in the dawn of Christ, perfect joy!"^[36].

The order of causes must be kept: it is not the solstice that fixed the feast — the date comes from the Gospel computation —, it is the feast that illumines the solstice. The objection of a recycled pagan origin falls of itself: Saint John's Day copies no feast of the sun, it deduces a date from Scripture, and it is afterwards that Christians recognise in it the symbol of the one who decreases before the Christ who increases.

Saint Augustine already preaching Saint John's Day

At the beginning of the fifth century, the feast is so firmly established that Augustine of Hippo devotes a series of seven sermons to it (Sermons 287 to 293), preached for 24 June^[37]. The last of the series, Sermon 293, is still read today at the Office of Readings of the solemnity: Augustine explains in it why the Church keeps a birth, when she ordinarily keeps her saints on the day of their death^[38].

"The Church holds the birth of John as particularly sacred: you will find none of the saints who went before us whose birth we solemnly celebrate. We celebrate only that of John and that of Christ."^[39]

And he gives the theological key to the whole feast:

"John, then, appears as a boundary placed between the two Testaments, the old and the new. Because he represents what is ancient, he is born of two aged parents; because he represents what is new, he shows himself a prophet in his mother's womb."^[40]

Agde (506): one of the great holidays of obligation

A century later, the Council of Agde (506) counts the Nativity of John the Baptist among the principal feasts of the region: a day of rest, on a par with the greatest feasts^[41]. By this point in the sixth century, Saint John's Day is thus already a feast of the first rank, with its own vigil: nothing of a late creation.

Vigil, fast and octave

Like the greatest feasts, Saint John's Day long included a fasted vigil on 23 June, then an octave prolonging the celebration for eight days^[42]. These usages tell the importance the Middle Ages attached to the Forerunner: vigils were kept, fasts observed, bonfires lit — and the mystery plays performed for the feast drew crowds.

It is Pius XII who, by the decree Cum nostra hac aetate of 23 March 1955, simplifies the octaves: only those of Christmas, Easter and Pentecost are kept^[43]. Saint John's octave then disappears, but the vigil Mass remains: 24 June stays one of the rare saints' feasts to keep two proper Masses, that of the 23rd in the evening and that of the day^[44].

The rank today: a solemnity

The 1969 Roman calendar keeps the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on 24 June with the rank of solemnity^[45]. In practice: white vestments, the Gloria and the Creed at Mass^[46], and precedence over the Sunday in Ordinary Time when 24 June falls on a Sunday — a Sunday yields its celebration only to solemnities and feasts of the Lord^[47]. Saints Peter and Paul, kept on 29 June^[48], are the summer's other great solemnity; but the Baptist is the only saint, with the Virgin Mary, whose birth the Church celebrates.

The vigil Mass, on the 23rd in the evening

The celebration opens on the previous evening, as for Christmas or Easter: the vigil Mass meditates the prophet's vocation, from Jeremiah to John. Its proper readings are^[49]:

The Mass of the day

On 24 June, the Mass unfolds the mystery of the Servant and the Forerunner^[50]:

Note the choice: none of these texts speaks of the baptism or the martyrdom — all is ordered to the birth and the vocation. The feast does not sum up the Baptist's life, it celebrates its source.

The Benedictus, the canticle of every morning

Zechariah's canticle is not reserved to 24 June: it is the Gospel canticle of Lauds, sung by the whole Church every morning of the year^[51]. On Saint John's Day, it is framed by a proper antiphon: "Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit, prophesied, blessing the God of Israel"^[52]. Thus every Lauds of the year recalls the birth kept on 24 June: the feast irrigates daily prayer.

The collect of the feast

The prayer that opens and closes the Mass of 24 June — the collect — sums up the whole theology of the solemnity:

"It was your will, Lord, that Saint John the Baptist should prepare your people for the coming of the Messiah; grant to your Church the gift of spiritual joy, and guide the minds of all believers in the way of salvation and peace."^[53]

The Vespers hymn: the birth of the musical notes

The Vespers of 24 June sing a famous Latin hymn, the Ut queant laxis, composed in the 8th century and traditionally attributed to Paul the Deacon, Benedictine monk and historian of the Lombards^[54]. The Roman Breviary spreads it across the whole office of the feast: the first part at Vespers, the second (Antra deserti) at Matins, the third (O nimis felix) at Lauds^[55]. Its first stanza addresses the Baptist himself:

« Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum, Sancte Ioannes. »^[56]

Which means: so that your servants may sing with freed voices the marvels of your life, take away the guilt of their sullied lips, Saint John. According to a tradition reported by William Durandus, Paul the Deacon, hoarse on a Holy Saturday when he was to sing the Exsultet, is said to have implored the same help as Zechariah recovering his speech: hence this hymn to the son of Zechariah^[57].

But the glory of the Ut queant laxis is musical. In the 11th century, the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo uses it to teach his pupils to sing in tune: the six half-lines of the first stanza each begin on a higher note of the scale, and their initial syllables give the six notes their names: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la^[58]. The si will come from the initials of "Sancte Ioannes", the last line, and ut will later become do, easier to sing^[59]. Thus every child who solmizes ut, re, mi unknowingly sings the hymn of the Vespers of Saint John's Day.

The hinge of the two Testaments

"The Law and the Prophets were until John": it is the Lord himself who makes the Baptist a boundary, and Augustine only unfolds that word^[60]. The angel had announced it to Zechariah: the child will walk before the Lord "in the spirit and power of the prophet Elijah"^[61], fulfilling the very last word of the prophets: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and dreadful day"^[62]. Because he is born of two aged parents, he belongs to what is ancient; because he leaps in his mother's womb at Christ's approach, he already belongs to what is new. To keep his birth is to keep the moment when Israel's expectation tips over into fulfilment.

Sanctified from his mother's womb

The Church sees in the leaping of the Visitation an anticipated sanctification: John is cleansed of original sin even before his birth, by Christ's presence in Mary's womb^[63]. That is the deep justification of the feast: a birth can be celebrated only if that birth is already holy. For all other saints, holiness is dated from their death — their entry into glory —; for John, it is dated from his coming into the world.

"The greatest among those born of women"

"Amen I say to you: among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist"^[64]. This praise, spoken by Christ himself, founds the Forerunner's cult: Prophet of the Most High, last of the prophets, he inaugurates the Gospel by pointing out the Lamb of God^[65]. His mission ends in martyrdom — beheaded for defending the truth of marriage before Herod —, which the Church keeps on 29 August and which the article Saint John the Baptist recounts.

Three nativities, and not one more

Christmas, 8 September, 24 June: Christ, his Mother, his Forerunner. Augustine was already saying it in his own time — "we celebrate only that of John and that of Christ", Mary's Nativity only added later^[66]. The rule still holds: the Church keeps the birth according to the flesh only of those whose birth is itself a mystery of salvation^[67].

The Saint John's Eve bonfires

On the evening of 23 June, on hillsides and church squares, bonfires are lit: it is the feast's most famous custom, attested since the Middle Ages throughout Europe^[68]. The Christian meaning is luminous: John is "the lamp that burns and shines"^[69], the one who goes before the day and carries hope, as the Office hymn sings^[70]. The fires were blessed, withered herbs were burned in them, and firebrands were carried home to protect houses: a devotion of fire that does not worship the sun but announces Christ, the light of the world.

Must a Christianised pagan feast be seen in this? The answer holds in one word: the date comes from the Gospel computation, not from the solstice — and the fires themselves are the universal language of human joy, which the Church baptised by giving it her meaning. To Christianise a season is not to borrow a religion.

Quebec: a national holiday born of a saint's feast

It is in French Canada that Saint John's Day took its greatest civic dimension. On 24 June 1834, the patriot Ludger Duvernay organised in Montreal a banquet that made the Baptist the symbol of French Canadians^[71]. In 1908, Saint Pius X proclaimed Saint John the Baptist patron of French Canadians^[72]; in 1925, 24 June became a public holiday in Quebec, then the Fête nationale in 1977^[73]. Every year, parades, bonfires and songs recall that a people recognised itself in the Forerunner: the one who prepares the ways and tells the truth to the powerful.

Patronages: Florence, Malta, the Lateran

The Baptist is one of the most popular saints in Christendom, and his patronages are immense. Florence has taken him for patron: Saint John's Baptistery, clad in white and green marble, is the religious heart of the city, facing the cathedral. Every 24 June, the city stops for the Festa di San Giovanni: a historical procession to the baptistery, the final of the historic calcio in costume on Piazza Santa Croce, then the fochi di San Giovanni, the great evening fireworks above the Arno^[74]. The Order of Malta, born as the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, keeps 24 June as its patronal feast, celebrated by its members throughout the world^[75]. And countless baptistries bear his name, including that of the Lateran, the Pope's cathedral^[76]. The article Saint John the Baptist details these dedications: refer to it rather than duplicate.

The herbs of Saint John's Day

In the countryside, the herbs of Saint John's Day were gathered on 24 June — Saint John's wort, sage, mugwort — to make protective bouquets^[77]. A simple custom with no obligatory superstition: gathering the summer's medicinal plants on the year's longest day, thanking God who created them.

The Baptist's iconography is immense — the Lamb he points out, the reed and the Ecce Agnus Dei banner, the baptism of Christ in the Jordan — but it belongs to the saint's life, treated in the article Saint John the Baptist. Keep for the feast what depicts it: the Nativities of the Baptist, like Domenico Ghirlandaio's in Florence, where Elizabeth in childbed receives the neighbours while the infant is presented^[78]; and the churches of the Nativity, beginning with Ein Karem, the village of the "hill country of Judea" where tradition fixes the Visitation and the birth, kept by the Franciscans^[79].

This last part fairly sets out what part of contemporary exegesis proposes on Luke 1, then the answers, then the limits of the method. It comes at the end of the article: it is neither the framework nor the verdict, but an objection addressed.

What part of contemporary exegesis proposes

Since the twentieth century, some exegetes have proposed reading the infancy narratives (Matthew 1-2, Luke 1-2) as late compositions, written after 70 or even after 80, from oral traditions and Old Testament models: the announcement to Zechariah is said to be modelled on those of Isaac, Samson or Samuel, sons of barren women; Zechariah's canticle is said to be a Judeo-Christian liturgical piece inserted afterwards^[80]. In this reading, the historicity of the detail — the division of Abijah, the lot in the Temple, Mary's kinship with Elizabeth — remains undecidable. Some further connect the young John of the desert with the Essenes of Qumran, whose manuscripts, discovered from 1947 onward, describe a Baptist community withdrawn in the desert of Judea^[81].

The answers: witnesses, coherence, corroboration

First answer: the ancient witnesses. The text is attributed to Luke from the end of the second century by scattered Churches that could not have concerted to invent an author; the prologue claims an investigation among the eyewitnesses. A late legendary composition, pieced together two generations after the events, would have neither this earliness nor this unanimity of attribution.

Second answer: internal coherence. The narrative teems with exact priestly notations — the division of Abijah, the casting of lots for the incense, circumcision on the eighth day — which presuppose precise knowledge of the Temple before its destruction in 70^[82]. A late redactor, writing after the ruin, could hardly have kept this exactness of detail without visible apologetic intent.

Third answer: external corroboration. John's very existence does not depend on Luke alone: the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, in his Jewish Antiquities, speaks of the Baptist as a good man who baptised the Jews and was executed by Herod Antipas at Machaerus^[83]. The central figure of Luke 1's narrative is thus a historical figure attested outside the Church.

The limits of the method

The sceptical reading rests on fragile procedures which must be named. First the parallel erected into a source: because the announcement to Zechariah resembles those of the Old Testament, it is concluded to be copied from them — as if God could not act twice in the same way, and as if an inspired author could not recount a real fact in the words of the Scripture it fulfils. Then the argument from silence: because Mark and John do not tell the Baptist's birth, Luke is doubted — yet each evangelist has his own purpose, and one witness's silence does not refute the other. Then circular dating: Luke is dated after 70 because it is presupposed that a precise prophecy of the siege of Jerusalem can only have been written afterwards, then that date is used to discredit his testimony — the anti-prophetic presupposition produces the conclusion it claims to demonstrate. Finally the Qumran extrapolation: no Dead Sea manuscript names John, and Luke says only that he "lived out in the wilderness" — to pass from geographical proximity to an Essene filiation is to build on sand.

The Church, for her part, holds with the Second Vatican Council that the books of Scripture "firmly, faithfully and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures"^[84]. The early dating and the attribution to Luke thus remain not only permitted, but solidly defensible: ancient witnesses, a claimed investigation, exact details, external corroboration.

• Saint John the Baptist — the Forerunner's full life: preaching, the baptism of Jesus, "the Lamb of God", prison and martyrdom.
• Annunciation of the Lord (March 25) — the announcement to Mary in Elizabeth's sixth month, the starting point of the 24 June reckoning.
• Christmas (December 25) — the Nativity of Christ, six months after the Baptist's, and the historicity of the infancy narratives.
• Holy Mary, Mother of God (January 1) — the divine motherhood of her whose visit sanctified John.
• Presentation of the Lord (February 2) — the other great feast of Christ's childhood, with its method: narrative, origins, objections, liturgy.
• Baptism of the Lord — the manifestation of Christ baptised by John in the Jordan.
• Epiphany (January 6) — the other feast of the manifestation, and the Eastern origins of 6 January.
• Easter — the feast of feasts, whose vigil is the model of that of 24 June.
• Pentecost — the third octave kept in 1955 with Christmas and Easter.
• Corpus Christi — another calendar feast born of its own history.
• All Saints (November 1) — the feast of all the saints, kept on the day of their birth into heaven.

Principal sources

• Bible, official French liturgical translation (AELF): Luke 1; Isaiah 49:1-6; Jeremiah 1:4-10; 1 Peter 1:8-12; Acts 13:22-26; Malachi 3:23-24; John 3:30; John 5:35; Matthew 11:11. English quotations after the Jerusalem Bible.
• Liturgy of the Hours, Office of Readings, Lauds and Vespers of 24 June (AELF): homily of Saint Augustine, hymns, antiphons, Benedictus, collect.
• Saint Augustine, Sermons 287-293 for the Nativity of John the Baptist (Patrologia Latina 38).
• Council of Agde (506); Pius XII, decree Cum nostra hac aetate (23 March 1955); Calendarium Romanum (1969) and the Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year, no. 5.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 523 and 717; Second Vatican Council, constitution Dei Verbum, no. 11.
• Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies III, 1, 1; Muratorian Fragment; Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XVIII, 5, 2.
• Frederick Holweck, art. "St. John the Baptist", Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8, 1910.
• Catholic Encyclopedia, art. "Ut Queant Laxis Resonare Fibris", vol. 15, 1912 (hymn of the Vespers of 24 June, Paul the Deacon, Guido of Arezzo and the musical notes).
• Sovereign Order of Malta, patronal feast of 24 June celebrated throughout the world (orderofmalta.org.uk).
• Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints, for 24 June.
• Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 1977 (critical position discussed at the end of the article).