John the Baptist

John was a Jewish prophet who preached repentance in the wilderness near the Jordan and immersed people as a sign of it, announcing a coming judgment. All four Gospels begin Jesus’s public story with him, and Jesus’s baptism by John is among the best-attested facts of his life, since early Christians found it awkward.

Josephus, independently of the Gospels, describes John as a good man who urged justice and piety and who was executed by Herod Antipas at the fortress of Machaerus because his popularity seemed a political threat. The Gospels add that John had condemned Antipas’s marriage to Herodias. His disciples continued as a group after his death.