Priest Hopes To Rebuild Crusader-era Church Of John The Baptist In Palestine

Ruins are all that remains of the Crusader-era Church of St. John the Baptist, just 100 meters south of the Nabi Yahya Mosque honoring the same man.

(ANALYSIS) SEBASTIYA, West Bank— After completing the decades-long construction of the Jacob’s Well Greek Orthodox Church in the Palestinian city Nablus in 2018, Archimandrite Ioustinos, 81, has an equally lofty ambition to fulfill before he retires.

“I really hope to get permission to build a church in Sebastiya, on the site where John the Baptist was beheaded,” he told ReligionUnplugged.com. “The area has been in the possession of Muslims for 240 years, and I bought it about 36 years ago. I ask the Lord, before closing my eyes, to give me permission to complete this church, the Church of John the Baptist.”

Ioustinos, also spelled Eustinus, was referring to the fourth century Christian tradition that John the Baptist’s disciples buried his torso there — about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) north of Nablus — after the ascetic visionary was beheaded nearby in A.D. 28 or 29 by Herod Antipas. Herod ruled Galilee and Perea as a Roman client state after the death of his father, Herod the Great, in 4 B.C.

The New Testament records in Matthew 14:12, “His (John’s) disciples came and took away the body and buried it.” While the Gospels are unclear about the location of the execution, a church was erected in Sebastiya above the tomb during the Byzantine era and rebuilt by Crusaders in 1160.

Various traditions developed about John the Baptist, who according to the Gospel of Luke was six months older than his second cousin Jesus and whose mother Elizabeth was the cousin of Jesus’ mother Mary. John earned his moniker for baptizing Jesus and others in the Jordan River.

With the Muslim conquest of the region in the seventh century, the Christian shrine in Sebastiya's public square became the Nabi Yahya Mosque honoring John the Prophet. In turn, the Crusaders built an impressive cathedral — now ruined — that according to tradition also includes the tombs of the prophets Elisha and Obadiah.

Ioustinos hopes to rebuild those Crusader ruins while preserving the holy site for both Christians and Muslims. His plan will have to accommodate the domed “maqam,” or shrine, erected by Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1892 over the eastern part of the site. 

Alternatively, Ioustinos could rebuild the ruined Church of the Invention of the Head of St. John the Baptist, located some 3,900 feet (100 meters) south of the Nabi Yahya Mosque. That picturesque Crusader site is today desecrated by Islamic graffiti. As if to strengthen the claim of the only Christian family in the village, in recent years, three of its relatives were buried outside the doorway.

A visual reconstruction of the Church of the Invention of the Head of St. John the Baptist provided by Ioustinos. Photo by Gil Zohar.

Today, Islamic graffiti can be seen on the ruins of the Crusader-era Church of the Invention of the Head of St. John the Baptist. Photo by Gil Zohar.

Ioustinos is up for the challenge. He served as the unofficial engineer and raised funds for the basilica that replaced the church and small monastery of Jacob’s Well, believed to be the site where Jacob, a patriarch from Genesis, pitched a tent, dug a well and met his bride Rachel. Ioustinos painted the church’s icons and frescoes. And as the church’s custodian, he even retrieves water from the ancient well for pilgrims to taste.

Once Samaria’s royal capital

Today, Nablus is a sleepy Palestinian village of 4,500 people on a scenic hilltop covered with gnarled olive trees. But during the Iron Age eight centuries before John the Baptist, Sebastiya — then called Shomron — was the royal capital of the Kingdom of Samaria. Omri, the sixth king of Israel, purchased the hill from a man named Shemer in about 876 B.C. Isolated on a hilltop more than 400 meters above sea level, it was easy to defend. Transferring his court there from Tirzah, Omri transformed the hill into his lavish capital.

His successors, Ahab and Jeroboam II, further embellished and fortified the royal city. Ahab, under the influence of his Phoenician wife Jezebel, built a temple there in honor of Baal that was later destroyed by Jehu.

Archaeological findings like this show the grandeur of ancient Samaria. Photo by Gil Zohar.

Jeroboam II — who lived from 784-748 B.C. — ushered in Samaria’s glory days. His long reign saw the development of a powerful aristocracy that became a symbol of decadence for the Old Testament prophets Hosea and Amos. Amos contrasted the miserable lives of the poor and the luxury of aristocratic houses with their couches of ivory.

In Micah 1:6, the prophet predicted, “And I will make Samaria as a heap of stones in the field when a vineyard is planted, and I will bring down the stones thereof into the valley and will lay her foundations bare.”

The instrument of divine wrath was the Assyrian emperor Sargon II. Sargon defeated Hosea, the last king of Israel, and captured the city in 721 B.C. after a three-year siege. This brought the downfall of the kingdom of Israel: The 10 northern tribes were deported en masse to Babylon, and their land was populated with Chaldaeans. Sebastiya became the center of the Assyrian province of Samaria.

During the Hellenistic and Roman periods some 2,000 years ago, Sebastiya was a thriving city with an acropolis fit for a king. A series of archaeological excavations at the site in 1908-1910 by Harvard University, under the direction of G.A. Reisner and C.S. Fisher, in 1931-35 by a joint expedition under the direction of J. Crowfoot, and in 1967 by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities unearthed the grandeur of the ancient metropolis.

Greek Orthodox tradition holds that Sebastiya was the venue for the birthday banquet of Herod Antipas. His father King Herod the Great had renamed the city Sebastiya, spelled Sebaste in Koine Greek, in honor of his patron, the Roman Emperor Augustus. The Greek sebastos, meaning "venerable," is a translation of the Latin epithet augustus.

Conflicting claims: where was John beheaded?

The well-preserved remains of the odeon of Roman Sebastiya are the site’s most impressive ruins. The stepped Augusteum, the Temple of Augustus, crowns the hill. The temple was built after 27 B.C., when Augustus bestowed the city to Herod the Great.

Some of the most well preserved ruins of Sebastiya are from the Temple of Augustus built in about 27 B.C. Photo by Gil Zohar.

The 1,764-acre (714-hectare) site became an Israel Nature and Parks Authority national park after the 1967 Six-Day War. Today administered by the Palestinian Authority, the park was significantly upgraded by the government of Belgium in 2019-2020. Camels are parked to await tourists in the newly tiled stone entrance square. But with the dearth of visitors owing to the COVID-19 pandemic — and Israelis being unable to legally enter Area A of the West Bank, although one passes neither roadblocks nor ID inspections to reach the area — Sebastiya has been recently all but deserted except for a few Palestinian picnickers.

Camel rides are popular with tourists who visit Sebastiya, West Bank. Photo by Gil Zohar.

Sebastiya was the seat of a bishop in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is mentioned in the writings of Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179-1229), the Syrian geographer who situates it as part of the Filastin province of Syria, located in the Nablus District. He also wrote, “There are here the tombs of (John the Baptist’s father) Zakariyyah and Yahya, his son, and of many other prophets and holy men.”

If John the Baptist’s headless body is indeed buried there, it is thanks to a marital spat involving Herod Antipas. Having divorced his first wife Phasaelis, the daughter of King Aretas IV from the Nabatean capital Petra, he married Herodias, a Herodian princess who had formerly been the wife of his half brother and her half uncle, Herod II. Antipas was Herod the Great’s son by a Samaritan woman named Malthace, while Herod II was his son by the Judean princess Mariamne II. According to the New Testament, John was arrested for publicly reproving this adulterous arrangement.

During an infamous banquet in Mark 6:21-29, the jealous Herodias bade her daughter, Salome, to perform her erotic dance of seven veils for the governor. Herod Antipas was so entranced by her striptease performance that he offered to grant the girl any wish she asked. At the behest of her mother — who resented John the Baptist’s judgment of her marriage — she asked for his head, which was delivered to her on a silver platter.

Out of spite, she then threw it in a dung heap.

What ultimately became of the head? According to one tradition, it was rescued from the garbage dump and finally interred in Damascus’ Basilica of Saint John the Baptist. In 635, when the Umayyads drove the Byzantines out of Syria, they converted the vast cathedral into the city’s main mosque. The shrine of the Prophet Yahya was incorporated into the Muslim house of worship. Today, an Ayyubid sanctuary stands over the tomb. Not coincidentally, the mausoleum of Saladin (1137-1193) — the Ayyubid sultan who vanquished the Crusaders — is adjacent to the Umayyad Mosque.

But there is no consensus about John’s head lying in Damascus. Rome, Munich and Amiens, France, also claim the skull, which could have been brought there by zealous Crusader relic hunters.

Adding to the confusion of conflicting claims, in 2010, archaeologists found remains — including a molar and a piece of cranium — in a marble sarcophagus in the ruins of a medieval church on the island of Sveti Ivan, or Saint John, off Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast near the resort of Sozopol.

Moreover, according to the first-century historian Josephus Flavius, Salome’s erotic striptease dance took place in Herod’s desert palace fortress at Machaerus, across the Dead Sea from Masada, today in Jordan. However, it is possible that John’s disciples — fearful of Herodias’ wrath — may have rescued his remains, including the severed head, and carried them the 93 miles (150 kilometers) to Sebastiya.

If Ioustinos is to rebuild the church as the site of John’s beheading, he will have to square the circle of conflicting claims between faith and history.

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada, and moved to Jerusalem, Israel, in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, Religion Unplugged and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives. He may be reached at GilZohar@rogers.com.