For customs of the Jews see art. SOCIAL LIFE. See also artt. Israel and Jerusalem.
i the Life of Christ, ch. x. JOAN AN. — A link in our Lord's genealogy (Lk
JOANNA {'luima, Tisch. and Revisers' Text; but 'ludi'a, WH and Nestle ; from Aram. Rjiji', Heb. njnv). — The wife of Chuza, the 'steward' of Herod Antipas. In Lk S''^ she appears as one of certain women who had been healed, and in gratitude minis- tered to Jesus and His disciples. The passage reads as though she had herself derived physical benefit from Jesus ; but it is possible, as Godet suggests in loc., that the 'nobleman' or king's officer of Jn 4J6-53 yff^g^ Chuza. If so, Joanna may have been led to attach herself to Christ through the restora- tion of her son's health, or even of his life if the Johannine narrative is to be identified with Mt
85-1= and Lk 7'"". The latter identification, as early as Irenreus (adv. Emr. ii. 33), and not witliout dis- tinguished supjjort (Wetstein, Ewald, de Wette, Baur), is attractive but precarious. Joanna is mentioned again in Lk 24'° as one of the women who went to the sepulchre to embalm the bodj' of Jesus. She is almost certainly the same person as in 8^, though her husband's name does not occur in the later passage. There is no need to explain the omission by a suggestion that he was dead, or had become obscure tlirough dismissal from his office by Antipas because of the relations of his house- hold with Jesus. The Evangelist had already sufficiently marked the identity of Joanna, who through her own devotion would be well known to the disciples. See also Chuza.
R. W. Moss. JODA.— A link in our Lord's genealogy (Lk 3'-").
JOHN. — The father of Simon Peter (Jn l^ 2115. iG. 17 jjy . ^Y Jonas). See Peter.
JOHN THE BAPTIST.—
i. John's Importance, and Sources for his History, ii. Birth, Youth, and Pre-Prophetic Life.
: Jesus ai v. Imprisonment and Death. vi. John and his Disciples. vii. Our Lord's Estimate of John.
i. John's Importance, and Sources foe his History. — The significance of John the Bai)tist for the history of Christianity is shown by the place given him in the Gospel records by every one of the four Evangelists. St. Mark describes John's mission in the very first words of his narrative as 'the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God' (!'). St. Luke makes the story of John's birth the prelude to his wonderful naiTative of the greater birth at Bethlehem (l^*^*). The three Synoptists are agreed in representing his mission as the necessary preparation, in accordance with OT prophecy, for the manifestation of the Christ (Mk P-3, Mt33, IXiZ*"), while in all the Gospels his baptism of Jesus becomes the moment of the Lord's equipment with the Spirit for His Messianic office (Mk !»•, Mt 3'«-, Lk 3="- ; cf. Jn l'"-«-). In the Prologue to his Gospel the Fourth Evangelist describes John as ' a man sent from God,' who ' came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all men through him (i.e. Jesus) might be- lieve' (l^- '). In accordance with this general sense of John's great importance for Christ and Chris- tianity is the space devoted to him in the Gospel narratives as a whole. It is true that Lk. alone furnishes any information about him previous to the moment when he suddenly issued from his retirement in the wilderness and began to preach the baptism of repentance in the Jordan Valley, and true also that in the case of the Fourth Gospel it is difficult often to distingui.sh between the Evangelist's statements as a historian and his own subjective exposition. But when we put together all the references to John's ministry and history and character which we find either in the form of historical narrative, or testimony from the lips of Jesus, or reflexion on the part of an Evangelist, and when we make use besides of one or two side- lights which fall from the book of Acts and the pages of Josephus, we find that for knowledge regarding the Baptist's mission, his character, his relation to Jesus Christ, and his i)lace in the history of both tlie old and the new dispensations, we are in no lack of plentiful and trustworthy sources of information.
ii. Birth, Youth, and Pre-Prophetic Life.—
The fact that Lk. alone of the Gospels gives an account of John's earlier life, together with the artistic nature of the ■ 3 and its presumed discrepancy with the representation
JOHN THE BAPTIST
JOHN THE BAPTIST
of the Fourth Gospel in respect of a connexion between John and Jesus previous to the baptism of the latter (cf. Lk 1»^56 with Jn 13'*'), has frequently been supposed to reduce this exquisite story to the level of pure lecrend. In view, however, of St. Luke's claims to historical accuracy (l' ^), and of the vindication of these claims at so many points by modern re- search (cf. W. M. Ramsav, SI. Paul the Traveller, ch. i.. Was Christ born at Bethlehem! ; Chase, The Credibility of Acts), it is impossible to set his narrative aside as if it rested on no basis of historical fact. It is full of poetry, no doubt, but it is the kind of poetry which bursts hke a flower from the living stem of actual truth. Any attempt to dissolve the narrative into Actions of a later growth must reckon with the fact that the Evangelist is evidently making use at this point of an early Aramaic source steeped in the colours of the OT — ' the earliest documentary evidence respecting the origins of Christianity which has come down to us, evidence which may justly be called contemporary" (Plummer, "St. Luke' in Jnternat. Crit. Com., p. 7). This document, which, if it is histnrioal, must have rested in large part upon the authority of tlie Virgin Mary, St. Luke, 'as a faithful collector of evangelic mrmorabilia, .lUows to speak for itself, with here and there an editorial touch' (Bruce, Expositor's Gr. Test., ad loc). To appreciate the historical sobriety and manifestly primary character of this early Jewish-Christia'n source, we have only to compare the first chapter of Lk. with the relative sections of the Proterangelium Jacobi, and especially with those chapters (22-24) which Har- n.ick calls the Apocryphitm Zacharice (see Hastings' DB, E.Ura Vol. p. 431).