A vivid, moving, and unprecedented biographical saga of John the Baptist.
"Mountains of literature have been devoted to and inspired by the great Christian drama, but before now none has brought to life the challenging figure of John the Baptist - "the voice crying in the wilderness" who cleansed the repentant in the Jordan River, who recognized Jesus even from his mother's womb. Kin, herald, teacher, rival - John was the first to believe in the Messiah and the first to doubt." In narrating the epic of John's life, Brooks Hansen spins into whole cloth various traditions and inspirations - from the music of Bach to the paintings of Caravaggio, from history and theology to popular legend and Gnostic and other sectarian scriptures. Alternating the transcendent spirituality and ascetic purity of John, his teachers, and the seekers who followed him with the magnificently sordid, calculating, and reckless Herod clan (including Herod Antipas's nubile stepdaughter, Salome, who famously demanded the prophet's execution at her stepfather's jubilee), John the Baptizer is a tapestry of power and dissent, ambition and self-sacrifice, worldly and otherworldly desire, earthly existence and transcendence.