John 1 establishes John the Baptist’s unique character as a prophet unlike any other, the prophet of the present tense; not foretelling the coming of the Messiah, but actually identifying him in the flesh. Viewed in this way, John functions as an intermediary between the old dispensation and the new, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Augustine describes him as a ‘threshold’ between them, quidem limes veteris et novi Testamenti (Sermon 293, col. 1328; see also McDonagh 2001: 22).

The most notable body part of John the Baptist in the view of medieval commentators was his finger. From the time of Augustine onwards, John is invariably described as pointing with his finger at Christ when he acknowledges him as the Lamb of God. Because of this he was considered to be plusquam propheta (‘more than a prophet’; Matthew 11:9): he does not merely prophesy about the one who is to come in the future, but is able to acknowledge him in person, and express that recognition with a gesture.

The importance of the finger is such that when Julian the Apostate had the bones of the Baptist burned at Sebaste (the head had gone elsewhere), the one part of him that survived—according to the account in the Golden Legend—was that finger.

No surprise, then, that pointing fingers have such prominence in two of the artworks here, and that pointing is the characteristic posture of the Baptist in countless books of hours, paintings, statues, and tapestries, almost all of which show him bare-legged, usually wearing a camel skin, indicating either Christ or his symbol, the lamb.

In the illumination from the Unum ex Quattuor manuscript, the lamb is contained in a medallion. This, resembling a consecrated host, is suggestive of an important element of the medieval cult of the Baptist—his association with the Eucharist. Usually the association is in terms of the head of the Baptist on the plate, representing the paten (the York breviary, in the fourth lesson for the feast of the Decollation, reads: Caput Johannis in disco: signat corpus christi quo pascimur in sancti altari, translated as ‘the head of John on the plate signifies the body of Christ by which we are fed on the holy altar’; Lawley 1883: col. 517). It seems that there is not just a symbolic reason for the association between the Baptist and the Eucharist; there is a liturgical link because priests at Mass still pronounce the words of John, Ecce Agnus Dei (‘Behold, the Lamb of God’), as they display the consecrated bread to the gathered congregation.

The Winchester Benedictional reflects another aspect of the bodily interaction between the Baptist and Jesus as it was imagined by medieval commentators. It was reasonably assumed that John physically touched Christ when baptizing him, just as we see him doing here. One Benedictine homilist emphasized John’s worthiness to baptize Christ et manibus tractare (‘and to touch [him] with his hands’; Cambridge, Trinity Coll. MS B14.48, fol. 76). The physical contact with Christ was itself one of the privileges of John identified by some commentators.

The Franciscan missal from Paris is unusual in that it identifies a further important element in the cult of the Baptist, namely, that he was the first to receive the revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity. In one late-twelfth-century English manuscript, the list of the privileges of the Baptist includes the fact that: ‘[t]he first revelation of the Trinity was to him’ (PL184, 675–81, cols 991–1002, incorrectly attributed to St Bernard), and in this passage of John’s Gospel, he refers to hearing the voice of the Father (in the Synoptic Gospels, the voice speaks of ‘my beloved son’) and seeing the Spirit descend as a dove. The implications of this are spelled out in this illumination where the scroll that links the Baptist and the figure of God the Father says, explicitly, ‘Deus’, while the Baptist points with a finger both to the First Person of the Trinity above him, and to the infant Christ at his feet. In other words, divinity is shown to refer both to Father and Son.

And so, the Baptist’s early recognition of Christ’s divinity is brought right to the manger-side, and the Franciscan devotion to the infant child in the manger, surrounded by the beasts, is brought right into the Gospel narrative of the Baptism. John discerns—and preaches on—the Trinity, just as the friars did.

References

Lawley, S. W. 1883. Breviarium Ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Eboracensis, vol. 2 (London)

McDonagh, Melanie. 2001. ‘Devotion to St John the Baptist in England in the Middle Ages’, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, p. 22