Passion of St. John the Baptist

August 29 keeps the memorial of the beheading of John the Baptist, the death Mark and Matthew both narrate: Herod Antipas imprisoned him at Machaerus for denouncing the king's marriage to Herodias, his brother's wife, and had him killed on an oath sworn at a birthday feast. John is the only saint besides the Blessed Virgin whose birth and death the calendar both observe — the Nativity on June 24, the Passion on August 29.

The date belongs to a dedication rather than to the martyrdom. The Bede-era martyrologies attach it to the dedication of a church at Sebaste in Samaria, where John's tomb was venerated and where Julian's officials burned the remains in 362, according to Rufinus and Theodoret. What was saved was dispersed, which is why the relic claims of the Forerunner are so widely scattered across the Christian world.

At Rome the church of San Silvestro in Capite — in capite, "of the head" — holds the reliquary that Western tradition identifies as John's skull, brought from Constantinople and given to the Poor Clares' convent on the site. Amiens claims another — the front of a skull venerated as the face of the Forerunner, carried back from the Fourth Crusade in 1206. The Lateran basilica, the cathedral of Rome and the mother church of the world, is dedicated jointly to the Saviour and to both Johns — the Baptist and the Evangelist.