History and mythology in the Gospel story about the execution of John the Baptist

This article is a historical and religious analysis of the Gospel’s story about the execution of John the Baptist. The first part of the work deals with the modern theories and reconstructions of the history and genealogy of the Herodian family. The comparative analysis of the Gospels, Josephus and several other witnesses shows that the dancer could be not only Salome, the daughter of Herodias, but it could also be Herodias Salome, the young daughter of Herod Antipas and Nabatean princess Phasaelis. This fact opens an alternative reading of the story: we can see not only the story about confrontation of Eros and Thanatos, but also the story about the innocence as a weapon of evil minds. The second part of the paper is the analyses of the story as a myth. In process we can understand the significance and the meaning of the episode on three levels: literal (Jesus is not John, since the second was recently decapitated), mythological (John is the “forerunning sacrifice” of Jesus а sacrifice made according to the pagan mythological model) and theological (the death of John is the end of the old mythological system based on the sacrifice and the forerunning of the new one, based on the “non-sacrificial” principal of non-violence).

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