Matthew 3:13 Jesus and the ministry of John the Baptist, is about 30 miles using modern Highway 71. Howard Clarke notes that according to tradition Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River five miles south of the Allenby Bridge, today the site of a Greek Orthodox monastery dedicated to John the Baptist. The area is currently in a military zone and is closed to visitors. This verse differs considerably from the description of the same event in . In Luke's account, Jesus is one of the crowd that has come to see John and it does not specify who baptized Jesus. Nor
John the Baptist (Caravaggio) as an adult, frequently in the act of baptising Jesus. Nevertheless, it was not totally without precedent. Leonardo had painted a youthful and enigmatically smiling Baptist with one finger pointing upwards and the other hand seeming to indicate his own breast, while Andrea del Sarto left a Baptist which almost totally prefigures Caravaggio. Both Leonardo and del Sarto had created from the figure of John something which seems to hint at an entirely personal meaning, one not accessible to the viewer, and Caravaggio was to turn this into something like a personal icon in the course of his many variations