Life of John the Baptist Philip’s wife Herodias." Life of John the Baptist The Life of John the Baptist is a book from the New Testament apocrypha, allegedly written in Greek by Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis in 390 AD. The text is an expanded biography of the biblical John the Baptist. Tony Burke, Associate Professor of Early Christianity, at York University describes the vita as: "begins with a harmony of details about John’s birth taken from the Gospel of Luke and the Infancy Gospel of James, finishing with the death of Zechariah and Elizabeth fleeing from Herod’s soldiers into the desert. After five years, when
Gospel of Peter as the text that was discovered in modern times.<ref name="e/p 371">Ehrman and Pleše 2011, p. 371.</ref> The Rhossus community had already been using it in their liturgy. John Dominic Crossan disagrees with most Biblical scholarship. Calling this gospel the "cross gospel", Crossan believes that this Gospel was written before the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, and considers Peter to be a forerunner to those gospels. Crossan's view is not accepted by other Biblical scholars. Later Western references, which condemn the work, such as Jerome and "Decretum Gelasianum", traditionally connected to Pope Gelasius I, are apparently based upon the