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 Marcion own agenda, or his "Gospel of the Lord" predated, and was a source for, the Gospel of Luke. Church Fathers wrote, and the majority of modern scholars agree, that Marcion edited Luke to fit his own theology, Marcionism. The late 2nd-century writer Tertullian stated that Marcion, "expunged [from the Gospel of Luke] all the things that oppose his view... but retained those things that accord with his opinion". According to this view, Marcion eliminated the first two chapters of Luke concerning the nativity, and began his gospel at Capernaum making modifications to the remainder suitable to Marcionism. The differences in