Has archaeological science identified the remains of St John the Baptist ?
By Dr. Georges Kazan
In 2010, a reliquary box was excavated beneath the altar of a 5th – 6th century Byzantine church, on an island off the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. The island’s name in Bulgarian is ‘Sveti Ivan’, after St John the Baptist. Inscriptions from the church, which commemorate the date of the Feast of St John the Baptist – 24 June.
The casket was opened under intense media interest, and revealed to contain a number of bones, including bones from a human hand, face, rib and a tooth.
At the time I was completing my doctoral thesis on Byzantine relics, and had compiled a database of over 200 similar reliquaries. I therefore contacted the excavators in Bulgaria, who asked me if it would be possible to have the relics radiocarbon dated at Oxford. I reached out to Professor Thomas Higham, a leading expert in radiocarbon dating at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU). This is the Oxford University laboratory where the Turin Shroud was dated in the 1980s. We also decided to attempt an ancient DNA (aDNA) study, in collaboration with Professor Eske Willerslev and Dr Hannes Schroeder from the Centre of GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen .
While it was not at that time possible to obtain genetic data from the relics, one of the relics was radiocarbon dated successfully. Amazingly, this revealed that the relic dates to ca. AD 30.
Modern science therefore cannot disprove the tradition, claimed in historical sources and suggested by archaeological evidence, that these are the relics of St John the Baptist.
The intriguing possibilities raised by this study inspired us to explore other alleged relics of St John the Baptist and early Christian figures in this way.