I thought Mary and Elizabeth were cousins — if they were, why didn’t John the Baptist seem to know who Jesus was when John was in prison and asked his disciples to go and ask Jesus if he was the Messiah?

I thought Mary and Elizabeth were cousins — if they were, why didn’t John the Baptist seem to know who Jesus was when John was in prison and asked his disciples to go and ask Jesus if he was the Messiah?

The evangelist Luke wrote of a biological relationship between the mothers of Jesus and John the Baptist. Reportedly, the Angel Gabriel told Mary, “Your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son.” (Luke 1:36).

Mary conceived Jesus when her cousin, Elisabeth, was six months pregnant with John. If Mary and Elisabeth were first cousins, John and Jesus would be second cousins.

But more interestingly, we know when John was born. His father Zacharias served as priest during the course of Abijah (Luke 1:5), which was June 13 to 19, and John was conceived shortly after that. So he would have been born in late March or early April.

Which, even more interestingly, means that Jesus would have been born six months later in late September or early October.

That would explain why shepherds were still in the fields at night (they wouldn’t be there in cold and wet December).

That was also around the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, when people made an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which would also account for why the family had left Nazareth to visit the Jerusalem area at the time.

They were second cousins in strict familial terms on Mary's side of the family to Elizabeth. But John the Baptist was also an Elias for Jesus, or in other words, one who came before Him to help prepare the hearts of the people to accept Jesus' teachings and to help prepare them to receive the Holy Ghost.

John received the priesthood authority to Baptize people from his father Zacharias who was a priest from the house of Levi. It was with this authority that John baptized many people, in preparation. After Christ was baptized, by emersion, the Holy Ghost descended in the form of a Dove. The authority to give the Holy Ghost comes through the priesthood of the Son of God, also known as the priesthood of Melchizedek. This authority was given to the apostles and they continued to baptize and give the gift of the Holy Ghost via this priesthood authority even after Christ left.

It is only possible to consider John the Baptist to be at all related to Jesus by believing Luke’s Gospel to contain a true account of their births.

The original Greek text does not tell us exactly how they were related, but common tradition has held that because their mothers were related, Jesus and John must have been cousins. After this detail, however, nothing else in our Bible mentions any interactions between the two during their childhoods. Indeed, the description of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist suggests that might have been their first meeting, which could then explain John’s question about Jesus’ true identity ( Luke 7:18-23).

One possible explanation for this seeming lack of relationship during their boyhood years is Luke’s detail that John “was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel” (Luke 1:80). The apocryphal “Infancy Gospel of James,” written perhaps in the mid-second century, mentions that John’s mother Elizabeth fled with him to the hill country to avoid Herod’s slaughter of the innocent boys born around the

time of Jesus.

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