St Zacharias and St Elizabeth

5^th November is recognised as the joint saint’s day for Zacharias and Elizabeth, whose story is told in the Gospel of St Luke, and nowhere else. Elizabeth is described by Luke as being a cousin of Mary, the mother of Jesus, but Elizabeth is “stricken in years” whereas Mary has traditionally been regarded as being very young, possibly as young as 14 or even 13. Although a wide age difference between first cousins is not impossible, the word “cousin” might have to be read as meaning “related by blood” albeit not particularly closely.

In Luke’s story, Elizabeth was the wife of an elderly priest named Zacharias, living in a city “in the hill country” of Judaea. They had no children and had given up hope of ever having any, due to their age. However, Zacharias was visited by the angel Gabriel who assured him that Elizabeth would conceive and that they were commanded to call him John. Zacharias expressed doubts that this could happen, and the angel promptly struck him dumb.

Luke describes a visit that Mary paid to Elizabeth after the former had had a similar visit from Gabriel and Elizabeth was six months’ pregnant. This visit leads Mary to declare the speech that is usually known as the Magnificat.

When Elizabeth had her baby and the time for circumcision and naming arrived, her relatives and neighbours expected that he would be called Zacharias, after his father. However, Elizabeth insisted that he would be called John, and Zacharias, still dumb, wrote on a clay tablet to confirm this, after which he got his voice back and delivered a celebratory poem of his own, which is generally called the Benedictus.  The assumption must therefore be that Zacharias told Elizabeth about the visit of Gabriel by the same means of writing it down. The son grew up to become John the Baptist.

It all makes a good story, and how much credence one gives to it is up to the individual. Of the four surviving gospels, Luke’s is the only one that tells it, and that is also true of many of the details surrounding the birth of Christ. Luke seems to have had a penchant for filling in the gaps of the established facts, and for relating stories that appear to fulfil ancient prophecies. There are clear parallels between the story of John’s conception and those of Samuel and Isaac in the Old
Testament. Could this be yet another example of Luke attempting to link his gospel to precedents and prophesies from ancient Jewish tradition?

Another story told about Zacharias, but not by Luke, is that he was later murdered by Herod’s soldiers for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of his infant son during the Massacre of the Innocents following the birth of Jesus. This story is not inconsistent with the Luke story, given that Elizabeth and Zacharias are described as living in Judaea, which is also where Bethlehem is.

© John Welford