The life of Zacharias and Elizabeth
It was in this circumstance that an angel came to Zachariah as he served at the altar and told him a son would be born to them, a child who would go before the Lord to prepare his way; the son they named John.
Church tradition holds that Herod, learning of the extraordinary manner of John's birth and fearing him as a rival king, sent men to kill the child during his slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem, but that Elizabeth hid herself and her son in the hill country, where they escaped discovery. Tradition further remembers Zachariah being questioned in the Temple about his son's whereabouts, and killed there when he would not answer, a death the Church has long connected to a word of Christ's about a Zachariah slain between the temple and the altar. Many scholars, however, think that saying pointed to an earlier man of the same name, and that the connection to John's father grew up only later, in writings composed generations after the Gospels. Elizabeth is said to have died soon after her husband, leaving John to be kept by God in the wilderness until the day of his own appearance to Israel.
