B.G. Hilton – Writer

In Search Of… s04e20 John the Baptist

skull in seatch of s04e20 John the Baptist
Insert joke about getting ahead.

Just going to go a very short review of this one. I almost accidentally missed it altogether and passed from Earth Visitors to Air Disaster Predictions. That’s because this episode dull. The biblical episodes of this show always are. The brief of the show is ‘what if something weird?’ but there’s only so weird they can go on Biblical stuff without offending a significant section of the audience.

Basically, this episode claims that the head of John the Baptist kept by the Vatican is not the real head of John the Baptist. A monastery in Egypt, they say, has the real head.

That’s it. I know there are people to whom this matters, though I’m not entirely sure why. One of the scholars interviewed for this episode explains that Christians don’t literally worship the relics of saints, they merely use these relics as reminders of the Christian virtues of a particular saint. If that’s the case, I’m don’t quite follow why it matters whether a particular relic is ‘real’ or not.

Anyway, there’s an okay re-enactment of John the Baptist doing stuff and some very interesting footage of a Coptic monestary. But bottom line, there are a lot of relics with disputed provenance and I don’t get why this one is so important.

Summing up

Footage: 5/10, Nimoyness: 6/10, Re-enactment: 5/10, Music: 5/10, Meh: 4/10. Overall: 25/50. Pass.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

nine − 5 =

Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!