Disputatio:Ioannes Baptista

Thinking about it[fontem recensere]

Why on earth cite four sources, three of them in modern Greek and one in English, against the claim that many people call this fellow "Sanctus Ioannes Baptista"? 1. Modern Greek and English sources do not prove anything about a Latin name unless they quote it in Latin. 2. It is not controversial that he is called Saint John the Baptist: surely no one disagrees that he is called that? At most we could handily add one source giving the name in in Latin. To add four sources, not in Latin, in a footnote against the Latin name "Sanctus Ioannes Baptista" is just useless.

But we ought to cite at least one reliable source for the information on the page. As we do for any page.

I'm not much of a religion freak, but it seems to me that some good information on this topic is found in St Matthew's Gospel. It also seems to me that a well-known Latin version of that text exists.

So, thinking about it, I am going to remove all those three Greek references. I am going to add a reference to Matthew, with a link to the online Vulgate edition. That means that anyone reading our article will see that there is a source -- readable in Latin -- about John the Baptist, confirming what we say and giving more details than we currently do. That will help some readers of this article. And that's the first thing we need to do: if there is a good and obvious source, cite the good and obvious source.

While doing this I noticed that the English footnote reference, one of the four, had been designed by somebody (on some other Wikipedia I expect) to show the date at which John the Baptist is thought to have been executed. That's actually useful, so I have added the date to our text and tried to bring the reference closer to bibliographical perfection. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:04, 25 Iunii 2015 (UTC)[reply]

And now I've put some Greek back in -- his name in Greek and the earliest sources for it. Question: am I inconsistent? Answers on a postcard to this address ... Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:26, 25 Iunii 2015 (UTC)[reply]