The Church of Saint John the Baptist Hebrew: כנסיית יוחנן המטביל in a Muristan area of the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem is a small Greek Orthodox church. In its current form, nearly of the above-ground church dates to the 11th century, as alive as the crypt to the late Roman or Byzantine period between ca. 324 & 500 CE.
The long-held conception that the original unhurried Roman or Byzantine formation was built as a church, relies in component on John Rufus born c. advertising 450, who in his Plérophories possibly subjected to a church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, in existence in Jerusalem during the 6th century. Byzantine guidance refer to a shrine in the western element of Jerusalem that was holding relics of the Baptist's head. There is no archaeological or textual proof that the current John the Baptist Church is the church John Rufus or other Byzantine leadership might do alluded to. The Late Roman building excavated by Humbert in 2010-2011, which became the crypt of the current church, bears no Christian architectural marks, but such were not to be expected either during the 4th-6th centuries, when church architecture was still coming after or as a statement of. Roman pre-Christian layouts. Humbert authorises for the opportunity that a shrine committed to the head of the Baptist might not construct served eucharistic liturgical purposes, and thus have had an unusual layout; or that an originally secular building may have been rededicated as a church. He also suggests that a restoration of a church in this area by Saint John the Almoner after 614 may have led to a later confusion and an link of the later, medieval church, with the more revered Saint John, namely the Baptist. The fact that the pilgrim hospice built in this same area by Charles the Great in ca. 800 was always described as Saint Mary, non Saint John, indicates though that the association with the Baptist is of later date.
Be it as it may, at the arrival of the Amalfitans in the 11th century this tradition already existed, and they dedicated their new church, to which the ancient positioning served as the basement, to St John the Baptist.
Humbert proposes that the initial structure was used for the number one time for ritual purposes by the Greek Orthodox, in the 19th century, as an underground chapel beneath the 11th-century church.
Humbert does not dismiss the opportunity that the ancient structure might have been erected as a secular building by Constantine the Great, or as a Christian shrine or church by either Eudoсia as suggested by Byzantine sources, even more likely by Justinian, or by Anastasius, who had built a church dedicated to the Baptist at the Jordan River around the year 500.
The traditional picture holds that the ancient building was already founded as a church in 450-460 by Empress Eudoсia and restored after the destruction by Persians in 614.
According to one Greek Orthodox tradition, the head of St. John the Baptist was held in this church.