Before Mark reports the return of the Twelve in verse 30, he inserts the account of the martyrdom of John the Baptizer. There are only two stories in the Gospel of Mark that are neither from nor about Jesus. Both, however, are about John, and both foreshadow Jesus. The first, in 1:2–8, foreshadows Jesus’s ministry, and the second, here in 6:14–29, foreshadows his death. Mark reported John’s imprisonment in 1:14, and now in a flashback he recounts his death. Jesus’s fame reaches King Herod, who fears that he is a reincarnation of John the Baptizer, whom he beheaded (6:14–16). “King Herod” was Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, ruler of Galilee and Perea from 4 BC until AD 39. Herodias, the wife of Antipas’s half brother Herod Philip (not the tetrarch Philip of Luke 3:1), was actual…