According to tradition, Jesus meets John at the Jordan River, five miles south of the Allenby Bridge, near Qasir al-Yahud on the West Bank. This location is today the site of an Eastern Orthodox monastery.

The baptism of Jesus

The baptism of Jesus is an event recounted in the New Testament in which Jesus is baptised by John the Baptist. It is commemorated on January 1 in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and some other western denominations (see Baptism of the Lord). The event is the foundation of the Christian baptism rituals. While the nativity narratives of Luke and Matthew differ from one another, and are absent entirely from Mark's narrative, Luke and Matthew return to paralleling Mark's narrative with the Baptism of Jesus. Both infancy narratives abruptly end, with Jesus suddenly being reintroduced as a man somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, something that lead to the emergence of the apocryphal Infancy Gospels such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Arabic Infancy Gospel. While Matthew doesn't indicate the size of this narrative jump, Luke explains it as being about thirty years later.

The basic outline in all three synoptic gospels is the same. They all begin by introducing the figure of John the Baptist and describing his preaching and his ritual of baptism. Jesus comes to the Jordan River and is there baptised, and after the baptism occurs the heavens open and God pronounces that Jesus is his son. Only after this moment Jesus' ministry begins. However, in addition to details that are present in only one gospel, there are also some important differences in the narrative, adding to the already present ambiguity over the theology of the event. Most Christian groups view the baptism of Jesus as an important event, and historically it has caused much debate on the issue of Christology. In Roman Catholicism, the baptism of Jesus is one of the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary.

Location
John is placed by the passage in the wilderness of Judea, which is generally taken to refer to the region of Judea sloping down from the highlands to the Dead Sea, an arid area not well suited to habitation. The term normally translated as wilderness is occasionally translated as desert, although there was enough moisture to allow for pastoralism. According to Pliny this region was home to the Essenes, and John could plausibly have been one of their major leaders. According to Guthrie, at this time wilderness was considered much closer to God than the more corrupt cities.

According to tradition, Jesus meets John at the Jordan River, five miles south of the Allenby Bridge, near Qasir al-Yahud on the West Bank. This location is today the site of an Eastern Orthodox monastery. A site showing early Christian activity on the Eastern bank in Jordan is considered by some to be the site of the baptism and is promoted as such by Jordanian tourism officials.

The baptismal scene

In Luke Jesus is portrayed as one of a large crowd who had come to see John and is baptised before them, while Matthew makes no mention of anyone besides John and Jesus being at the scene. The scene opens in Luke and Matthew with John delivering a polemic apparently against the Pharisees and Sadducees who are present. Luke and Matthew then re-join the account of Mark, which does not contain the polemic, by portraying Jesus as going down to John and being baptised by him.

Source: partly from Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_of_Jesus