Unlike most of the other events in this cluster of Lukan infancy material, John the Baptist himself is independently attested outside the New Testament: the first century Jewish historian Josephus describes John, his preaching and his execution by Herod Antipas in some detail, in an account most historians regard as substantially reliable and largely independent of Christian sources, giving John a firmer claim to historical attestation than almost any other figure in the infancy narratives.
The specific circumstances Luke narrates around John's birth, Zechariah's temple vision, his enforced silence, and the precise coordination with Jesus's own conception, are nonetheless read by critical scholars as Luke's own literary composition, serving the Gospel's larger purpose of presenting John as the divinely appointed forerunner whose life is providentially woven together with Jesus's own from before either was born.
The feast of John's Nativity, kept on 24 June, is one of relatively few feast days in the Christian calendar commemorating a birth rather than a death, a distinction traditionally explained by the belief that John, like Jesus and Mary, was sanctified before birth, making his birth itself, rather than only his eventual martyrdom, an event worth liturgical commemoration in its own right.