James McGrath, welcome to the show. Hi, Alex. Good to be talking to you. You've written two books about who I think is the most mysterious. character of the new testament i mean there are literally characters that we just know less about but given how important this person is and given how much people think they kind of know about him
John the Baptist is, in my estimation, the most mysterious person in the New Testament. I've taken an interest in him recently, and I've been asking people, do you know John the Baptist? They go, yeah, of course I know John the Baptist. Okay, who is he? Well, he's the guy that baptized Jesus. Okay, what does that mean? What is baptism in that time, before Christianity existed?
What was he doing? Oh, well, he prepared the way. In what sense? What does that mean? And you only need to dig a little bit beneath the surface to realize that we kind of don't really know much about any of this kind of stuff. Why was it that John the Baptist was enough of interest to you that you decided to write about him? There's a long version of that story, which I'll try and keep.
I'll try and give as much of it as I think will be interesting and leave out at least some of the details. You mentioned I wrote two books on the subject, so that at least hopefully indicates the level of interest that I'm bringing to this topic.
But they're two very different books, right? So sometimes academics will write a scholarly monograph and then we'll do sort of a popular version that's just like without the footnotes and stuff. But what I tried to do for this project was much more what I think...
we really need more of in fields like historical Jesus studies, where sometimes you'll have a detailed study that makes a deep dive into some particular question, but you never get a dressing of how does that fit into the bigger picture.
Right. And so you have this one piece of the puzzle given almost exclusive attention or maybe several pieces of the puzzle, but you're not given any guidance into how those might fit together. And so what I tried to do is take a deep dive into some of the puzzling. questions, mysterious things, questions of methodology, and then also write a general audience biography that I think will also be of interest to scholars that tries to...
put the story together, because I think we can figure out more about John than we have. So I start the biography with an analogy. I say that, you know, people...
I think they know him, right? But it's like a homeless person that you pass on the streets every day. And when you actually ask the person, okay, so that person, he was always there. This was your route to work. Can you describe this individual? And suddenly it's like, well... shabbily dressed and you know various things and of course a lot of people's stereotypical image of john is of this like wild homeless looking man right which is itself puzzling because this person was
more famous in his time than Jesus was, and extremely influential, which is hard to fit with some of the things that people think they know. And so, in addition to everybody saying they know John the Baptist, I think there's a lot of... stereotypes and assumptions that may actually need to be challenged. So the way I found my way to the figure of John the Baptist and focusing in on him, it's a roundabout sort of way.
started off doing my doctoral work on the Gospel of John. And one of the things that I didn't really dig into there and just mentioned as sort of another topic related to the one that I did focus on was that that gospel seems to be concerned polemically.
with views of John the Baptist, right? That gospel opens with, you know, there became a man sent by John, right? That's the first human character to appear in the gospel of John right there in that prologue. And then it's emphatically, he was not the light.
He came just to bear witness to the light. The true light was coming into the... You know somebody was saying John is the light, right? There's no need to be that emphatic if that's not happening. And so John's been on my radar for a long time, but... As I spent time teaching one of the courses I developed in an area that at that time was well outside of my normal area of teaching and research.
was to work on extracanonical early Christian literature, including Gnosticism. And one really interesting Gnostic group that... far too few people have heard of is known as the Mandaias. You ask people, have you heard of Gnostics? Sure. Have you heard of the Mandaias? A lot of people will say no, unless they're really, really interested in the subject. And yet...
The Mandians are the last surviving Gnostic group from ancient times and made it down to the present day, right? And so they're still around. We can observe their rituals. Baptism is central to it. They have sacred texts in the dialect of Aramaic. They really like John the Baptist. And they're not fans of Jesus, like at all, right? And so it has been proposed plausibly that this group, in some way, shape, or form, owes something to followers of John the Baptist that did not...
become part of what became Christianity. And looking at, you know, basically just putting together a collection of readings for this course, I took a look at the Mandian texts. which those two had been on my radar but not of great interest since my doctoral work because there was a time in a bygone era when lots of people were relating mandaian sources to the gospel of john in particular
And what I realized as I was putting together this collection of readings for my students was that the two most important sacred texts of the Mendians had never been translated into English in their entirety. And I was like... how can this be, right? If these things were discovered today, I mean, they'd be making headline news the way that the Nag Hammadi discovery did, right? And so I took an interest, I started dabbling, I realized that unlike New Testament, where
It's hard to find something new to say and a new angle on a well-worn text and a much-studied text. When it comes to the study of the Mandians, there are texts that have never been translated in their entirety. There are... dozens, maybe hundreds of unanswered questions that nobody's working on. And just stepping into that field, even just dabbling initially in presenting a paper.
I just discovered this is a fascinating place and it's just so different from New Testament. And I knew as soon as I started getting involved in that, got an NEH grant, that's the National Endowment of the Humanities in the United States, to work on a translation project.
for a text that we sometimes refer to as the Mandian Book of John, right? And that's John the Baptist. It's not a version of the Gospel of John. And I knew that if people in my main field of New Testament were ever to pay attention to... this translation and the importance of these sources then i was going to have to do as a follow-up project a deep dive into the historical john the baptist
in which the case is made that those sources are relevant, right? They're later, right? They need to be treated with due caution, but they are not irrelevant and to be ignored in the way that has become the prevailing view in New Testament studies. And so this project really was an effort to do that, but it also brought together my other interests in things like Christology and the historical figure of Jesus. And so all of that...
sort of converged naturally. Basically, everything that I had ever worked on throughout my academic career, starting from my doctoral work, really converged in this project. I'm definitely not done with John the Baptist. There's more to be said. I'm hoping that people listening to your explanation there, their ears will start perking up at various points. I mean, you said things like there were people who thought he was the light.
which given that John's Gospel is calling Jesus the light, there are people who were thinking that John the Baptist is like the guy instead of Jesus. You talked about how there is a group of... Gnostics who particularly like John the Baptist. I mean, these guys are really interesting because they don't think that John is the Messiah, right? But they do think that John is their most important prophet.
And they've got a handful of prophets, like Adam is one of their prophets. I'm not sure if Abraham is one of their prophets. I don't think he is. I know that they reject Moses, for example. They include a few others. Which other prophets from the Old Testament do they have? So they essentially have the early patriarchs. So it's the same kind of
figures that are prominent in what we sometimes call Sethian literature, right, from among the Nagamati texts. And so Seth features, he's referred to as Shiteu, which is Seth L, right? So you have these interesting... names are used for like the celestial counterparts of the earthly figures and so going back to like first century thought world, whether it's Philo of Alexandra or offshoots of the things that were in development in that time, the Gnostics, but also in rabbinic tradition.
One of the ways that they made sense of these two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 was that God created a heavenly prototype to the earthly human. And so you get this exploration of this idea of celestial counterparts.
And so you have a figure who's called Anush Utre, who's also a very important one. And that seems to be like Angelic Enosh. But an interesting question is whether maybe there's been some... pronunciation transformation over the centuries or something like that, and whether this could in fact be Enoch, right, who of course features prominently in literature about his celestial journeys and revelation and things like that.
But yeah, so they don't like, as is also true of the Nag Hammadi text, they don't like Judaism and Torah and things like that. And I think that, you know, and this... This could get us away from John the Baptist at least a little bit, but one of the chapters in the book is about the origins of Gnosticism. That's in the big book, John of History, Baptist of Faith. And I think that Mandiant sources...
do help us answer what has been a question that was just subject to speculation up until now. Where does this counter-cultural in the sense of against Torah... movement come from where they're interested enough in the genesis creation stories to focus attention on them and yet they interpret them subversively and say that this creator god is this inferior demiurge who makes
or doesn't even so much make as organizes the material world and rules over it and is at best an incompetent bungler and at worst a malevolent figure and sometimes a bit of both. How do you end up with those things, right? Because if you are part of Judaism, you should like this deity, right? And if you're not part of that tradition...
then why would you be so interested in these Jewish texts, right? So Gnosticism, as listeners to this show will know, within Gnosticism broadly, there is this idea. that the creator of the material world is either evil or incompetent and not the true God. And this is something that crops up in Gnosticism. And these Mandians, which comes from Manda, which is the Arabic word for knowledge, I think, or Gnosis, at least. Yeah, Aramaic, actually. What did I say? I think you said Arabic.
Oh, I meant to say Aramaic. I thought you might have meant Aramaic, but we mention Aramaic much more often, and so it's easy. The Aramaic name, a word for knowledge or gnosis. being Manda. That's where you get these Mandaeans. And there's two interesting things about them, one of which is that they're this ancient Gnostic sect that still exists, although in a small way today.
They're still around, but they're this ancient Gnostic sect. But there's this other interesting thing about them, which is that their favorite prophet, their most important guy, is John the Baptist, and that they don't like Jesus. Do you trust the news?
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So cut through media bias and better inform your views on important issues by going to ground.news forward slash Alex OC or by scanning the QR code that's currently on your screen. Subscribe using my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. So the Gnostic stuff, you think that the discovery of their literature gives us an insight into the origins of Gnosticism? Yes, I think that the reason why we have...
You know, a close connection with early Christianity, and yet also some evidence that there were versions of this system of thought that were not Christian. but that have a close relationship nonetheless to Judaism and Jewish tradition, is because this emerges in the circles around John the Baptist. And we actually have an ancient Jewish Christian source known as the Pseudo-Clementine Literature.
And it claims that Simon Magus, right, who is this person who is blamed for being the originator of Gnosticism, was connected with John's movement. And it was him and either a student or a teacher of his, right, because sometimes the sources vary, but it seems like a teacher of his was even more directly connected with John, and that Simon basically ousted him in order to take...
charge of this sort of Samaritan branch of this movement. And that teacher's name was Docithius, according to these sources. And it would be easy to treat some of these things, and obviously this is highly polemical literature, and so we do need to treat it with some skepticism, but sometimes highly polemical literature is giving you a caricature or distortion that...
relates to actual people, events, movements, and things like that. And we have evidence from Samaritan sources of a sect that they refer to as the Dustan sect, right? So the Dosithian sect.
And one of the things it says about them is that they prayed standing in water, right? And so that sounds like a connection with this John the Baptist thing. Then we have the first Christian author, right, writing in Syriac, who actually quotes from... a mandian text and is interacting with them directly who refers to them uses a number of different terms and labels but one of them is dustians right and so it seems like a lot of these threads that connect john with gnosticism
suddenly start to appear in other places in ways that require some sort of explanation. And so it's fairly piecemeal. But given that there are traditions that associate... John's movement, not John himself, but John's movement, with the origins of Gnosticism. And given that we have a Gnostic group that looks back to John the Baptist but doesn't like Jesus, suggests that the origins of Gnosticism
should be traced back to the movement around John, but not necessarily either John himself or Jesus, right? And so these may be directions that certain branches of this movement took. And the reason I think this is important, even if you don't think as, you know, I don't think John was a Gnostic, but if this emerged out of the circle around him, if we're trying to triangulate back to John.
to follow the different branches to get this figure that inspired these different movements, the Jesus movement, the Gnostic thing. If we want to... bring John into clearer focus, then tracing these threads back and figuring out what kind of figure could have inspired these different movements, I think is an important step in the effort to bring him into historical focus.
It's just, you know, I'm so glad when all of my favorite subjects come together into one and with your book, you know, New Testament, John the Baptist, Gnosticism. gospel of john even a little a little bit of a sprinkle in there because that that's your expertise too it's brilliant and
It makes this figure all the more mysterious, like you say, because even if he himself is not a Gnostic, what is going on? Why is this man connected with this movement that gives us that fruit? By their fruits, you shall know them. So let's explore that. The most important thing about John is that he had this nickname, the Baptist or the baptizer, which as you point out in your book, at the time is not a technical term. It just means immersion.
Baptism is the same thing as immersion or dunking. So you quite, I think, entertainingly say that we might as well call him John the Dunker or John the Immerser. This isn't a technical term. This is just a nickname. You also point out that at the time, immersion pools as a religious ritual were pretty common.
There has to be something pretty special about what John was doing to give him a nickname of John the Baptist in a time when everybody was immersing themselves. It'd be like having the nickname Alex the Englishman. while I live in England. I'd have to do something pretty particularly English to get that kind of nickname. So what was John doing when Jesus came upon him in the River Jordan?
Yeah, well, we see some discomfort developing. It's not there in the Gospel of Mark, interestingly enough, right? But as Jesus gets elevated, the fact that he underwent a baptism that was a baptism for the forgiveness of sins. become something that some members of his movement are not entirely comfortable with. Actually, can we spell that out? The Gospels quite clearly say that John is preaching a baptism.
of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. This isn't something that we've put onto the topic. This is said in the Gospels that John is baptizing people. for repentance and forgiveness of sins. And then Jesus, the Lamb of God, the perfect man, God himself incarnate, comes along and has a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And I think one of the things that tells us is that the earliest Christian authors we have are not thinking of him in those terms yet.
When we get to the Gospel of John where it's saying, you know, he is the Word made flesh, right, which may not mean quite what a lot of people assume, but he embodies this, you know, divine presence, activity, whatever, revelation. he's described as the lamb of god who takes away the sins of the world but by that point i mean the gospel of john also doesn't even explicitly say that john baptizes jesus right it says
It has John say, the reason I came baptizing was so that he might be revealed to Israel. So there's this increasing discomfort. right and it continues beyond beyond the new testament uh yeah it's like implied that jesus is baptized by john in john's gospel but he doesn't say so and and further to what you said earlier about john being a polemic you know saying like oh
John the Baptist is definitely not the Messiah. Here's another subtle indication that John might have been acting polemically and intentionally not mentioning that Jesus was baptized by this other guy. Yeah. And although I do get the sense that John... probably had a certain degree of humility, as also did Jesus. You wouldn't get that impression sometimes the way he speaks in the Gospel of John, but just as we see a lot of that as the words of this Christian author.
policing on the lips of jesus sort of a defense of the christian view of jesus right and so you get this you know high claimed authority but also these statements that reflect a certain humility. I think that was probably true about John as well. But the words attributed to him in the Gospel of John only found there, right? He, Jesus must increase and I must decrease and things like that.
There's reason to doubt whether those went back to the historical John. On the other hand, one of the things that's attributed to John in the synoptic tradition that also shows up in the Gospel of John is this idea that there's one coming after him. who'll be stronger, whose sandals he's not even worthy to untie. And I think I solved a lot of questions about John in my books. I'm still trying to figure out, you know, that's a very specific thing. It's like...
I'm not even worthy to tie his shoelaces, right? I'm not worthy to... do the laundry on his handkerchief or something. You can see what the image might mean, you can kind of figure it out, but it's not an obvious thing to say. I've not thought about that before. I mean, I just kind of assumed it meant something like, oh, I'm not worthy to do anything.
but to untie his sandals is... Like you say, it's possible there are undertones that we're simply not picking up on, but the readership of John's gospel, you know, in the... second century or late first century would have picked up on and john here sort of being presented by the new testament authors is interesting because of course it seems like
The fact that Jesus was baptised by John is something that probably actually happened, and we can know that because, if it didn't, it's not something that the Gospel authors were likely to invent. John the Baptist was known as a religious teacher in his own right. He had followers. Some people thought he was the Messiah. And so for Jesus to come and be baptized by him sort of indicates that...
Jesus is accepting him as some kind of spiritual guider or leader or something, almost like he's joining his movement. And that's a pretty uncomfortable position to put the Son of God into. And so do you think that... historically this gives us an indication that at some point Jesus was some kind of disciple of John the Baptist. Yes. I wouldn't even say, you know, the only thing I would challenge in what you said was the almost, right? That he joined John's movement.
And yet John seems to have said that, you know, one coming after him, right, will be stronger. And I think, you know, that may, you know, one possible context for John, rather, to have said something like that is when he... got wind that Herod Antipas was paying attention to him and likely to try to eliminate him. If you get rid of me, one of my disciples, one who comes after me, just like we get that in...
that language used for Christian discipleship, here too, it could have the same connotations. Somebody who's part of my movement will turn out to be even stronger than I am. And especially given that... John seems to have styled himself as like the prophet Elijah. Elijah certainly stirred things up, but it was his disciple Elisha, right, who...
actually does sort of bring about the regime change and does some of these things. And so that may have been the way that John was thinking. And so Elisha might be stronger, right, than... Elijah in terms of the forcefulness with which he acts, that doesn't necessarily mean greater, right? And it's interesting that we have attributed to Jesus a statement, which I think is unambiguous, that
John is the greatest human being who was ever born, right? And the Christian tradition certainly struggled to know what to do with that, given that he was saying... For Jesus to say, among those born of women, there's none greater than John the Baptist. Well, Jesus was born of a woman. And so, case closed. Yeah, that is fascinating. I kind of had assumed that that quote excluded Jesus, but then...
Right, you are. He was also born of a woman. That's in Matthew 11. Truly, I tell you, among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist, although it is in... Other Gospels are available, as they say. And there are different versions of these stories. But what we do know is that John the Baptist crops up in more than just a baptismal capacity.
I mean, you mentioned before, you said that John the Baptist was more famous than Jesus in his time. And people might listen to that and go, hold on a second, are you sure? Isn't that a bit conspiratorial? But I don't think a lot of people pay attention. to where john comes up just how significant of a person that he is you know when when herod antipas hears about jesus
And there's rumors that there's this man going around, this teacher, this miracle worker. What are some people saying? It says in the Gospels, they think it's John the Baptist resurrected. You can imagine the kind of... the kind of splash that Jesus was making in the ancient world. Famously, you know, crowds following him, everybody's heard of him. For somebody to look at that and go, oh, it's another one of those John the Baptists.
who is this John the Baptist guy and what was he doing? He must have been something pretty special. Yeah. I mean, we have an indication in the Gospels that he had... An impact, people are paying attention to him sort of far and wide. It refers to him being active in the wilderness, you know, or some sort of wilderness area. But that term is often...
taken to mean the desert, like in some isolated area, like he was a hermit. But in actual fact, the places that are mentioned are the wildernesses around the Jordan, right? And there were major thoroughfares going through there. Didn't focus on urban centers, but he sort of stood at the crossroads and had a lot of opportunity to not just reach a large audience that way, but also reach a large audience that would then take what he was saying with them.
back to wherever they came from, right? Back to Transjordan, back to Galilee, back to other places. And it's interesting that in the book of Acts, we have reference to... the Christian message, the message about Jesus, message focused on Jesus reaching Ephesus, and it says that Paul finds disciples there who've only been baptized with John's baptism.
And so what sort of disciples are these? Presumably they're members of John's movement, right? Which had reached Asia Minor before this Christian offshoot of John's movement got there. And so... we get a sense of just how influential John must have been. And that's why the depiction of him as this person who looks like he's unhinged and is, you know, just, it's clearly wrong.
This is somebody who religious, political leaders were paying attention to, and the general populace regarded him as a prophet, as somebody sent by God. Yes. Indeed, we know that a lot of them must have thought that he was the Messiah because of the fact that it has to be emphasized that he's not the Messiah. That's Jesus. In fact, at one point when Jesus asks his disciples, Who do you say I am? What's the first thing they say in response? Some say that you're John the Baptist.
This is the big moment where Peter, where he says, well, who do you say I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ. The first thing they say is, well, some people say that you're John the Baptist. Others say that you're Elijah. And it's like, some say that you're John the Baptist. Once again, reading through these gospels. trying to pick up who this character is you realize that he's he's not just some side character right and so
This culminates, this particular attention on John the Baptist as an important figure, this culminates in him eventually being put to death, right? Can you tell us about that story? Yes. So the story that I think... Other than baptizing Jesus, the story that's most famous, and maybe even is slightly better known just because it's depicted so often in art and other things, is John the Baptist being beheaded with the story of the dancing girl and all this kind of stuff.
Just as with the details of what precedes Jesus' execution, historically, we need to be... practice due skepticism towards this very vivid story that the Gospel of Mark tells us. It's very unlikely that Herod Antipas had any reluctance to execute John. Josephus tells us that he wanted to execute John. The Gospel of Matthew in retelling the story that was in Mark also says that, which is interesting. It's one of the ways that we know that Mark...
was used by Matthew, right? Because Matthew is taking over Mark's story, but changes it to something more plausible and says Antipas was looking for an excuse to kill him. And yet he forgets his editing and just his copying from the source and keeps the detail that... Antipas was sad when the request came for the head. Oh, wow, that's really interesting. And so it's, you know, but just as with, you know, the conversations between like Jesus and Pilate and that kind of stuff where it's like...
Yeah, right. Pilot didn't want to execute this troublemaker. Very out of character. Here, too, I think that the effort to place the blame on... on women rather than on Herod Antipas, is an effort to say, well, yes, so both of the major figures in our movement were executed by the figures who were in some way, shape, or form representatives of Roman power.
But, you know, really, their hands were tied. They were forced to do it. And so you really shouldn't pursue us and do the same to us because we're part of this movement, right? And so they're doing some damage control there. It's unlikely... that anyone would have known the details about what happened. Although we are told that a woman named Joanna, who was married to Herod's property manager,
became a sponsor of the Jesus movement. And so it is possible that there was somebody with some inside knowledge. And so one other thing that people often don't notice is that Josephus says that John was imprisoned and eventually executed at Macaris, which is in the desert. And yet the story in Mark has the request for John to be beheaded come when Herod Antipas is...
throwing a birthday party for himself, hosting a birthday party for himself, with the leader leading people in Galilee. And so he would have held that sort of thing at his new capital in... Tiberius in Galilee, he would have said, well, let's all go away to the desert for a bit, right? And so, presumably, if there's any truth to there being a request for John to be beheaded,
and then they had been brought on a platter and delivered and things like that, we would have to accept that Mark is compressing the time frame, right? And so Antipas gives orders and word is sent and... Somebody brings word to Machaerus that John is to be executed and things like that. I think it's also interesting that both the Gospels and Josephus indicate that John was imprisoned in Machaerus.
For some time, he wasn't immediately executed. And that's, I think, something that's not always paid enough attention to, right? What was Herod Antipas hoping to accomplish by not simply eliminating this individual? Or was there any constraint? And even if we think that being sympathetic to John is not the likely explanation, what we get Mark offering, enjoying listening to him.
There was something, right? And so was it that he's hoping to figure out more about this movement and his followers before cutting off the head of it? Because sometimes you cut off the head and the... famous mythological image of the get seven more popping up where they and so is it because he's worried that the followers might do something in response to the execution and so he's trying to
to judge whether it's safe before proceeding with simply eliminating him. It's very hard to say, but I think not enough people have asked, what's the delay about? What does it tell us about? you know, how Antipas viewed John and thus about John. Why is John imprisoned and then eventually executed? Like, what's the reason for that? Yeah, well, so...
The answer Josephus gives is that Antipas was concerned about the crowds, which seemed like they might be ready to do anything that he might advise them to. And we'll come back to that in a moment, because I think there may be one thing that we know that somebody did. following John's advice or indication. The Gospel of Mark says that it's due to John criticizing Antipas' divorce from his first wife.
and marriage to his brother's ex-wife, right? They divorce and he marries her. And when we put those two together, we actually...
get a story that makes even more sense than either of them does on its own. Because Josephus tells us that the popular opinion when Herod Antipas was defeated by the ruler of Arabia, named Aretas, which included Aretas taking Machaerus and conquering Machaerus, people thought that this was God paying or God ensuring that Herod Antipas was paid back for what he had done to John the Baptist.
And so when we know that John was imprisoned at Machaerus, and that according to the Gospels, he criticized her at Antipas for divorcing the princess of Aredas' daughter. and mistreating her in that way and making this other marriage. And that set the people of Herod Antipas' territory on a course to be in conflict, right? And so I think that like other prophets, you know, in the...
long line of prophets. John is not just like, oh, you're disobeying the law, you're doing stuff that's naughty or something like that. He's concerned about the political ramifications, the social ramifications of what rulers are doing, that this is... There's a reason why you're not supposed to just divorce and remarry at whim and to treat your spouse in a fair way. The injustice here is not just mistreatment of a woman, but this is...
getting your, dragging the whole people into conflict, right? And so it makes sense why people would then have said, yeah, John called him out on this. He was in prison in Machaerus. Then, you know, his first wife's father kicks his butt and, you know, takes Machaerus and... Yeah, of course God had a hand in this, and this was justice being done. Coming back to that, the crowd seemed ready to do anything that he might indicate. Rulers in the ancient world, as also today, are...
Always worried when somebody has the ear of the crowds. But that statement, they seem like they might be ready to do anything he advised. I'm guessing that might not have just been... They were all getting baptized, right? And it's interesting that the Gospel of John has this different chronology to the other Gospels and indicates that there was a period of time when Jesus was active.
when John was not yet imprisoned. And so, during that time, historically speaking, Jesus would have been part of John's movement. And the Gospel of John seems to be trying hard to have... John directing all attention to Jesus, which doesn't seem to be the way that things actually unfolded. And the Gospel of John places that famous action in the temple.
The thing is sometimes called the cleansing of the temple, but it seems much more likely to be a foreshadowing of its destruction. Driving out the animals and the money changers, right? The things that were essential for the temple to continue its... operations of offering sacrifice and i think that action you know was you know whenever it was whenever we place it was an expression of jesus as part of john's movement and an offshoot of john's movement because john offering
baptism for the forgiveness of sins was already taking aim at the temple, right? And providing what the temple offered, but by different means and, you know, much more affordably, let's put it that way. If Jesus did this action when the Gospel of John says, a few years before the crucifixion, and while John was still at large, then not only might this be the kind of thing that drew Antipas' attention,
to John's movement. He heard that, did you hear what one of John's emissaries did in Jerusalem? But also, Jesus may have thought of himself as having some responsibility for John being imprisoned. What he did, even if it was at John's request, may have led quite directly to John being imprisoned. And so I think that John's imprisonment and eventually his execution actually also are key.
influences on how Jesus comes to think about his own messianic identity. It's important to say, I think, that given the lack of direct and unbiased information that we have about someone like john the baptist through through the gospels a lot of this is essentially speculative it's sort of a kind of educated guesswork but it takes a lot of drawing out to see where where you're getting these ideas from and in your book you you do this you take the time to demonstrate
how the very act of baptism that John was proficient in is itself, like you say, contra to temple worship, because you're sort of... you're offering people what they're supposed to kind of only be able to get from the temple from somewhere else and drawing out this idea of Jesus as historically one of John's followers and this quote about them being willing to do anything and I think it is a really interesting
And I think the thing that most people are going to be interested in, in all of that, is the idea that there is this time where Jesus is going around considering himself to be a follower of John. The Gospels say... that from the very beginning it was recognized that like it's the other way around like john's like no no no not me this is this is your man if that's historically dubious Is there a point historically, do you think, that this does actually happen?
where Jesus does actually just begin to think, actually, no. Is it when John the Baptist dies? Is it after that? Or is there some point where he goes, I was a follower, but now I'm the teacher? Yeah. As an educator, I would say that I am most proud when my students become teachers. It's sort of a natural progression.
One of the things that struck me as I was working on this project was that there is a saying attributed to Jesus that no student is greater than his teacher, but a student, when they reach their full potential, can become like their teacher. Wouldn't you have been thinking about himself and John, first and foremost, even before thinking about his own students in relation to him? Either way, it potentially will fit. That saying, I think, will fit.
rather poorly with the way a lot of people think about Jesus as this figure who, well, no one could sort of approximate who he was and what he did, right? But Jesus' own teaching seems to suggest otherwise. It's really interesting parts of the Gospels where Jesus indicates that the disciples...
are kind of to do as he does one day. And of course, this is complicated by this separate topic of Jesus' Christology, the idea that he's God, the idea that he's this particular individual missing in all of that. or a difficulty for all of that are quotes like when Jesus says famously, you know, I am one with the Father, the Father and I are one.
he immediately says that he is in the father and the father's in him and he says to his disciples one day you will be hopefully in me in the way that and then i'll be in you and so there's a lot of this kind of Jesus having this position of authority, but implying that at least some of it can be given to the disciples. In John chapter 20, Jesus sends out his disciples with the ability to forgive sins. He says,
as the Father has sent me, now I'm sending you. If you forgive people's sins, they're forgiven. If you do not, then they're not. And it's like, well, yeah, maybe there is this feeling that you've got a follower of John the Baptist who then says, actually, Now it's my turn. And nearing the end of his ministry says, okay, this whole forgiveness of sins stuff that started with John the Baptist and I kind of took over, now it's on you, the apostles, to go out and do the same thing.
But of course, this is complicated by the fact that on top of these little clues, we've got a theology and we've got a gospel. which tells us that Jesus is so much more, that he's the son of God, that he's the Messiah, that he's the son of man, and all of this kind of stuff, it makes it quite difficult to understand how Jesus actually saw himself.
Yes, and that is a genuine difficulty. And the challenge, I think, for historians, and this has always been true, but I don't think those of us who've been interested in historical research on Jesus.
have always kept the balance that's needed here, is that on the one hand, we can detect a trajectory, right? And that eventually gets us to things like the Council of Nicaea, right? Where Jesus… is the incarnation of the second person of a, or actually at that point, it's not even thinking exactly in Trinitarian terms yet, but a figure that is...
of one substance with the Father, right? And the church spent a lot of time getting to that point. But there's a trajectory that gets us from the historical Jesus to there. And so we know that we need to peel back. some layers of development in order to bring the historical Jesus into focus. On the other hand, sometimes I think there has been a swinging of the pendulum to the opposite extreme where
It's almost an effort to get back to a Jesus who doesn't have any high view of himself whatsoever. And there are enough sayings attributed to Jesus that seem to be authentic, that have a strong case to be made in their favor.
that becomes implausible, right? One famous example is the promise, you will sit on 12 thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel, which most scholars think you know the version in one of the gospels is changed it's you will sit on thrones rather than you will sit on 12 thrones because of course one of the 12 that jesus was addressing then was judas And with hindsight, Jesus promising you will sit on 12 thrones, including Judas, is sort of problematic, right? And so if he envisages his...
apostles, his appointees sitting on 12 thrones, judging the 12 tribes of Israel, then what's he doing, right? And so presumably he is of a higher status. And an interesting question is, does he at this point think of both himself and John as having a higher status? So when it comes to thinking about John as the Messiah, which we know some people were thinking, it's not entirely clear whether...
John and or Jesus thought in terms of that sort, but there was an expectation of what we might call two messiahs, right? Messiah is just a transliteration of a word that means anointed one.
And there were two figures who were installed in office with a ceremony that involved anointing, the high priest and the king. And both of the rightful holders of these positions... according to the jewish law and according to the scriptures of of judaism we're no longer holding that right so people like herod the great even the maccabees right are not of the line of david uh somebody else other than
The line of Zadok was holding the high priesthood. And so there were groups that hoped for the restoration of these roles to their rightful holders. And one interesting possibility is that John... may have come to see himself as a messianic figure, right, in the strict sense, but he's a priestly messiah, right, who is carrying out an activity in a non-traditional...
way, right? So not by offering sacrifices in the temple, but by offering by some other means. And so between that and his arrest and execution, it may be that Jesus came to think of himself and believe he's the stronger one. that John promised and thus will be the Davidic king, but that he too maybe... first has to follow a path more like John's, right? That involves suffering and rejection. And that only then would God intervene to vindicate both of them and show that they were right.
One place, there's only one place where I think that view of maybe John and Jesus as two messiahs shows up in the New Testament. And it's in the book of Revelation, right? Where there's this reference to two witnesses. in the holy city, who are killed, and their bodies lay on the streets and are exposed. But then, after three days, they're raised up. And did that reflect an expectation that John and Jesus
would be raised and vindicated because the two witnesses are said to be the two lampstands, right? And that's an image. from the book of Zechariah, where you have the high priest and the king, these two anointed figures, and the lamps are sort of oil lamps, and it's all connected with that imagery. And so do we have a hint there of a time when you had this messianic view of John and Jesus. Wow. Well, what's the Christian interpretation of that passage of who these two people are?
I mean, sometimes it's been like it's Peter and Paul or two witnesses in Rome or something like that. There's good reason to think that we have in the book of Revelation a work that had an earlier form. And it's interesting. There is one person whose view I do not subscribe to, but I think there's still something really interesting in terms of the connection with the John the Baptist movement.
Jay Massenburg Ford wrote a commentary on the book of Revelation that is not widely used because she had a really unusual view that this was a Christian reworking. of a work that was originally by someone named John, and that John was John the Baptist. And so this was actually a work by John the Baptist, but then edited by Christians to become a Christian work, which I think is fascinating, right?
I'm not ready to go there. We'll see if I ever turn my attention to Revelation, whether I change my mind about that. But what is interesting is that we have both this sort of dual messiah.
thing that pops up there with the two witnesses. And we have the woman who gives birth to a messianic child being chased into the wilderness, which... mirrors a story that's told about John and his mother fleeing into the wilderness when supposedly Herod the Great was after them, which we find at the end of the Infancy Gospel of James.
It's mostly about Mary and then about Jesus, and suddenly it's only about John and his parents. And we also get in the Mandian tradition storytelling about John being whisked away to safety.
and things like that, and then making a reappearance. And so it seems like there is, in more places than we realize in the New Testament, there are traces of... traditions that were connected with John and his movement that take on a very different form when they're transformed as part of these early Christian documents.
I want to talk a bit more about these Mandians, because like you say, they might provide a link to the historical, original followers of John the Baptist, though it's not entirely clear that... they are actually a historical continuation. They certainly see themselves that way. They think they are the people that we see referred to as followers of John the Baptist. The ones that don't become Christians go on to become these Mandians.
And like you say, they've got religious scripture of their own. And as far as I understand, they're quite protective over it. Like we're kind of not supposed to be reading it as non-Mandaean. So sorry if they're only watching, but we'll... We won't show it on screen, perhaps. But the most interesting thing, I think, because I haven't read the whole Mandaian Book of John, although perhaps one day, I did scan over...
its depiction of the baptism of Jesus. Because the Mandaeans, although like you say, they don't like Jesus very much, they still think that John baptized Jesus. What is different between our gospel account? of this baptism and the Mandian account of the baptism. Yeah, so in the Mandian account, it reads as though, and it's hard to know at what stage this might have happened.
But it does read as though it's aware of how Christians are depicting this event, and there's some deliberate parodying of it, right? And that's one of the challenges, not just in studying the Mandiant text, right? But it's one reason why I think some have just...
set them aside. It's like, well, there's some indication that there's material that might be derivative of and dependent on Christian literature. And the truth is that just because Matthew and Luke used Mark doesn't mean that Matthew and Luke can't embed other traditions. And even know some of the things that Mark knew, but know them in a different version. And maybe one that...
was more authentic, right? Because the fact that Mark wrote first doesn't mean that he was completely honest and didn't transform anything. And then everybody else who came along Raider was distorting. is pure, right? That's not the way storytelling works. And so there may be things in this story, even if it reflects polemical engagement with Christian storytelling, that reflect how
Others of John's followers who didn't become part of the Jesus movement viewed Christian storytelling and included some elements that reflected their own independent knowledge. One of them is that Jesus in the story asks to... I mean, if we go with the modern meaning or the later meaning of the term in Mandaic, which is a dialect of Aramaic, it would mean, you know, I want to be ordained. But it's a word that comes from the Aramaic word for disciple.
And so, taking it in its root meaning, Jesus asks John to baptize him and make him his disciple, which is at best implicit in the Christian version of it, but is explicit there. This is in the Mandian Gospel of John, Jesus says this. Yeah, in the Mandian Book of John, yeah. Yeah, Book of John. Yeah, and it's really quite hilarious in a lot of ways, right? The Mandians.
They love puns, which I think we see that as something that John and Jesus seem to have had in common. And the Mandian tradition certainly had preserved that as an element of their storytelling. Jesus is supposedly this great, skilled teller and interpreter of parables, and yet John... addresses Jesus with some parables, and he takes them in this woodenly literal way and misses the point of them. And it's really sort of religious satire.
at its finest. If you're a Christian, you have to have a thick skin when reading it, of course, because it's criticizing Jesus. But the Mandiant tradition wasn't entirely comfortable with John baptizing Jesus. Like, wouldn't John have seen that he was a troublemaker, right? That he was bound to be, you know. And so in other, elsewhere in the Mandiant literature, we have John simply baptizing Jesus, and then Jesus goes off the rails. Here,
John seems to be aware that Jesus is trouble. And so it's only when there's basically a letter from up above, right? So like in the Christian tradition, you get the voice from heaven. But in the Mandian version, there's essentially a voice or a letter from heaven saying, you know, baptize the deceiver, right? This is not on you, John, right? You're off the hook, okay? We know he's going to be trouble and go ahead with it anyway.
And then the spirit makes an appearance, but as with the god of the Jews, Adonai, Ruha, the spirit, is also a malevolent figure in this tradition, right? And so it's just fascinating the way they tell the story. One thing that I have pointed to more than once as indicating likely... embedding of early tradition and very ancient tradition in this story, one of the things that John accuses Jesus of is loosing the Sabbath which Moses ordained.
It's in Aramaic, but that's the expression, loosing the Sabbath, right? Untying the Sabbath. And that's exactly the meaning of an accusation that the Jewish authorities bring against Jesus in the Gospel of John in the New Testament, chapter 5. And the reason that this indicates some sort of early tradition is that once they take their Gnostic form, they no longer view the Sabbath that Moses ordained.
as a good thing, right? And so Jesus untying it, loosing it, abolishing it, disregarding it, would not be a point of criticism, right? And so the only way this makes sense on the lips of John is if this was part of the story. even before that branch of John's movement took its Gnostic turn and remained part of the story. And it would mean that some of John's movement...
were more conservative in some ways with regard to the Jewish law than some elements of the Jesus movement were, right? And so it's striking that we get sometimes attributed to just generic Jewish authorities or things like that, things that elsewhere are attributed to John or his movement, right, suggests that at least some of John's followers understood John in a more conservative way, right? And so...
There, too, I think that between the conservative Jewish and the gentile mission-oriented versions of Christianity, the emergence of Gnosticism, the emergence of, and the likelihood that this influences other strands within Jewish and Samaritan tradition, John seems to have had a vision for bringing together, as we might say today, a broad coalition. And people who were clearly really skilled, intellectual, insightful individuals. And of course, when you have somebody who is a...
esteemed as a teacher and a key influence in a time, then if they're considered an artistic genius, a musical genius, all these other people gather around them. And oftentimes what they end up doing, it reflects the influence, but also then takes it in. different direction. And I think that's exactly the role of John is that he brought together a lot of the thinkers and the activists of his time because he was this
This person was thought to be a genius with ritual and with word and with teaching and with social change. So we know, everybody knows the story of Jesus getting baptized by John. the Baptist as told by the Gospels. In the Mandean or Mandean book of John, Jesus approaches John the Baptist and says, asks him to baptize him and pronounce your name. pronounce over me the name you pronounce. And he says, if I become your disciple, I shall mention you in my epistle. If I do not become your disciple,
then erase my name from your scroll. And then John spoke saying, and this is me reading out the text, John spoke saying to Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, you have lied to Jews and you have deceived men, the priests, you cut. seed off from men and labor and pregnancy from women. You loosened the Sabbath that Moses ordained in Jerusalem. You lied to them with a horn and played different things with the trumpet.
And Jesus seems to go on to deny these things. He says, if I've lied to the Jews, then may a burning fire consume me. If I have deceived the priests, may I die two deaths instead of one. But there's this bizarre battle. that begins to happen between john the baptist and jesus and jesus is like come on man like baptize me and he even says like i don't know if this is sarcastic i don't know if it's serious where he says like if you baptize me
I'm going to write about you in my memoirs. It's a really, really strange sort of set of circumstances. And like you say, that loosened the Sabbath, which Moses ordained, given that the Mandaeans reject Moses as a prophet, It's unlikely that they would just, like, make that up out of nowhere, right? Yeah, and it's interesting that we get that accusation, you know, that Jesus was accused in that way, right, according to the Christian tradition.
I think there are also other points of intersection there, right? I mean... You'll be mentioned in my memoir, right, is a great way of putting it, right? It's like there are these Christian texts that claim to be sort of memoirs of the apostles connected with the Jesus movement, and they mention John. But, of course, Mendians don't think they depict John accurately, just like they don't think they depict John accurately.
Jesus accurately. And the tooting with the trumpet thing is also because there's a saying attributed to Jesus about when you do good works, don't trumpet them and things like that. Then there's also the cutting off of seed, which is accusing Jesus of monasticism, which… It's not clear. So some of this probably reflects ongoing debates, right? And that's one of the other hard things I wrestled with, and I tried to bring some initial stabs at...
getting some clarity on these things, but there's a lot more work to be done. How much of the disagreement between John and Jesus in Mandiantax is like the disagreements between John and Jesus or the... The being at... Not quite at odds, but... saying different things in the Gospel of John, how much of this reflects stuff that John and Jesus would have said to one another, and how much of it is this movement that is fracturing, telling the story in different ways.
polemically. And so figuring out which are the issues that might have gone back to John and Jesus, if any, and which ones reflect later debates between what...
Was one movement now becoming two movements focused on John and Jesus? There's a lot more historical work to be done on that. One thing that we haven't actually explained or talked about much is... baptism like we've talked about john who was going around baptizing people and we've mentioned that it just means immersion like we know that it involves water but how much do we know about what baptism actually is
why John the Baptist seemed to be obsessed with water, why his whole movement seemed to be surrounded by immersion in water. Where did that come from? Yeah, and we don't have a story about... John discovering baptism. One possibility is that if he leaves home trying to figure out what he's supposed to do... And immersing in water, maybe catches a glimpse of himself.
Somehow it resembles, it seems like not his own image looking back. It's more like what he imagines the prophet Elijah looks like or something like that. You can imagine how, I mean, certainly there's a long history of people undergoing immersion, seeking. a spiritual experience. That wasn't the dominant form of immersion in that time. And the way we know that John's immersion was not just the purity immersion of that time.
is one that you mentioned, that he becomes known as the immerser, which is very hard when you have so many people immersing all over the place. But also, there are these stories about his authority being challenged, right? By what authority do you do this if you're not the Christ or Elijah or the prophet? Yes, this is said to Jesus, to be clear. So Jesus is accused later in the canonical Gospels. By what authority do you do these things? Yeah, and there...
He says, well, I'll ask you a question. John, what was his authority, right? So he links himself with John's authority there, which is interesting. But in the Gospel of John, right, and I'm not suggesting that this was a historical incident with the dialogue preserved, but... In the Gospel of John, Jewish authorities come to John and ask him, what's your authority to do this thing?
Why do you baptize if you're not the Christ or Elijah or the prophet? So in other words, to do this thing that was offering forgiveness by a different means requires authority. And the very fact that... the question of John's authority to baptize comes up suggests that he was doing what the Gospel of Mark and other sources say, namely offering a baptism that was offering the forgiveness of sins, right? It required repentance, but it's...
For the forgiveness of sins. And even in the early Christian preaching described in the book of Acts, at which point it's barely a Jesus-focused movement. It's the... the Jesus branch of John's movement, they are still proclaiming, you know, repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins, right? That's their message. And so we see that there's continuity into the early Jesus movement that...
gets overshadowed and gets lost along the way as Jesus is elevated and John is submerged, maybe is the right word to use. So I think that John, right? One of the more speculative but I think plausible things that I explore in my books is that we have these dual traditions of John as dedicated as a lifelong Nazarite, right? Like Samuel and... Samson had been, and also the son of a priest. And priests were required to keep their hair trimmed, right, according to the Torah. And later, later...
texts like the book of Ezekiel and the rabbinic literature may get even more explicit. And Nazarites were prohibited from doing that. And so if John found himself torn between two... incompatible roles that he inherited, that might have provided a catalyst for him to ask, okay, so what am I supposed to do with my life? I'm the son of a priest who is not going to serve in the temple. I've been dedicated in a way that...
was rare. And Samuel, of course, is the one who anoints David, right? But the prophet remains an authority over the king, right? And so there is the possibility that John thought of the coming one. as a Messiah and thought of himself mainly in prophetic terms, but without any implication that because the king is stronger, that he's the ultimate authority and the prophet is not.
ultimately as the spokesperson for God, the one that even the king should be subject to. Yeah, that's why I'm quite interested in this unworthy to untie his sandal, because...
That tells us a lot as to whether he's sort of saying that out of reverence to the king or whether he means it as a sort of authority placement. And that, as you say, probably requires more... more exploration um but that's interesting so we know that because the other thing that we haven't spoken about is is the birth narrative sometimes it's forgotten that in luke's birth narrative of jesus
It begins with the birth of John the Baptist or the pregnancy of Elizabeth, his mother. And we're told that there's this miraculous story. We're told this miraculous narrative that... Elizabeth can't have children, she's too old, but they're praying for a child and God miraculously gives them this child and that child is John the Baptist. And when...
Elizabeth is pregnant. She goes to meet Mary, who she's a relative of. And John does a backflip in the belly. And there's a lot in there. I mean, one thing is that we know that Zechariah, the father, is a priest.
the way that we know i mean so priesthood is like an inheritable office at that time so it was would have been expected that john becomes a priest in the same way and that's in the infancy that's in the the gospel narrative there but it's also in the manda the mandaion sources that his father was zachariah the priest so probably was known that that was actually the case um and like you say they have to they have to trim their hair but we also get this indication that
because Elizabeth is a relative of Mary, we're not given much more information, that Jesus and John the Baptist are like related to each other. But then I think a lot of scholars think that this is a dubious connection because that whole birth narrative is suspiciously similar, as you point out, to the miraculous birth of Samuel in 1 Samuel. And so...
It kind of looks as if the author of Luke's gospel has copied the birth of Samuel from the Old Testament and applied it to John the Baptist. What do you think about the historicity of that story? Yeah, so... The main point to emphasize is that from the perspective of a historian, infancy traditions are not the place to look for reliable historical detail as a rule, right?
ancient biographies right this is not at odds with treating these as sources that are about actual historical figures but ancient biographies regularly preface them introduce them with Tales of wondrous portents that indicate symbolically how great and wonderful this person that the biography is going to be about would be, right? And so this is pretty much par for the course. And it's clear that...
Luke and or Luke's source is patterning the story, particularly the story about John the Baptist, on the story of Hannah and Samuel. We also have hints of the Moses story in Matthew's infancy story, which is just focused on Jesus. And yet, looking at both of these, historians tend to say,
they probably would have remembered what the names of Gia's parents were and would have included those kinds of details. And so I think that things like the name Zechariah and Elizabeth, which were also there in the Mandian tradition, are likely to be historical. And it seems as though things like his father being a priest are the kinds of things that would have been known, because people...
Before they listen to anyone, they want to know who is this person, right? And people's reputation depended on ancestry and things like that in this particular cultural context. Whether John was a Nazarite, looked like he was a lifelong Nazarite, whether he had long hair, whether, you know, that's something invisible, right?
Nazarite is not to be confused with Nazarene. So a Nazarene is just someone from Nazareth, but a Nazarite is a particular kind of religious observer. So they grow out their hair. They abstain from alcohol. They abstain from defilement by touching dead bodies. But it's some kind of particular reverence that involves the growing out of your hair. Yeah.
yeah and so most people i think if they have any prior contact with the bible will at least know samson was one right although he's a very um not a typical one right the hair was not thought to give superhuman strength right this is a mythical magical kind of take on the nazirite thing but a lot of times people
forget that Samuel is depicted in that way. And these are the only two figures that were depicted as being lifelong Nazarites, right? So it was much more like the, you know, you imagine somebody taking a vow and saying, you know, you know until you until this government seeds this point i will you know i refuse to cut my beard or something like that right you know it's like somebody saying you know i'm going to
you know, dedicate myself to this and for that time, you know, or I'm not going to touch booze again until, you know, I have accomplished this goal that I've set for myself or whatever it is. And so a Nazarite vow was usually that sort of thing, something that somebody took for a period of time. And then they ended it and they shaved their head and they went back to normal. And it's interesting that we have in Mandaism the term Naserai used.
for basically somebody who is adept, skilled in the esoteric knowledge of the Mandiant tradition. And so whether that goes back to Nazarite... whether it goes back to the fact that in this movement, the person at the center was a Nazarite and his right-hand man was a Nazarene, and so they were doing a pun thing. But it's fascinating that this term...
which sounds a lot like a term that appears in the New Testament, also shows up in the Mandiant tradition, right? Because they don't like Jesus, so they're not going to be borrowing it from Christians. And so what's it doing there? Where do we get... this idea of John as a lifelong Nazarite from? Are we told explicitly that this is the case, or is it something we infer? Yeah, so it's implicit, at the very least, in the Gospel of Luke.
where it's like, he will never touch wine or strong drink. In the Jewish tradition, that was enough to indicate that this is a Nazarite vow. And that is a vow that Elizabeth is making. on behalf of john i mean so it's in the story it's simply mentioned by the angel right uh i think that we can you know if i'm right about
some of the infancy source material, then there may have been a more explicit version about Elizabeth playing a role much more like the one that Hannah does, right? But in echoing the Hannah... Hannah is Samuel's mother. Hannah is Samuel's mother, and Hannah says, if you grant me a son, I will dedicate him, right? And he will be dedicated as a Nazirite all his life.
Implicit in John's dedication as a Nazirite all his life to this woman who is patterned on, right? Her story is patterned on that of Hannah, right? There is this implication that there's this dedication even before he's born. to this vow. And it's interesting. One of the other things there hasn't been all that much research on, I was surprised when I was working on this project that
John as a new Samuel, right? Most scholars working on the New Testament have been Christians or post-Christians or something like that. And so the interest still goes, you know... first and foremost, to Jesus and then everyone who comes after him. And so there are things about John's depiction, even in the New Testament, that deserve further exploration than they've received. But it's amazing how much information we do...
Back to my first question that I've been asking my friend recently, like, who is John the Baptist? It's like, well, he's the guy that baptized Jesus. He's the first person mentioned in Luke's, first birth mentioned in Luke's infancy. narrative. He's the man who Jesus is accused of being John the Baptist at least twice, once directly and once as being him resurrected. He's a man that's put to death.
But in this fantastical beheading and the head being placed on the silver platter, there's loads and loads of stuff going on, which indicates that at the very least, he was an important dude.
He wasn't just some guy that came to prepare the way and nothing else. He quite obviously had his own stuff going on, his own ministry. And we even have the echoes of his religious community today with their own literature that is... part of this bizarre Gnostic reinterpretation of the way that the world works and, you know, different entities and creators and demiurges and all this kind of stuff.
All of this packed into this one mysterious character who's right at the front of the Gospels. He's also the first human character mentioned in the Gospel of John.
in john i i point this out to people i sort of say that you know the famous in the beginning was the word and the word was with god like before the whole word became flesh thing you get john the baptist and and this emphatic assertion john the baptist who was not the messiah was preparing the way for jesus the messiah and john the baptist himself
Not being the Messiah was the person who, because he was not the Messiah, you know, it really wants you to know that he's not the Messiah. And that alone should be enough to perk your ears off, I think, you know. What does that tell us about what people thought at the time? Yeah. yeah he confessed and did not deny but confessed it's like okay you're yeah clearly somebody doesn't think that if you need to be that emphatic about it
Yeah. Do you think that the stuff that we've discussed today could or should affect a typical christian understanding because a christian might listen to this and feel a bit uncomfortable you know jesus possibly a disciple of somebody else jesus having a baptism for the forgiveness of sins i mean that part isn't even controversial but like you know there's a lot in here that might sort of trouble a traditional christian understanding right well the thing i always say is you know particularly
you know having uh come you know was born into the catholic tradition but found my way into um and still within the protestant tradition and in the protestant tradition uh the scriptures are supposed to be the ultimate authority If things that emerge when you pay attention to them and don't just try to sort of deny them away, if things that are found in the pages of these texts make you uncomfortable, then maybe you should...
be uncomfortable, right? Maybe your thing that you imagine is Bible-believing Christianity is not that. And maybe one aspect of it is that the Bible has a lot more different stuff in it than... the pieces you've chosen in order to assemble your viewpoint. It's interesting. I wrote a book on another subject, but not unrelated, called What Jesus Learned from Women.
Some of the response to that, too, was he couldn't learn from anybody. He was God. And it's clear that there you have a popular view of Jesus that actually has veered into a stance about him and beliefs about him that... historically were condemned as heretical by orthodoxy, right? What became orthodoxy was that somehow there's full divinity, but also full humanity. without either being diminished. And nobody has actually managed to formulate a coherent view that...
meets all the requirements of the Creed of Chalcedon. And so you can understand why people keep veering off into things that are at odds with it. It's pretty much inevitable. But it's interesting that... So many Christians are willing to say, oh, well, but yeah, not that because he was divine, right? And to downplay the humanity because of their belief in his divinity. And they never say, oh, well, not that divine attribute because he was human.
And so it's clear that a lot of modern Christology and a lot of modern Christian thinking about Jesus is off-kilter. It's unbalanced. It is leading heavily in one direction where... The creeds and definitions of orthodoxy said it should be balanced between two different things. And I'm not advocating for Christian orthodoxy. I'm just pointing out that there's this disconnect, right?
For Protestants, at least, it's not the creeds that are supposed to be the authority, it's the Bible. And yet, so much of the Bible is read through the lens of these later creedal definitions of who Jesus is and what it means. to say that he's the Word made flesh, things that are not spelled out in that precise way within the pages of the New Testament themselves. There's so much more to say, and that's why you wrote two books about the subject. I mean, topics not included include...
For example, the suggestion that John the Baptist was an Essene. And this is a really popular suggestion that people like to bring up. But in your book, you explain why that might be a little bit dubious and sort of like a bit... a bit groundless right um also the we talked about water and you give some ideas as to where this importance of water in john's like baptismal
ministry might have come from the in ezekiel at the end of ezekiel we're told about the construction of the new glorious temple one day in the future and one of the interesting things about this this temple that's imagined at the end of Ezekiel, is that it has water flowing out of it. And that water brings the gifts of the temple to people outside. And that water sort of...
It's something about that water which allows what is in the temple to be brought outside of the temple too. And that maybe John had read this and thought, well... you know, I'm not so keen on this temple stuff because I'm not going to be able to teach in the temple because I'm a Nazarite, but I was supposed to be a priest. And so he's out in the wilderness and it's something to do with the water.
All of this stuff is fascinating and it all kind of comes together in some really interesting ways. So is it fair to say that the scholarly work is that the book's title is John of History, Baptizer of Faith and the popular level. work is Christmaker, A Life of John the Baptist. That's a good distinction, like sort of scholarly versus public. Is that how you consider those books? Yes, but I'd also say that if you want the deep scholarly...
investigation of how might baptism have been invented, right? And looking at the sources, looking at things in obscure languages, at least obscure from the perspective of English-speaking world scholars. then the big book is a place to look for those kinds of things. The other one is telling John's story, right? He's trying to narrate it as a biography.
I think a lot of people who read the biography will want at least some of the arguments for, okay, but what's the basis for that conclusion, right? And so I try to do both those things. I think in the past, I've tended to... try to squeeze all that into like one book and this was the first time where i tried keeping those things separate and i think it really did work well i mean i i'm i'm happier with
having kept them separate. I think otherwise I would have had a book that wasn't quite doing either what a general audience wanted or what scholars wanted. Yeah, well, certainly what happened with me is I was reading Christmaker and I switched to then diving into the bigger book.
And I think that if you're listening to this, like if you're interested in the sort of Gnostic element, if you're interested in all that kind of stuff, then the big book is the way to go. But if you just want to hear all of this put together in a narrative form that makes sense from beginning to end. I think Christmaker is what to do. But hey, why not buy them both? They're both linked down in the description. So check them out. James McGrath, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a good one.
Alex O'Connor, it's great talking with you. And I really hope this is not our last conversation because we're just scratching the surface of the things that apparently we're both really, really interested. I'm sure. I'm sure we'll speak again soon.