Within Reason - #95 James McGrath: John the Baptist, the Bible's Most Mysterious Man

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

James Frank McGrath is the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University. He is the author of two books on John the Baptist: "John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptiser", and "Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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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, like, so you know John the Baptist? I go, yeah, of course I know John the Baptist, yeah. Okay, who is he? Well, he's the guy that baptized Jesus. Okay, what does that mean?

Like, what is, what is baptism in that time, like before Christianity existed? What, like, what was he doing? Oh, well, he prepared the way, like, 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. So why was it that John the Baptist was like enough of interest to you that you decided to write about? Yeah. So 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, you know, scholarly monograph, and then we'll do a 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, right, where sometimes you'll have a detailed study that makes a deep dive into some particular question, but you never get addressing 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 people 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, you know, who was always there, this was your route to work, can you describe this individual? And suddenly it's like, well, shabbily dress, and various things. And, of course, a lot of people's stereotypical image of John is of this 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. I 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, 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 extra-canonical early Christian literature, including Gnosticism. And one really interesting Gnostic group that far too few people

have heard of Ghanes, right? You ask people, have you heard of Gnostics? Sure. Have you heard of the mandyans, 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 text in a 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 forward to this course, I took a look at the Mandayan 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 Mandaiian texts. 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 them and I 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 Nagomadi 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 much-studied text. When it comes to the study of the Mandaians, there are texts 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 texts that we sometimes refer to as the Mandayan 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, you know, so my other interests in, you know, 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. And 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 Nagamadi texts. And so Seth features, he's referred to as Shiteu, which is Seth L, right? So you have these interesting names that 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 Alexandria 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 Utra, who's also a very important one,

and that seems to be like Angelic Inosh. 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 celestial journeys and revelation and things like that but yeah so they don't they don't like as is also true of the the nomadhi text they don't like judaism 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. Yeah. That's in the big book, John of History, Baptist, of Faith. And I think that Mandayan 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, you know, 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, you know, the, or doesn't even, you know, so much make as organizes the material world and rules over it and is a, 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? Right. And if you're not part of that tradition, then why would you be so interested in these Jewish texts, right?

So, Nosticism, as listeners to this show will know, like, within Nosticism 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 Nosticism. And these Mandians, which comes from Manda, which is the Arabic word for knowledge, I think, or Nosis. least. Yeah, Aramaic, actually. What did I say? I think you said Arabic. Oh, I meant to say Aramaic. I thought you might have been Aramaic, but we mentioned Arabic much more often, and so it's a Yeah, yeah, the Aramaic name, a word for knowledge or noses being manda.

That's where you get these mandans, and there's two interesting things about them, one of which is that they're this ancient Gnostic sect that still exist, 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? I don't. And a lot of that has got to do with the way that bias seeps into media reporting.

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the origins of Gnosticism? Yes, and I think that the reason why we have a close connection with early Christianity and yet also some evidence that there were versions of this system of thought that were not Christian, right, but that have 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,

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 Ducetius, according to these sources, right?

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 Dostan sect, right? So the Dossetian 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, writing in Syriac, who actually quotes from a mandi in text and is interacting with them directly. who refers to them, uses a number of different terms and labels, but one of them is Dostians, right? And so it seems like a lot of these threads that connect John with Gnosticism suddenly start to, you know, appear in other places in ways that, you know, requires 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 this.

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 figure 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 bit of a sprinkle in there because 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, you know, by their fruit? you shall know them. So let's explore that. I think 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, right? 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, John the Dunker, or John the immerser. Like, 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.

And so 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 be something pretty like particularly English to get that kind of nickname, right? 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, right? Actually, can we just, can we

spell that out is that the Gospels quite clearly say that John is preaching a baptism of forgiveness of repentance for the forgiveness of sins like this isn't like something that we've put on to the to the topic this is said in the Gospels that John is is baptizing people for repentance and forgiveness of sins and then Jesus the 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, you know, the earliest Christian authors we have are not thinking of him in those terms yet, right? And 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

people assume, but he embodies this 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, right, was so that he might be revealed to Israel. So it's, there's this increasing discomfort, right? And it continues beyond the New Testament.

Yeah, it's like implied that Jesus is baptized by John in John's gospel, but he doesn't say so. And further to what you said earlier about John being a polemic, you know, saying like, oh, you know, John the Baptist is definitely not the Messiah. Here's another like subtle indication that John might have been acting polemically in 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, you know, sometimes the way he speaks in the Gospel of John. But just as we see a lot of that as, you know, 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, He must, 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 John is this idea that, you know, there's one coming after him who'll be stronger, whose sandals he's not even worthy done tie.

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, you know, I'm not worthy to do the laundry on his handkerchief or something. You know, like, you can see what the image might mean. You can kind of figure it up, but it's not an obvious thing to say, right? 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, like, it's possible. there are undertones that we're simply not picking up that the readership of John's gospel 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 baptized 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 guideer or leader or something, almost like he's joining his movement. And that's a pretty uncomfortable position to put, you know, the son of God into. do. 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. 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 Jesus, for John rather to have said something like that is when he got wind that Herod Antipus was paying attention to him and likely to try to eliminate him. If you get rid of me, one of my disciples, right, one who comes after me, right? 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, 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 force. 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, you know, for Jesus to say, among those born of women, there's none greater than John the Baptist, well, Jesus was bored of a woman. And so, Keith's close

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 as truly I tell you among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than

John the Baptist although it isn't other gospels are available as they say and there are different sort of versions of these stories but what we do know is that John the Baptist crops up in more than just a baptismal capacity. Like you, 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 Herod Antipas hears about Jesus, and there's rumors that there's this. 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 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, it's another one of those John the Baptist. Who is this John the Baptist guy? And what was he doing? You know, he must have been something pretty special. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have an indication, you know, in the Gospels that he had an impact. People were 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. And so he didn't focus on urban centers, but he sort of stood at the crossroads and had, you know, 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, right? The message about Jesus, message focused on Jesus, reaching Ephesus. And it says that, you know, Paul finds disciples there who've only been baptized with John's baptism. And so what sort of disciples are these? Presumly, 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, right? 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, and 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? 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 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, you know, 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, right, with the story of the dancing girl and all this kind of stuff.

And just as with the details of what proceeds Jesus execution, historically, we need to be, we need to, practice do skepticism towards this very vivid story that the gospel of Mark tells us. It's very unlikely that Herod Antipus 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, right? Which is interesting. It's one of the ways that we know that Mark was used by Matthew, right? because Matthew is taking a remark story but changes it to something more plausible and says Antipus was looking for an excuse to kill him, and yet he forgets his editing, you know, and

just is copying from the source and keeps the detail that Antipus 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 Pilot and that kind of stuff where it's like, yeah, right, pilot didn't want to execute this trouble maker, very out of character. Here too, I think that the effort to place the blame on, you know, on women, you know, rather than on Herod Antipus, 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 Josepha says that John was imprisoned and eventually executed at McCarras, which is in the desert. And yet the story in Mark has the request for John to be beheaded come when Herod Antibus is throwing a birthday party for himself, is 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 wouldn't have said, well, let's all go away to the desert for a bit, right? And so presumably this, if there's any truth to the, 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, you know, Antipus gives orders and word is sent, and somebody brings word to Macarres, 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 Macarres 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 Antipus hoping to accomplish by not simply eliminating this individual, right? Or what was it, you know, what was there any constraint, right?

And even though, even if we think that being sympathetic to John is not the likely explanation, right, what we get Mark offering, being, you know, 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, you know, before cutting off the head of it? because, you know, sometimes you cut off the head and, you know, the famous mythological image of the, you 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, you know, whether it's safe before proceeding with simply eliminating him. It's, it's very hard to say. But I think not enough people have asked, you know, what, what's the delay about? What does it tell us about how Antipus 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 Antipus 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 Antipus's divorce from his first wife and marriage to his brother's ex-wife, right, a 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 Antipus was defeated by the ruler of Arabia named Eritus, which included Eretus taking Maceris and conquering Maceris, people thought that this was God paying or God ensuring that Herod Antipus was paid back

for what he had done to John the Baptist. And so when we know that John was imprisoned at Maceris and that according to the Gospels, he criticized, Herod Antipus for divorcing the princess of Aribia, Eritus's daughter, and mistreating her in that way and making this other marriage. And that set the people of Herod Antipus's 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, you know, the political ramifications, the social ramifications of what rulers are doing, that this is, you know, there's a reason why you're not supposed to just divorce and remarry a whim and to, you know, treat, you know, treat your spouse in a fair way. And, you know, the injustice here is not just, you know, 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 of Macarious. Then, you know, his first wife's father, you know, kicks his butt and, you know, takes McCarris, and, yeah, of course God had a hand in this, and this was justice being done.

Coming back to that, you know, 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 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, right?

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 Antipus's attention to John's movement, movement. Like, he heard that, did you hear what John's, you know, one of John's emissaries

did in Jerusalem? But also, Jesus may have thought of himself as having some responsibility for John being imprisoned, right? What he did at John's, 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 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 you're getting these ideas from. And in your book, you do this. You take the time to demonstrate how the very act of baptism that John, was 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 is historically one of John's followers and this quote about them being willing to do anything. And I think it is a really

interesting theory. 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, 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, I mean, 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. And as an educator, I would say that, you know, I am most proud when my, you know, my students become teachers. You know, it's sort of a natural progression. And it's, you know, 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, you know, a student when they reach their full potential can be become like. their teacher. And wouldn't you have been thinking about himself and John, first and foremost, you know, even before thinking about his own students in relation to him, either way, it's,

it potentially will fit, that saying, I think, will fit rather poorly with the way a lot of people think about Jesus has this figure who, well, nope, no one could, you know, 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, as he does one day. And of course, this is complicated by this separate topic of Jesus' like 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, 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. forgive people 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, 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. And 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, this has always been true, but I don't think those of us who have 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 has changed. It's, you will sit on thrones rather than you'll 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. an interesting question is, does he at this point think of both himself and John as having a higher status, right? So when it comes to thinking about John as the Messiah, right, 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 messias, 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 Judaism, were no longer holding that, right?

So people like Herod the Great, even the Maccabees, right, are not of the line of David, 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, right, sort of in the Holy City, who are killed, you know, and their bodies lay on the streets and are exposed, but then, like, after three days, they're raised up. And did that reflect an expectation that sort of John and Jesus would be raised and vindicated?

Because the two witnesses are said to be the two lamp stands, 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 some two other 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. So, Jay Messingbird 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 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? And I'm not ready to go there. We'll see if I ever turn my attention to revelation, whether I changed 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, right, when supposedly Herod the Great was after them, right, which we find at the end of the infancy gospel of James, right? It's mostly about Mary and then about Jesus, and then suddenly it's only about John and his parents. And we also get in the Mandaiian tradition storytelling about John being whisked away to safety, right, 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 mandions, 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, these, these, these, mandions. 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-Mandion. So sorry if they're only watching, but we won't show it on screen, perhaps. But the most interesting thing, I think, because I haven't read the whole Mandayan book of John, although perhaps one day, I did scan over its depiction of the baptism of Jesus. Because the Mandarians, 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 Mandayan account of the baptism. Yeah, so in the Mandayan account, right, 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 Mandayan 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, you know, 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 though some of the things that Mark knew, but knew 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 wrong, Raider was distorting his 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 Mendiic, 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, right? And so taking it in its root meaning, John is asked to, Jesus asks John to baptize him and make him his disciple, right? Which is at best. implicit in the Christian version of it, but is explicit there. This is in the Mandaian Gospel of John, Jesus such is. In the Mendiayan Book of John, yeah. Yeah, Book of John. Yeah, and it's really quite hilarious in a lot of ways, right? The Mandaeans, they love puns, which I think, you know, we see that as something that John and Jesus seemed to have had in common.

And the Mendiayan tradition certainly has preserved that as an element of their storytelling. And so Jesus is supposedly this great, you know, sort of 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, you know, 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 it, you know, the Mandaean tradition wasn't entirely comfortable with John baptizing Jesus. Like, wouldn't John have seen that he was a troublemaker, right? That this was, he was bound to be, you know.

And so in other, elsewhere in the Mendean 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 like a, basically a letter from up above, right? So like in the Christian tradition, you get the voice from heaven. But in the Mandayan 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, you know, go ahead with it anyway. And then the spirit makes an appearance. But as with the God of the Jews, Adonai, Ruhah, the spirit is also a malevolent figure in this tradition. Right. And so, uh, 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. And it's that, you know, it's an Aramaic, but that's the, 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, right, the emergence of, you know, and the likelihood that this influences other strands within Jewish and Samaritan tradition, John seems to have had a vision for, you know, bringing together, as we might say today, a broad coalition, right, and people who were clearly... really skilled, intellectual, insightful individuals. And of course, when you have somebody who is 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 a 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, 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 Mandayan, or Mandayan 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 woman you loosened the sabbath that most Moses ordained in Jerusalem. You lie 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, you know. But there's this bizarre, like, 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, you know? Like, it's a really, really strange sort of set of circumstances. And like you say, that that loosened the Sabbath, which Moses ordained, given that the mandans 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 memoir of the apostles connected with the Jesus movement, and they mentioned John. But, of course, Mendiens don't think they depict John accurately, just like they don't think they depict Jesus accurately. And the tooting with the trumpet thing is also, because there's a saying attributed to Jesus about, you know, when you do good works, you know, don't sort of don't trumpet them and things like that. And so then there's also the cutting off of seed, which is, you know, 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, you know, bring some initiative. 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 Mandaiantax is like the disagreements

between John and Jesus or 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, and 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, like why his whole movement seemed to be surrounded by like immersion in water like where did that come from yeah and we don't have we don't have a story about sort of john discovering baptism one possibility is that you know if if he leaves home trying to figure out you know what he's supposed to do and you know immersing in water you know maybe catches a glimpse of himself and you know somehow it it resembles you know 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 know, 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? I'm not suggesting that this was a historical incident with the dialogue preserve, but in the Gospel of John, Jewish authorities come to John and ask him, you know, what's your authority to do this thing, right?

Why do you baptize if you're not the Christ or Elijah or the prophet, right? So in other words, to do this thing that was offering forgiveness by a different means requires authority, right? 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. It required repentance, but it's for the forgiveness of sins. And even in the early Christian preaching described in the Book of Acts, right, at which point it's barely a Jesus-focused movement, right? It's the Jesus branch of John's movement. They are still proclaiming, you know, repent to 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, and 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, like Samuel and Samson had been, and also the son of a priest. And priests were required to keep their hair trim, right, according to the Torah. And later texts like the book of Zechial 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, right? If I'm not going to be, 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, you know, 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, you know, even the king should be subject to. Hmm. Yeah, that's why I'm quite interested in this unworthy to untie his sandal because that that tells us a lot as to whether he's he's sort of saying that out of reverence to the king or whether he means it as a sort of authority placement and and that as you say probably requires more more exploration 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 when Elizabeth is pregnant she goes to meet Mary who she's a relative of and John like does a backflip in the 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 and the way that we know 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 the the gospel narrative there, but it's also in the Mandayan sources that his father was Zachariah the priest. So probably was known that that was actually the case. 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 First 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? Because 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, you know, 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. And we also have hints of the Moses story in Matthew's infancy story, which is just focused on Jesus. And yet,

you know, looking at both of these, historians tend to say they probably would have remembered what the names of Jesus' parents were and would have included those kinds of details. And So I think that things like the name Zechari and Elizabeth, right, which are also there in the Mandayan 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, right? Because people, you know, before they listen to anyone, they want to know who is this person, right?

And people's reputation depended on, you know, ancestry and things like that in this particular cultural context. And 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, not a typical one, right? The hair was not thought to give superhuman strength, right? This is sort of a mythical, magical kind of take on the Nazarite thing. But a lot of times people forget that Samuel, right, 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, somebody, you imagine somebody taking a vow and saying, you know, until this government cedes 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, I'm not going to touch booze again until, you know,

I have accomplished this goal that I've sent 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 Nassarai, used for basically somebody who is adept, skilled in the esoteric knowledge of the Mandaian tradition. And so whether that goes back to, you know, 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 Mandaiian 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, right, where it's like, he will never touch wine or strong drink, right? 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.

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, you know, if you grant me a son, I will, you know, dedicate him, right? And he will be dedicated as a Nazarite all his life. And implicit in John's dedication as a Nazarite 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... And that's, you know, that's, you know, it's interesting, you know, one of the other things that hasn't been, there hasn't been all that much research on, you know, 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 explanation. exploration than they've received. But it's amazing how much information we do have. 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. You know, he's, he's the man who is, 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 by in this, in this fantastical beheading and the head being placed on the silver platter and all 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 and all of this packed into

this one mysterious character who's right at the front of the Gospels. He's also the first character mentioned, right, the first human character mentioned in the Gospel of John. In John. 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 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, you know, 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 come, you know, was born into the Catholic tradition, but found my way into, and still within the Protestant tradition. And in the Protestant tradition, 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, you know, Bible believe in 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.

And some of the response to that, too, was, you know, 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, right, without either being diminished and without the... And nobody has actually managed to formulate a coherent view that meets all the requirements of the Creed of Calcedon. 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, right? 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? And that for Protestants at least, right, it's not the creeds they're 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, you know, 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 and john's uh like baptismal um 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 a 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, like, you know, people outside. And that water sort of, it's something about that water, which allows what is in the temple to be broad outside of the temple too. And that maybe John had 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. he's out in the wilderness and it's something to do with with the water and 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, 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, you know, if you want the deep scholarly, you know, investigation of, you know, 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, you know, 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? It's trying to narrate it as a biography. And I think a lot of people who read the book, biography will want at least some of the arguments for, okay, but what's the basis for that conclusion, right? And so I tried 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'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, then 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. with honor, 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 were both really,

really interesting. I'm sure. I'm sure we'll speak again soon.