Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist. Eerdmans, June 2024.
and
John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer. Eerdmans, October 2024.
At the outset of my first (and hopefully not last) full-year sabbatical, I set out to do something I had never done before. I planned to write two books about John the Baptist: a biography accessible to a general audience and a monograph detailing the distinctive methodology and contributions of my study. As the publication date of the former approaches, it seems appropriate to provide not only a preview of both but also a reflection on how (and why) I’ve undertaken this larger project.
As someone with a longstanding concern for public scholarship, I aim to write books that address both an academic as well as a broader audience. It has taken time for me to realize that when publishers ask about the audience for your book, it is not advantageous to respond “everyone.” Murphy’s Law applies to publishing: if you try to write for everyone, no one will like it, or at least no one will feel that you provided precisely what they were hoping for. Some will expect more detailed engagement with primary and secondary sources, others will wish there had been significantly less. To help maintain each book's distinctive nature, I created two separate folders and sets of working documents. In one of them, I could tell stories about visiting places associated with John in tradition and seek to narrate the big picture outline of John’s life. In the other I could dig into ancient sources in detail, engaging with the history of scholarship related to John, the Mandaeans, the origins of Gnosticism, the relationship between John and Jesus, and other such questions.
From the outset, I envisaged two clearly distinct books, one popular and the other more academic, one with fewer footnotes than the other. Presumably, the only readers who would read both belong to the subset of humankind that is much more interested in John the Baptist than is typical. Yet for those who share that level of interest, the double-pronged approach allowed me to do something that has also proven extremely valuable in the study of the historical Jesus and other ancient figures. It is not enough to offer a reconstruction of an individual’s life. One needs to engage our criteria for historical research and how to interpret available evidence. Nor is it enough to treat individual sayings and stories atomistically. There is a need for both, and to work on doing both simultaneously was extremely rewarding.
When it comes to the life of Jesus, there are so many details, the authenticity of each requiring evaluation and correlation with other authentic data. The number of possible configurations and resulting portraits shows no sign of nearing exhaustion. With respect to John the Baptist, on the other hand, what we have in Josephus and the New Testament is so minimal that even if it is all accepted as authentic, it does not provide nearly enough information to offer a narrative bibliography.[1]
I applied lessons drawn lessons from writing What Jesus Learned from Women (Cascade, 2021) to this new project. In What Jesus Learned from Women, I offered a glimpse of the stories featuring women connected with the Jesus movement, and I strove to offer fulsome accounts of individuals who received little attention from extant patriarchal authors. In the process of writing, I developed a method for writing history from laconic sources.
At that time, I also became increasingly convinced of the historical value of our knowledge about Jesus of Nazareth as a source of information about John, as well as the relatively neglected literature of the Mandaeans, the only ancient Gnostic group to survive to the present day, who consider themselves followers of John the Baptist but not of Jesus.[2] The fact that Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist’s is a fairly secure historical datum.[3] For the historian, the strenuous efforts of early Christian authors to explain how Jesus could somehow be greater than the one whom Jesus himself called the greatest human being who ever lived (Luke 7:28/Matt. 11:11) serve only to confirm that John’s preeminence was the prevailing assumption. Just as Plato as a student of Socrates provides us with information about his teacher (information that must obviously be critically evaluated and that may offer a significantly distorted portrait of the individual in question), so too we should expect to find significant continuity between John and Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew makes clearer than other early sources that, at least for that author, the continuity extended to turns of phrase (Matthew 3:2 and 4:17; 3:7 and 12:34; 23:33).[4]
If using Jesus as a source of knowledge about John seems obvious once it is proposed, proposing to use Mandaean sources will not elicit the same reaction. The uncritical use of Mandaean sources (most famously by Rudolf Bultmann, building on the work of Richard Reitzenstein) led to a backlash that often resulted from a lack of familiarity with the relevant source material.[5] In the English-speaking world, C. H. Dodd was probably the most influential voice in this regard.[6] The repetition of assertions that are simply incompatible with the evidence, such as that the Mandaeans may have borrowed John from Christians in the context of the early Islamic era, continue to be repeated. My monograph John of History, Baptist of Faith dedicates a complete chapter to making the case that the Mandaean sources are comparable in date and relevance in relation to John as the Nag Hammadi and Rabbinic corpora are to the study of the historical Jesus. In short, they are later and do not provide historical evidence as assumed a century ago. Ignoring them entirely, however, is something that can only be done in the case of Jesus because we have an unusually large collection of earlier sources about him. In the absence of those, we would have found slightly later sources such as these to be indispensable in our efforts to triangulate back to him.[7] In the case of John, that is precisely our situation.
Both books also make the case that, in light of important evidence from Mandaean sources, we can explain the origins of the esoteric religious traditions sometimes labeled as “gnostic” in the circles around John the Baptist.[8] Add to this John’s influence on the so-called “sign prophets” mentioned by Josephus (whose resemblance to Jesus is regularly noted but treated as coincidental, reflecting a shared spirit of the age rather than direct influence), and it becomes clear that we are dealing with a figure whose widespread and long-lasting impact on human history has not been been fully understood. Christmaker, as a biography, seeks to narrate that story. Any biographer has to connect the dots between historical data points, to deduce an individual's inner life and motives. John of History, Baptist of Faith seeks to make the case for using Jesus and Mandaean materials as sources about John. The monograph explores what we can determine about the meaning of John’s baptism, tracing both the influences on him and the innovative element that led to John being known in his time and forever after as “the Baptist.” In Christmaker I allow myself to explore details that I only mention briefly in the monograph, just as the monograph goes into details that a reader of a biography would not wish to see included.
When we see John appear on the historical scene, allegedly the son of a priest, we find him promoting a means of obtaining forgiveness distinct from the temple’s sacrifices. In other words, he has spearheaded a new religious movement that is seeking to undermine the institution with which his father was associated. I knew that there was a story worth telling there, but the failure of any ancient source to offer an explanation (other than in terms of John’s prophetic calling) made it seem initially that any story that could be told would have to be completely speculative. While I am eager to put my (at times overly active) imagination to good use in connecting the dots between snippets of historical information, for this particular type of academic project it is important to steer clear of anything that might be deemed pure speculation. Then, however, I noticed a neglected implication of the information in Luke’s Gospel. Luke depicts John as a lifelong Nazirite, like Samuel whose infancy story (1 Samuel 1-2) is echoed both in form and content in the early chapters of Luke. Nazirites must keep their hair unkempt (Numbers 6). Priests are prohibited from doing so (Lev. 10:6; 21:10; cf. Ezek. 44:20; b. Taanit 17a). If John’s mother did what many readers of scripture have done down the ages and connected her own experience with that of the characters in its stories, she might well have prayed for God to do for her what he had done for Hannah, and vowed to dedicate her child as Hannah did. This would have placed John in an impossible situation, caught between his mother’s vow dedicating him as a lifelong Nazirite and his father’s ancestral heritage and vocation. While infancy narratives are not ideal ground for seeking historical information, I argue that the fact John appeared as a Nazirite and derived from a priestly family would have been visible and well-known, unlike the many unverifiable and often implausible details one encounters in infancy narratives.
It turns out that snippets of information in our ancient sources sometimes provide more helpful and trustworthy clues than fully developed narratives. If we think of the most famous story about John, his beheading at the behest of a dancing girl whose identity (despite the tradition of naming her Salome) is far from clear, too many have been misled by the presence of this vivid and striking narrative to assume that it has a basis in history. In fact, this episode may be Mark’s effort to shift the blame for Jesus’ crucifixion onto Jewish authorities and away from Roman ones. Whether it is an ancient or a modern biographer offering a vivid narration, readers must evaluate the story they offer critically. The more detailed academic discussion found in John of History, Baptist of Faith does offer something that provides support for what is narrated in Christmaker even at this specific point, by reconstructing the infancy narrative about the Baptist that lies behind the Gospel of Luke, the Mandaean Book of John, the Protevangelium of James, and other ancient sources. A biography is not the place for the careful historical reconstruction of lost ancient source material known only through derivative works. Yet my conclusions reinforced my belief that the story I tell in the biography has a strong basis in evidence and scholarly argumentation. I feel that this two-book format for research into the life of John the Baptist suited the project and the dissemination of the results thereof better than any one volume would, and I am eagerly looking forward to finding out how they will be received by the general public and by academics.
[1] Knut Backhaus, “Echoes from the Wilderness: The Historical John the Baptist,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 2:1780, has suggested that, “a biography of John the Baptist will never be written.” Christmaker will obviously prove him to have been correct or incorrect, depending on how it is evaluated by academics.
[2] For more information aimed at a general audience unacquainted with the group see my article "This tiny minority of Iraqis follows an ancient Gnostic religion – and there’s a chance they could be your neighbors too" in The Conversation June 21st 2021.
[3] So e.g. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus Vol.2. New York: Doubleday, 1991, p.123; Walter Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2006, p.38; Joel Marcus, John the Baptist in History and Theology. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018, p.38.
[4] Thus, while I agree with and build on the work Joel Marcus and others have done to highlight the distinctively Christian slant in our earliest sources that mention John, I also seek to do justice to the fact that the earliest proto-Christians emerged out of John the Baptist’s movement. I also diverge from them in not concluding that John had been an Essene at some point. As is also true if one compares Jesus with the Pharisees, there are important commonalities but equally important differences.
[5] Rudolf Bultmann, “Die Bedeutung der neuerschlossenen mandäischen und manichäischen Quellen für das Verständnis des Johannesevangeliums,” ZNW 24 (1925) 100-146 as well as many subsequent publications.
[6] See his chapter on Mandaism (sic.) in The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. Cambridge University Press, 1953, pp.115-130.
[7] Joel Marcus, John the Baptist in History and Theology. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018 shows the ongoing influence of the earlier views mentioned here. He is to be commended for acknowledging their relevance even if he nonetheless echoes views such as that the Mandaean John may safely be assumed to be derivative of the Christian one (see pp.19-22). Larry W. Hurtado’s treatment of the subject in his 2014 article “Fashions, Fallacies and Future Prospects in New Testament Studies” (Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 36:4, 299-324) on the other hand simply shows that, when evaluated on the basis of close study of Mandaean sources and academic sources about them, the prevailing view among New Testament scholars is itself a fashion and fallacy that deserves to be challenged and overturned. On this see also my 2013 article in Bible and Interpretation, "Revisiting the Mandaeans and the New Testament."
[8] Ancient Christian authors attributed the origin of Gnosticism of Simon of Samaria (aka Simon Magus), and the Pseudo-Clementine literature connects Simon with John the Baptist. While caution is needed, M. David Litwa dismisses the value of the Pseudo-Clementine information out of hand in his recent book Simon of Samaria and the Simonians. He writes, “The Homilist… combined the portraits of Simon the magus and Simon the theologian to create Simon the educated philosopher. To fill out his portrait, he added a host of invented details…” (Litwa, M. David. Simon of Samaria and the Simonians: Contours of an Early Christian Movement, London: Bloomsbury, 2024, p.155). While it is true that, as Litwa writes, “The Homilist was not interested in constructing a faithful portrait of Simon or the Simonians” (p.165), we have reason to think that he was offering a polemically-motivated portrait of a figure whose followers were still a live concern and with whom he and his own group were in contact. Some of the positive information that is unlikely to have been invented may be of particular historical value, especially when correlated with other sources. The Pseudo-Clementine literature connects Simon with an individual named Dositheus, and the later Christian author Theodore bar Koni calls the Mandaeans “Dostheans” i.e. Dositheans. The Samaritan Chronicle of Abū l-Fatḥ in turn says that the Dustan (Dosithean) sect prayed standing in water, as did Jesus when baptized by John according to Luke 3:21. Those familiar with ancient Jewish literature will also recognize the affinity to the depiction in the Life of Adam and Eve of them repenting after their expulsion from the garden by standing in rivers. The threads connecting each of these may be slim, but they are woven together in a way that points to a historical origin of Gnosticism among the followers of John the Baptist.
James F. McGrath is the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University in Indianapolis. His PhD from the University of Durham, completed under the supervision of James D. G. Dunn, became the basis for his first book, John's Apologetic Christology, published by Cambridge University Press in the SNTS Monograph Series. His second book (which he calls a "prequel" to the first) surveys the broader context of monotheism and Christology in ancient Judaism and Christianity. Its title is The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context, published by University of Illinois Press. More recently he has published What Jesus Learned from Women (Cascade 2021) which explores the topic of the historical figure of Jesus and the influence the women mentioned in the Gospels had on him, and The A to Z of the New Testament (Eerdmans 2023), which seeks to let everyone who is interested learn in a readable and fun format the key things that one learns in any introductory New Testament course. In addition to his work on the New Testament and early Christianity, Dr. McGrath also researches the Mandaeans (the last surviving Gnostic group from the ancient world) and their literature. The critical edition, translation, and commentary on the Mandaean Book of John published by DeGruyter, which he produced together with Charles Haberl of Rutgers University, represents the first such academic edition of the complete work in English based on all known manuscripts. Being passionate about public scholarship and reaching a wider audience, he is also active on social media. His Patheos blog and his profiles on Facebook, X, and Reddit can be found by searching for @ReligionProf.