Christmaker!

It’s in the gospel, “He must increase while I must decrease.” He kind of passes the baton.

Yeah. And that’s made, you know, so explicit in the Gospel of John that scholars, you know, historically skeptical scholars are like, “Yeah, right.”

How convenient. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things, Dan?

Man, I’m ready to go. This is… I’m excited because we… we’ve got a guest today, and I think some minds are going to get blue. We’re going to blow some minds.

Yeah. And not in the Arrested Development sense.

Right.

But in something hopefully a little more productive, a little more constructive. Our guest today is a longtime friend of mine, James F. McGrath. Welcome to the show, James.

Thanks so much. So good to be here on DND, D over D. That’s right.

And James is professor of New Testament at Butler University in lovely Indiana. I don’t know that I’ve ever… what city in Indiana?

Indianapolis.

It is Indianapolis. Okay. Right there in Indiana itself. All right.

Well, James, I want you to know that our… I was talking to Dan about you, and at one point he said a sentence that I heard as “He’s a butler.” And I was like, “He’s got a side job as a butler?” No, no, no. Okay, fine. He’s at Butler. I get it.

All right.

Yeah. Well, when I was on sabbatical working on the book that we’re going to be talking about today, you know, I was in the UK for part of it and hadn’t heard of Butler University. And I was thinking they were going to think, you know, butler training school or something.

I like it. I like it. It’s good to have a career you can fall back on.

There you go.

The Indianapolis School of Butlery or Butlerage or whatever it’s called. And when I was… I hung out with you for a day in Oxford last October at lovely Magdalen College, overlooking to some degree the garden there, which I was actually… I was there back in October with my family. We decided to go hit up the… the garden since I had such a lovely time last time. So thank you for introducing that to me.

Oh, no, thanks for stopping by and hanging out. It was… yeah, that’s always fun. But, yeah, this was… I basically took a year and did very little else other than think about John the Baptist and write down the results of that.

So I think that’s a great intro into what we are going to be talking about. The title of your book, which I think is a great title, is Christmaker, which is fantastic. And what we’re talking about is John the Baptist, who I thought I might know something about, but it turns out I knew almost nothing. I mean, and you’ve mentioned this sort of in the intro to the book, you talk about how when people… people just sort of assume that they know what, you know, if they’ve read the New Testament, they kind of… they feel like they got a sense of John the Baptist. You know, if you go to galleries around the world, you see paintings of a guy with crazy hair and some sort of caveman loincloth made out of camel, and… and that’s… and then you’re like, and, you know, he got a guy wet. And that’s kind of what you know about John the Baptist.

And I was surprised to learn that there is a lot more that we… that to know about this figure. And I’m so… I’m excited to get into it with you. And maybe we should start with just who was this guy? Like, where… I… we know that he was the same timeframe as Jesus, but… but he was… he wasn’t just… he wasn’t a disciple of Jesus. It was kind of the other way around.

Yeah. And that’s one of those things that oftentimes is the first… it’s like, “Wait, Jesus was someone else’s disciple?” No, can’t be. And a lot of people, you know, respond, you know, quite forcefully in a negative way to that idea even being floated. But on the one hand, we have, you know, Jesus being baptized by John, which seems to indicate, at the very least, it indicates Jesus’ acceptance of John, his teaching, his movement, right, in some way, shape or form. Jesus also, I mean, he praises John a way he doesn’t praise anyone else. He connects his own authority and activity with John in a way that, you know, John keeps coming up. It’s like, you know, John, the Son of Man… there’s, you know, you want to know by what authority I do these things.

And through a lot of this book, one of the ways that you’re kind of extracting a lot more data out of the New Testament than many people might assume at first glance is available is you’re, you’re trying to put together explanations for why we’re seeing the stories being told the way that we are seeing them being told. And one interesting thing about Jesus’s baptism is it seems to present this as some kind of chance encounter, like in the, in Mark and in the other presentations, apart from the nativity story that has Jesus and, and John linked from before birth. Jesus just walking around and just like, “Hey, you’re doing this, right? Let’s, let’s, let’s go ahead and get this taken care of.” What reason do you suppose the New Testament authors had for kind of sloughing off, getting rid of some of this background and telling the story in the sparse way that they tell the story?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think some of it is just the way ancient people tell stories, right? Unless they are doing a big epic, you know, poetic telling of something where you go into lots of detail. And then even then there’s, there’s a lot of repetition, but you’re still, you know, as a modern person might feel, it’s still sparse on some of the details and description. But it seems to have been common knowledge in these circles that the start of the good news, the start of the story, is with John. I mean, time and again that’s, you know, what we get, right? Mark goes there, you know, as the beginning of the good news is John. In the Gospel of John , John’s the first human being to appear even before Jesus. Right? If we’ve got the timing of, you know, where, where they’re appearing on the scene in that prologue, right? And then in Acts, when it talks about, you know, the beginning of all of this, right. I mean, Luke had started with, “I’m going to tell you the story about all these important things that happened,” and then starts with John’s parents. But then in Acts, you have, you know, we’re going to pick somebody to replace Judas.

And so we’ll go back to the very beginning, and that’s not Jesus, it’s John. And so I think everybody simply knew this to some extent. And so there’s, there’s definitely some effort to emphasize Jesus’ relative importance to John. Jesus kind of made that hard for the movement as it was developing, right. You couldn’t shift focus away from John entirely because Jesus spoke so highly of John. I think some of John’s followers may have found it easier to reject Jesus than vice versa.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, because it seems like there—there was a—there was a big John movement before Jesus even came into the picture. Can you talk a little bit about what that might have been, what it probably looked like?

Yeah. And I think some of—some of how we deduce that is putting together what we know about ancient movements in general and what we know about the Jesus movement upon which John was actually a major influence, and connect those things with the things that we’re explicitly told. And so one, I think, mistaken notion that people have is that John in the wilderness was something like a hermit living out in the middle of nowhere. And I mean, even if that had been the case, given how many people apparently went to, you know, hear him wherever he was, he must have had apostles, right? He must have had people that he could send out. Right? Wasn’t like, you know, if you’re doing a, you know, some cool stuff in the wilderness of YouTube, but, you know, you’re worried that nobody’s going—you know, nobody’s going to just find you there, right, with all this, you know, barren landscape that’s surrounding you. And so, you know, you got to get into, you know, you got to send apostles out. You got to get something on TikTok to, you know, where people really are or whatever it is that gets people to come. And so we don’t know for sure whether John, you know, how much John actually went into, let’s say, cities and towns and talked there.

But at the very least, he had either—he had, you know—I mean, you’d either have to say—I mean, the only option for a historian is to say that he sent people out to invite people. Right. Otherwise you’d have to have, you know, angelic messengers or booming voices from the sky or something telling people where to go.

No, it seems like, I mean, you talk a little bit in the book about the fact that John didn’t invent religiously dunking people in water, but he may have invented this concept of baptism. Talk about what baptism is and why it’s associated with him and that sort of thing.

Yeah, so baptism is something that’s so familiar to Christians. I think that it’s like, I don’t think I ever, before I started working on this book project, ever stopped to ask, so how on earth does somebody ever come up with the idea for this? Yeah, you’re going to dunk people in water and that’s going to be forgiveness. And you look at what Christian baptism is supposed to symbolize, right, dying and rising with Christ. Well, that’s—and so you’re united with Christ. You know, it’s not an obvious symbolism. Right. That’s been added on as an additional layer. And we get the sense from our sources that, you know, Christian baptism is sort of taking John’s baptism and giving it a new spin and saying, you know, if you want to connect with the Holy Spirit, you really need this. Right. But in the process, we hear about people who were baptized only with John’s baptism. Right. And the fact that this had spread and spread quite widely before anything that is starting to become Christianity appears on the scene.

And so John becomes nicknamed the Baptist. And that could mean, you know, or the Dipper, the Dunker, the immerser, whatever we might want to call him. And that can be one of two things. Either you have a group like the Baptists, right. We have that today. And so if you have somebody who is a part of that group and hanging out among Catholics, they might call him John the Baptist or something like that. Right. The other is that he is this person who really was the innovator, right, and the spearhead and the driving force of this new movement. And I’m inclined to think that the latter makes better sense of the evidence, because we get not just John the Baptist and reference to, you know, daily baptizers and the Baptist movement, things like that, but also reference to John’s baptism.

Right.

And so it seems to be this thing that, like, people are aware that he’s doing something different.

Yeah.

And he’s doing this in an era when, you know, on the one hand, immersing in water is a familiar practice. Right. More so than perhaps ever before. But for that very reason, I think not only does that tell us that John must have been doing something different, right, and something that stood out in this context enough for him to get the nickname, but also that it can’t have been the very sort of scaled-down immersion that you’d get in, let’s say, some certain, like, Protestant evangelical churches where it’s like, you know, you dunk, you know, might get asked a question and then, you know, you get out of the water and it’s over and, you know, get to the potluck or whatever else is next, depending on which tradition it’s in the context of. There must have been, you know, some ritual. Right. There must have been formulaic phrases. There must have been things that would persuade people that this is something meaningful and help them to have some sort of experience in the context of this ritual.

Right?

Now, when I’ve been asked about baptism in the past, what I think the conventional wisdom, at least as I have perceived it, and what I’ve shared with groups and, you know, when we’re in Israel and Palestine and we come across a mikveh, the idea, as far as I had always understood it, was that this was just kind of an incremental elaboration on a mikveh, the kind of thing you found at Qumran among the people who were responsible for transcribing the Dead Sea Scrolls. But in the book, you talk about this as something that’s a pretty radical departure from the mikveh. Can you talk a little bit about the purposes of the mikveh and the relationship to what John seems to be doing with the baptism?

Yeah. So a mikveh, you know, an immersion pool, you know, purification bath, however one wants to put it. For people who may not be familiar with them, I’ll encourage them to Google it. Right. M-I-K-V-E-H, you know, will get you to some pictures and you can see one if you’ve never, because a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words.

If somebody had given birth, they could not go into the temple for a certain amount of time. And I like that example particularly because it helps people understand that you’re impure, ritually impure, and can’t go into the sacred space after giving birth. But giving birth is a blessing. Right. It’s not that you did something wrong. Right. So impurity and sin are sometimes, you know, one is used as a symbol of the other, but they’re not the same thing.

That’s interesting. Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.

Yeah. And so a mikveh was used because in this time period, people had taken the references to washing. Right. They’ll wash themselves and taken it as full immersion. Right. And it’s not something that’s explicit in most texts that you must immerse, but that became the way of doing things. And anyone who enjoys a nice bath in hot weather will appreciate that. This probably was. You could see why this would catch on. But for, you know, we’re not told that John or Jesus or anyone else connected with his movement immersed in a mikveh or immersion pool to practice baptism. Right. It seems to consistently be in rivers and sources of flowing water, which in Aramaic was living water. And so it seems as though John may have chosen other venues, as it were. Right. Other modalities of immersion, both because it gave a different experience, but also it symbolically and even visually, you know, locationally distinguished what he was doing from what others were doing.

So what was he doing? What? What? Like you. You sort of mentioned that Christianity has glommed onto this as a. As a way of you. I mean, you mentioned sin, forgiveness or wiping away of. Of sin. Is that a. A John innovation or where did that come from?

Yeah. So there, there are some great texts that might inspire one to do something like this, or at the very least one could latch onto and say, look, this justifies it. Right. Doing that with biblical texts is not a new practice. Right. I’m sure. I know you address it quite often. Some of the things that people do with texts, some of which are. It’s like. But it was interesting. One of our fellow bloggers just blogged about Isaiah chapter one today. And I was like, yeah, good, good. Draw attention to that text before my book comes out, because that seems like one of those places where you could get, you know, away with your sacrifices. Right. You know, and all the noise of your worship and all this stuff is displeasing to me. Practice justice and then wash yourselves clean.

You know, wash you, make you clean.

Yeah. And so somebody who, you know, I think that you need somebody who’s primed to look for an alternative to the sacrificial system. And I think I’ve deduced some things about why John might fit that, you know, fit that description. But if you’re.

If you’re willing to go into that. I wanted to talk about this a little bit from Luke. We get a little bit about John’s family and John’s birth, and you talk a little bit about how there seems to be, based on what John gets from his father and what John gets from his mother, tension in his. The path that he has laid before him for his life, which has a lot to do with this idea of where we’re not a part of the temple superstructure and everything that. That goes on there, which might be responsible for. For John’s kind of use of alternative means of. Of seeking forgiveness for sins. Can you talk a little bit about what you see as that tension that. That John is born into?

Yeah, absolutely. And I was hoping that would come up, not least because there’s this time lag between this general audience biography, which I think is well informed academically, but is written hopefully accessibly for anyone to read it. But then there’s going to be in October a big, thick academic monograph that’s going to dig into some of the details that scholars care about. And because there’s that lag, I’m very curious what a fellow academic will make of some of my deductive reasoning and inferences and things.

Yeah. Briefly, I was gonna say I was reading part of this and I was like, there seem to be some methodological assumptions going on here, but I. It wasn’t until later that I saw that you were going to include your defense of those assumptions in the bigger book. So I look forward to that bigger book, but I’m sorry, I interrupted.

No, no, no. It’s. I’ve given fellow academics just enough to say, what. What is he doing?

Yeah.

But hopefully to make it interesting enough that they’ll. They’ll come back and say circle round and read the bigger book. But. Yeah, so the starting point for some of the deduction that I, you know, sort of the deductive process I went through in working on this book was realizing that not only do we not see John following in his father’s footsteps and practicing as a priest, that wouldn’t necessarily tell us a lot because priests didn’t get to serve in the temple all that regularly. You know, it was a bit hit or miss. You know, you’re. You’re called on duty, but then the lot may or may not be chosen, things like that. So that didn’t necessarily tell us much. But if he’s proclaiming an alternative mode for obtaining forgiveness and connecting with God and doing these things, expressing one’s repentance, then that’s not just going into a different line of work than your father. That’s setting up a competing business, basically, and one that undercuts the pricing strategy of your father’s business, which, you know, because immersing in water takes, you know, your time and effort, but doesn’t.

Doesn’t cost you what sacrifice would cost you. And travel to the temple.

It’s a low overhead gig. Yeah, yeah.

And so my immediate reaction once I realized, oh, you know, whoa, this, I was like, there’s gotta be a really interesting family backstory to this. Right. And I wish I could. I wish I knew what it was. And do I speculate? No, I better not. It’s going to be too. But as I was pulling on all these threads and looking closely at some of the details about John, started paying attention to the fact that he’s depicted as being a Nazirite. Right. Someone who’s committed as very few other people that we know of were to be bound by this vow. Right. That people often took for a short period of time, but to be bound by this vow for life. Right. And so we have Samuel and Samson, right. In the Jewish scriptures, who are. They will never cut their hair and will never partake of wine or strong drink, grape products, and are dedicated to God in this way. And we get allusion to that in Luke’s infancy story.

And first reaction as a scholar working with historical critical methods is, yeah, but we can’t, we can’t base anything on that, can we? But of course, you know, even when you have these very symbolic, highly, you know, you know, fictionalized and scripturalized narratives that you get in infancy stories, in ancient biography and other literature, you still have incorporated those things that people knew about the individual. Right? Names of parents, for instance, can find their way in there. And you don’t, you don’t invent new names if you happen to know the names of somebody’s parent. Right?

Right.

And so John would have been visible. He may not have looked as much like Hagrid as people tend to assume, but he would have. The hair might be about right.

You know, still very tall, though. Probably seven, eight feet tall.

Well, I like to think so because, you know, he’s. He’s earned my respect as a part of this thing. And I tend to look up to people who have exceeded me in stature and as a smaller individual. But he’s depicted as being committed to this. And then I came across the fact that priests are required to keep their hair tidy and trim. Right. It’s there in the scriptures. And the wording that’s used in Hebrew is actually. It’s basically the, the exact opposite of what’s required of the Nazirite. Right. So the Nazirite keeps their hair this way, and the priest is prohibited from keeping their hair that way. Right. And so suddenly you have this tension. Right. John is the son of a priest, but you have this Nazirite vow. And so that got me thinking that one possible explanation for this. First of all, I’m pretty sure this never came up for anyone. Right. How often do you have somebody who’s a priest?

And then there’s lifelong commitment to. But you could very easily imagine, as people do today, John’s mother, if she was, you know, had not managed to have a child, reading these stories about the patriarchs and saying, yeah, God, if you’ll do for me what you did for Hannah, then I’ll do with my child what, you know, what you did.

And very similar for Manoah and his wife in Judges 13 . They are older and childless, and then the angel visits them and blesses them.

Yeah. And so whether you want to, you know, say it was Elizabeth’s sort of motivated action, you know, if people who are inclined to work angels into the story as well can always, you know, do that. But there’s no need sort of for a historian to do that. But if you have someone who is dedicated in this way, then they’re going to find themselves torn between their father’s vocation. Right. And which is their own. Not just heritage, but imperative. Right. If you are the son of a priest, you know, you. You become a priest.

Well, it’s an incredible privilege, too.

Yeah, yeah. And so. And presumably so is being a Nazirite.

Right.

You know, like Samuel or Samson, you know, but John would have found himself not just torn between mother and father, but I think it might have also led him to some insights about Scripture. Because you have a commandment that seems perfectly straightforward. Honor your father and mother. What do you do when father and mother are pulling you in different directions? And you might assume, okay, patriarchal context, we’ll go with that. But it’s not spelled out in that way.

And you think in this time period, the Hasmonean kingdom is getting a lot of flack, particularly as we get into the first century CE and we see this at Qumran. We see this in places where the authority of the high priesthood that is now being assigned by Rome is in doubt, it’s being rejected. Do you think that plays a role perhaps in John’s decision?

Yes. And certainly John has. There’s a long history of associating John with the Essenes. It goes back. It’s interesting. One of the things that I noticed working on this project is that it goes back before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah.

The Essenes are mentioned by Josephus.

Yeah. And there was enough hint of some bathing and stuff that was like people had been proposing that. And so I think that primed some people to then, you know, make those connections.

Yeah, which is why you said it in the book. I was thinking of it when you introduced it. I was like giggling to myself about the video they show you at the visitor center at Qumran where they’re, they’re kind of hinting at, oh, that guy John, who went off and did his own thing, might have been a member of the Qumran community.

Yeah. And so there were, you know, it was not just the Essenes that were critical of the temple and of the priesthood and the Essenes. One thing that I think was different between John and the Essenes is that the Essenes, you were eager to get back there. Right. They just needed the right priests to be in place doing things the right way. And you know, it’s terrible when, you know, you see something being managed a certain way and you know, the best way for that to be done and nobody will just take, you know, put you in charge of it, you know. But John seems to have had a different sort of angle and seems to have been offering something that bypassed the temple in a way that, you know, we don’t get, you know, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so there’s probably, there definitely was conversation possible. And to that extent, you know, John’s alternative to temple sacrifice probably resonated with a wider cultural current.

I think one of the things that I’m going to jump a little bit because one of the things that I found most that was a revelation for me. I’m not, look, I’m not a well studied person in this, so I, I was not aware. And I think a lot of our listeners might be shocked to learn that not only did John have his own sort of separate ministry or, or, you know, I don’t know what to call it, but his own, his own followers and his own movement back in Jesus’s time. They still exist. Like there’s still there are there, there is, there is a religious movement that is, that still follows John the Baptist and does not follow Jesus.

And I think you, James, you’re one of very few scholars, I think, who specialize, specializes in the study of this group, which is also the only remaining Gnostic community that survives from antiquity. So a lot of people don’t know much about the Mandaeans. Can you talk a little bit about that and their relationship to John the Baptist?

Always happy to talk about the Mandaeans.

That’s what I thought.

If somebody were traveling the world and going to the most remote places they could and happened across a Gnostic group that were immersing in, they’re speaking or using for the scriptures a dialect of Aramaic and they mention all these biblical figures and they consider themselves followers of John but don’t like Jesus and think Jesus was a follower of John’s who went off the rails. I mean this would be making headlines, right? I mean you think about, you know, the Nag Hammadi discoveries, right? And so it’s, it’s just bizarre to me that the Mandaeans are not better known. And of course there was fascination with them. And I think the reason why we don’t see the same level of familiarity today is precisely because they, they had their heyday a while back in terms of awareness in the English speaking world to think of, you know, that in particular, and it was the translation of one of their, you know, I mean, their most sacred text into Latin that sort of sparked off the, the theosophical movement and some of the modern esotericism, which is fascinating.

Oh really?

Well, yeah.

So like at the end of the 19th century, somewhere around there or when.

Was this going back? Earlier than that. So it was 18th. I mean, I want to say 18th century we have. Is it Norberg’s translation of the, what do you call it? Liber Adami I think was the title he gave it, you know, Book of Adam. And so, you know, the, the sort of 19th century theosophical movements, you know, were, were drawing on that and make reference to it.

Okay.

And so then you had early 20th century, the, you know, scholars like, you know, Richard Reitzenstein in Germany doing sort of the history of religion stuff and then Bultmann drawing on that and bring it into New Testament, but plugging things in very uncritically. You know, I’m going to have a more extensive treatment of this in the Big Book coming in October. But you know, Bultmann, you know, would find like, you know, been looking at one verse and see, you know, two redactional hands, you know, work, you know, and do this whole thing and then would quote this passage from a Mandaean text and plug it as background. And first of all, the Mandaean texts are later and so they need to be used much more cautiously. But also there’s none of that close redactional analysis to say. So is all of this one piece or anything? And I’m not saying that it’s. I think he had an oversensitive redactional radar, as it were. But seeing all this editorial work and things like that in these texts and then plugging in something else from later as background without asking the same kinds of questions is problematic.

And so then there’s this backlash against it and they’ve been ignored. And so. Yeah, so let me. Having said some of that stuff that, you know, that’s the stuff Dan will find interesting now. The stuff Dan will find interesting. This is a group that is Gnostic, which means that they think that the creator God in Genesis is not a very nice entity. Right. This is not the ultimate source of all things, you know, not even the ultimate source of all things good and evil. This is a lower entity that sort of takes this material world that comes about as a result of, you know, cosmic mishap essentially, and rules over it and orders it in a way that, you know, is not great because it doesn’t have. That doesn’t have great stuff to work with. Right, yeah, we can.

Based on a Middle Platonic notion that the spiritual is divine, whereas the fleshly, the corporeal is corrupt and wicked.

Yeah, it certainly at least connects with that. And you know, they found the Gnostics that were in sort of the Greek speaking world and in, you know, areas where you could interact with Greek philosophy, definitely were latching onto that and were making common cause and influencing as well as being influenced by that. But we also get it, you know, in Mesopotamia. Right. And you get it, you know, interacting there, I think, much more, much less with Greek philosophy and much more with Zoroastrianism.

Okay.

And so you do get some hints of, of a sort of a there being dark waters. Right. As well as the waters of the light world. And you know, then you get the reflection going on and then that kind of gets corrupted in that way. And so the possibility that there’s some sort of more permanent dualism of some sort, you know, is at least explored. And for anyone who’s dived into the Gnostic texts that we’ve had, you know, published, you know, Elaine Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels or things like that will know that they were not very concerned about consistency in their, you know, in their cosmology and things like that.

The place where goodness sort of thrives, as it were, where.

Where everybody knows your name. Yeah. Just out of. Out of curiosity, you mentioned that the Mandaean texts are later. Do we have a good idea of the time period? Is it the second century? Are we into the third and fourth century?

Yeah. So I. I don’t think anything could safely be traced back before the third century. We do have. You know, one thing that has often caused some misunderstanding is that, you know, some of them, at the very least, have been interpolated and redacted in, like, the Islamic era and things like that. But what’s interesting is that oftentimes we can see. Yeah, scholars. Scholars like us will immediately recognize that where it’s like talking about, you know, Judaism and the Torah and things like that, and they’ll say, and the Arabs got circumcision from the. And then it veers off this thing and it’s.

Yeah.

And veers off onto a subject that is not a focus anywhere else in this text or things like that.

Well, I can imagine without a gigantic institution and the pressures of such an institution, there’s more liberty with the way these texts are transmitted.

Yeah. So in a sense, the ritual is. Is the. The canon. Right. The ritual is the thing that they try to safeguard. And, you know, it’s like it’s inerrant and it can’t be changed.

Okay.

The texts, you know, were not treated in the same way except in as much as the texts helped pass along the. The prayers and elements of the ritual.

What are. What are some of the earliest manuscripts of Mandaean texts?

So, I mean, some of, you know, our. Our complete manuscripts tend to be, you know, just a couple of hundred years old, you know, are not all that old. There’s a big collection at the Bodleian Library. That’s why I was in Oxford when you saw me there. On the other hand, we have some of the same formulas and prayers and things incorporated into things like incantation bowls that are found in, you know, the Mandaeans’ historic context in Mesopotamia, where, you know, same light world being. Same kinds of formulas are being mentioned in there. And, you know, like in the 4th or 5th century, we have, I want to say, in the. I’m trying to remember what century Theodore bar Konai is, but he, he quotes from Mandaean sources and we have even things like, you know, Manichaean sources that seem to be quoting from and drawing on Mandaean sources.

Interesting.

Some. Some very early ones. And so triangulating back and figuring out when this religion takes something like the form in which we now find it is, is challenging.

Yeah, yeah.

I certainly don’t want to say, let anyone get the wrong, you know, impression that John was a Gnostic. Right. Any more than I want to say that we have the Nag Hammadi texts. And so Jesus was a Gnostic in the sense that those later texts develop. But I think that John provides an important clue to the emergence of this thing that becomes a really powerful worldwide religious trend and movement in its own right. You know, when you consider Gnosticism, its rebirth in modern esotericism, the fact that there are Christians around the world who nonetheless, you know, really like the Gospel of Thomas and the, you know, various other texts, you know, these are. This is a movement that’s continuing to, to make an impact and not just on the Mandaeans, who are a fairly small number.

Yeah. Being Gnostic is kind of like being Antifa. Like you don’t get a membership card. It’s. It’s a very kind of loose collection of. There’s a large spectrum of relationship to the ideologies of that.

I thought you’re going to say it’s just, you know, it’s a label that’s only put on you by the people who disagree with you. Right.

And that’s, and that’s another way to, to think of it. But I. Just. One more question before we get to Dan’s question. I. It strikes me that you have in the Mandaeans, the convergence of at least three different traditions. You have something to do with, with John the Baptist, you have something to do with Gnosticism, and you have something to do with Zoroastrianism. And it sounds like they kind of took root in Mesopotamia. Is there. And, and again, a lot of this is speculative. We can’t really unpack everything going back in time. But is there a sense for, for any kind of order that this happened? Or they’re like John the Baptist followers moved to Mesopotamia to escape from the, the Jesus movement and, and met up with Zoroastrians there? Or is it Gnostics who were like, man, this Jesus guy’s a little weird. Let’s, let’s pick up this John the Baptist guy. Is there a sense for that, or is it just kind of all these things are all a part of this tradition and, And.

And it’s fungible, basically, at this point.

Yeah, it’s challenging to answer those questions, but you’ll find, particularly among New Testament scholars who’ve never actually looked at these texts, there are some assumptions about answers to that. You’ll hear things like that they might have borrowed John in order to fly under the radar of Islamic authorities or something like that. And that doesn’t fit at all, not least because they say fairly negative things about Islam and Muhammad and about Jesus, who’s also a prophet in Islam. And so, you know, unless you want to say they did that, they did this clever thing to fly under the radar of Islamic authorities, but didn’t realize that insulting other prophets would undermine them, botched it completely. So the Mandaean texts mention Jerusalem more than. I mean, they have this inordinate attention to Jerusalem and its surroundings, which even I did a comparison, sort of. The Babylonian Talmud is much longer as a corpus than the Mandaean text, but in terms of, you know, sort of like per page, kind of.

How often do we get references, you know, and this is a tradition that considered itself to be essentially an expatriate community. Right. With its roots in, you know, in Judah and Judaism and Jerusalem. And it’s more frequent. Right. And they blame the destruction of Jerusalem on, you know, the persecution of essentially, Mandaeans. Right. You know, disciples. And so I think that it’s hard to account for that if this is a group that comes about in Mesopotamia. Right. I think that they need to have some sort of historic connection, and then there needs to be some movement. And I think the best way to make sense of all the different pieces of, you know, and signs of influence is to suggest that this was a Jewish esoteric movement or an Israelite esoteric movement, because I think it had some broader traditions beyond what was defined as, or understood as Judaism in that time. And that makes its way to Mesopotamia and continues to exist within the framework of the local community as an esoteric, secretive tradition that has its own views and beliefs and some mystical practices.

And so we get some things that are, at the very least, dialogue, but might even be influence of some of these, you know, some of the Gnostic forms of mysticism on, you know, more mainstream Jewish mysticism.

Right.

You look at some of the. Even some of the diagramming of light world beings and the emanations and things, and it looks like the Sefirot you know, from the, from, you know, Merkabah, mysticism and Kabbalah. Kabbalah. And so you get these intersections. And so I think they were an esoteric tradition still within that context until at some point, you know, their, their beliefs come to light or somehow, you know, people become aware of them. Some, some, someone with authority in the synagogue starts, you know, doesn’t like what’s going on, gets wind of it or something, and you get some sort of separation. And so that was one. One of the first things that I, you know, as a foray into this area was bringing my work on the Gospel of John , where you have this sense that you have a community that has this, you know, sort of. It’s been described as being rather anti-Jewish and yet it’s also Jewish. Right. And so it’s. And so that this process of being sort of driven out from a community that one was a part of might have played a similar role and had there may have been a similar dynamic in the case of the Mandaeans, probably within a Mesopotamian context, although as with Christianity, not all necessarily in the same, in the same manner and in the same way everywhere in the world.

Yeah.

I was curious, you know, you mentioned the Mandaean literature and I’m curious how scholars, how sort of scholars, because it seems like that is, that. That’s sort of probably there’s a lot of information there about John the Baptist. How much do you think you can trust that as being, as being informative about this figure? And how much do you think is it’s just sort of legend that they’ve created about, about this man?

Yeah, and there’s, I think one could assume even before going into it, based on experience with other sacred texts and traditions, that there’s going to be, there’s going to be some legend and there’s also the possibility that there may be some useful historical information. And the question is, is there enough of the latter to justify having your attention if you’re interested in historical stuff, but then how to get at it? Right.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, in the bigger book that’s coming later, that’s one of those methodological things that Dan, when he was reading, probably wished was already available. I discuss, you know, I think that Mandaean texts, you know, plugging them in as background, uncritically trusting them or ignoring them are, you know, the two extremes, both of which are problematic and that we should use them the way we use rabbinic tradition. If we’re interested in the first century, later rabbinic sources, despite, you know, some of the scholarship of past centuries, is not the religion of Jesus’ time, right? But it’s influenced by the religion of Jesus’ time. And sometimes there are things embedded in there that help us to understand things that were going on in the first century, right? Because they are outgrowths from that along a different avenue. Right. In the same way, you know, we’re spoiled if we work on the historical Jesus. We’ve got these early sources. That’s often not the case.

If we didn’t have the Gospels, and I actually have this thought experiment in the, in the bigger book, and all we had was the Nag Hammadi stuff, we’d actually be able to get back to. Well, we might struggle to get back to, but we’d have maybe even more than we realized from the historical Jesus. Because there’s this stuff in the Gospel of Thomas that, because we have the Synoptic Gospels, we know some of these are versions of sayings that probably were historical. And so one thing that hasn’t been done yet, and I’m eager to see some other people work on this besides me and a very, very small number of other people who have an interest in it is, you know, there, there’s teaching attributed to John in Mandaean sources. We can’t trust it that this, this is like a verbatim record or even a, you know, a close approximation. But there may be things embedded in it. Right. Certainly some of the same ideas, you know, emphases on social and economic justice and things like that come across. And so there’s reason to at least ask the question because we don’t have great first century, you know, we don’t have the equivalent of first century, multiple first century gospels about John the Baptist.

And so in that circumstance, I think we should take these things and, you know, critically weigh what they tell us. And as one of the, one of the first people to be doing that, I’m sure I’m going to get a lot wrong. And I’m, I’m pretty sure I’m not done with John the Baptist. You know, I finished working on this and was like, you know, what do I do next? I’m like, yeah, I should just do more John the Baptist. You know, it’s like, I don’t think it’s done here, but we, I need, you know, we need more eyes and ears, you know, paying attention to this and asking these questions and looking from a different angle. But I think there’s much more there that will prove to be valuable for our understanding of Christian origins, for our understanding of John the Baptist, for our understanding of ancient religion than is really appreciated.

I’d like for you to talk a little bit. You mentioned, you sort of mentioned in passing that the Mandaeans don’t—aren’t fans of Jesus and, and, and sort of don’t love where Jesus took John’s teachings. I would love to talk a little bit about both their perspective and maybe just the perspective of if we could imagine a, you know, a follower of John, what Jesus might have looked like to them. Because I don’t think that that’s a perspective that anyone has really considered. Like scholars like you have considered it. Obviously. I had never thought about it. Obviously. Like when you, when you’re raised with a Christian tradition, of course John would want Jesus, would be excited for Jesus to become, you know, this Messiah figure. But that may not have been what John was after. That may not have been John’s perspective and, or the people that are following John.

So I’d love to have you talk about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So I knew it was going to be potentially focusing the attention in a particular way that might or may not be helpful and might not be appreciated in some circles. Calling the book Christmaker. Yeah, I thought. But once I got that, I was like, okay, but it’s a good title. It’s going to. And you know, particularly I’m hoping, you know, Mandaeans are going to, you know, actually read this and appreciate that I’m working their sources into this attempt to get at the historical John the Baptist. They’re obviously going to find, take as much exception to some of the things that I say as, you know, Christian scholars take to some of the things I say about, you know, historical Jesus or about John. But I think that historically speaking, you know, we have John depicted as talking about one who will come after him, you know, presumably meaning, you know, a disciple who will be stronger than him. Yet we also have people talking about the possibility that he’s the Messiah. And Luke is pretty upfront about that. And so if he’s clearly saying, no, not me, I’m not the Messiah, right.

He’s doing this Monty Python routine right back in the first century and everybody’s like, see, you know, or. Or the Dune thing, right? Only the true Messiah would say he’s not the Messiah. I think that John must have been speaking in a way that, first of all, speaking in a way that was a bit more elusive and less. Less easily pinned down. I think his life was, you know, seems to have been cut short so that he didn’t get a chance to say to everyone, okay, you know, so my, my time is coming to an end here and so you should all follow Jesus, right? You know, he was, you know, we were closely together, you know, before I was imprisoned and you know, he’s, he’s, he’s the way I think the movement should go. Right. And so clearly Jesus followers believe that. And it’s not necessarily historically implausible.

It’s in the Gospel, he must increase while I must decrease. He kind of passes the baton.

Yeah. And that’s made, you know, so explicit in the Gospel of John that scholars, you know, historically skeptical scholars are like, yeah, right, how convenient. Like he was not the light. He just gave witness, bore witness to the light. It’s like, okay, you seem to, you seem to think this is important. Who’s, who’s saying the opposite, right? And you look around, it’s like, oh yeah, there’s this wider movement. And I think that as time went on, right, certainly once Jesus is executed and you know, it’s like, no, no, he’ll be back and he’s going to do this and still time is passing. I think other, other figures emerge who say, yeah, no, it was, it was not Jesus and you know, maybe it will be me. And so we get this ongoing movement and probably also get some who, you know, as also happens with Gnostic forms of Christianity, just say, you know, what’s the spiritual message that matters? And you know, kind of the apocalyptic stuff can be phased out or toned down.

Now, can you talk a little bit about you? One of the chapters is entitled the Last Days. Can you talk about the decline and fall of John the Baptist, how his, the end of his life plays into basically how his tradition has been carried on?

Yeah. So it would be easy, you know, and I’m sure I, at least initially, you know, went this route that, you know, of thinking, well, at least we’ve got this vivid story of his execution. Right. And so, you know, if we don’t, there’s a lot that we don’t know. But you know, here’s this nice big puzzle piece, you know, with several, several interlocking bits that we can slot in. But often when we have a particularly vivid story told in an ancient source, it would be very easy to just assume that it’s, you know, it’s historical because it’s early and it’s vivid and it’s got lots of detail. But in actual fact, Mark is our only source for that. You know, Matthew and Luke repeat, you know, some of what Mark says, but Mark is the source. Josephus indicates that Herod Antipas executed John, but doesn’t give us, you know, there’s no mention of a birthday party. Not that there’s any reason why John, why Josephus would have mentioned that. And so eventually it struck me that, you know, in the story of, you know, the birthday and the dancing girl and Herodias and all this, that you get this attempt to shift the blame away from Herod Antipas, right.

Who’s sort of the representative of secular authority and rules at Rome’s behest. And so. And we get the same thing in the story of Jesus execution where there’s this effort to divert the attention, say, well, no, I mean, the representative of secular authority didn’t really want to kill him, but, you know, the hands were tied.

Yeah.

And so that parallel between those two ways of dealing with the story of the execution of these key figures in this movement, that parallel had not struck me in quite the same way. Right. And you do get it mentioned. But it’s usually, you know, Mark’s telling of John’s story prefigures the death of Jesus or, you know, there’s your foreshadowing, there’s, you know, intertextual echoing or whatever else, but not in terms of this effort to divert attention away. And so I don’t think anyone is likely to have known whether, you know, who if anyone danced at Herod’s birthday party or anything like that. There the tradition identifies the girl as Salome, but there’s actually a significant problem having that be the person given when this is supposed to have happened and what we’re told in Josephus about, you know, sort of Herod and Herodias and their family and things like that. But I think that we can actually connect John’s death as depicted in Josephus and in the Gospels, and find that they do actually dovetail in some interesting things that probably do point us to some useful historical information.

So in the Gospels, John’s main criticism of Herod Antipas is his divorce of his first wife and his marriage to Herodias, who had been his brother’s wife. And the details, you know, this is sort of things that kings and tetrarchs and other would-be people who wish they were kings did in the ancient world. And so, but, you know, there seems to have been some illegality, at least with regard to the timing and other things. But Josephus says that when Herod Antipas was defeated by Aretas, that some blamed this, you know, basically said that, you know, he’s getting his comeuppance for what he did to John. And that’s often viewed, you know, some have said that, you know, Josephus must be getting the dating, you know, or must be telling us that John lived much longer than Jesus did because he tells his story about the sort of the end of the conflict, and it’s like 37ish. And so, you know, John must have died then. But it would have been natural to connect these two right to the death of John, John, the execution of John several years earlier.

And this event, when we consider that Herod Antipas’ first wife was the daughter of Aretas and so she flees back home. And that, you know, Herod Antipas’ terrible treatment of the daughter really sours the relationship and that’s what leads them into war. And I think that John the Baptist was calling out Herod Antipas not just, you know, oh, you know, you divorced and married for convenience, but you’re dragging your people into a war that’s foolish and that’s bound to be disastrous. And in the process of his being defeated by Aretas, Herod Antipas’ stronghold at Machaerus is one of the places that Aretas conquers. And that’s where John the Baptist, according to Josephus, had been executed. And so we put, you know, sort of all these things together. I think we do get a sense that these things are complementary sources of information about this and not things that are actually in tension with one another.

That’s interesting. So John the Baptist is not just out there preaching forgiveness of sins and is socially concerned, but also to some degree geopolitically concerned. Or is this mainly about the well-being, the homeostasis of the Jewish people at the time that he’s thinking, hey, you’re putting us in a vulnerable position by ticking off the wrong person’s daughter?

Yeah, I don’t think we necessarily have to choose between those, you know, fair enough. More than one thing wrong with what a ruler’s doing. But yeah, I think it’s very interesting. You know, one of the things that led me to really revisit some of the and try to challenge some of the stereotypes is that, you know, I mean, John is something of a judgment and, you know, fire and brimstone kind of preacher, but it’s all aimed at, you know, the aristocracy, the religious leaders. But we’re also told that he, you know, he was listened to and you know, his message was appealing to tax collectors and prostitutes. And your standard fundamentalist preacher doesn’t resonate with that audience, your modern-day fundamentalist preacher. The tax collectors and prostitutes are not going to be lining up to say, “Hey, this guy’s speaking our language.” And so I think that we have to get that rather like Jesus, right? There’s harsh words and harsh criticism and sarcasm and condemnation towards those in power and there’s compassion for ordinary people.

And this concern with social and economic justice I think connects with that because on the one hand you have, you know, ordinary people who would have struggled to travel and to afford sacrifice and do these things.

You as a soldier, you as a tax collector, just take what you’re due, right? Don’t take more than that. Everyone is, you know, living on the edge of starvation. You could potentially elevate yourself and your family out of that by, you know, taking a bit more. And that’s what everybody’s doing and everybody’s trying to, as far as it depends on you do this, you know, do, do what’s right.

Yeah.

And that I think resonated, right, Because I think he understood. You know, I wonder if John’s time in the wilderness, right, was not, you know, a time which he was thinking about these things and realizing, you know, on the one hand, you know, if he eats just what is sort of provided naturally, whether it’s bee honey or date honey, and whether he actually dipped the locusts in the honey or, you know, ate them separately, one of them was dessert or the other, you know, we don’t need to worry about that. But I think he probably, you know, it would have dawned on him that you could actually disentangle yourself from injustice. But you’re also not making things better and you’re not making a difference and you’re not doing anything that addresses what’s wrong with the society.

Yeah.

And that being active and going back, you know, involves getting your hands dirty. And so you have to, you know, you have to have both a passion for justice and a means of forgiveness.

Yeah. And I think if, if he’s influenced by texts like Isaiah 1 , you have one of the strongest iterations of the prophetic critique within Isaiah 1 . And, and so if there is a kind of a distancing from the institutions of the temple, I can see how the prophetic critique, the concern for social justice as well as the concern for critiquing the systems that are facilitating all of this injustice could be part and parcel to, to his message. So yeah, that’s, that’s a great message to, to end the life of John the Baptist on. So not that he was a socialist, but at the very least was very concerned for systems of power and, and for ensuring that the people who are on the, the business end of them are not, are not just afterthoughts, are not just grist for the mill. Anything else to, to add, Dan?

I, I think that there is more to talk about and there’s, it’s a, it’s such a fascinating figure that I’m, we’re gonna grab you, James McGrath. We’re gonna keep you with us for our patrons only section segment so that people can, can hear a little bit more about this because it is super interesting. But for those of you who aren’t patrons, thank you so much for joining us. If you’d like to reach out to us. Well, if you’d like to become a patron, that’s the first thing to do right now, which is to go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and just join up. If you want to hear the patrons only segment, join at the, at the $10 a month level and you can do that. Otherwise you can hear an ad-free and early version of the show every week at the five dollar a month level. Or you can just give however much you want to give us. And that’s awesome as well. If you’d like to write into us, please feel free to do so. You can do it at contact@dataoverdogma.com. James McGrath, thank you so much for joining us.

We really appreciate having you on the show.

Oh, thanks so much. I’ve just thoroughly enjoyed this conversation with you.

I have as well. And we will see those of you who are joining us in the afterparty in just a moment. And for everyone else, bye, everybody.