McGrath, James F. Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2024. xi+172 pp. Hb; $24.99 Link to Eerdmans
James F. McGrath is Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University. Prior to this book on John the Baptist, he published John’s Apologetic Christology (SNTSMS 111; Cambridge, 2001), The Mandaean Book of John: Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary (with Charles G. Häberl; De Gruyter, 2019), and The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context (University of Illinois Press, 2022). In 2023, he published the entertaining The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too (Eerdmans, reviewed here). McGrath is active on social media and regularly posts to his blog, Religion Prof.
McGrath makes some rather bold claims in this popular-level book on John the Baptist. For example, “What became Christianity was an offshoot of the Baptist movement” (124). Jesus was a disciple or apostle of John (93), and “Jesus’s teaching was the gist of John’s message” (74). Christmaker challenges much of what most Bible readers think they know about John the Baptist.
In the first chapter, McGrath describes John as “a rebellious son.” He was born into a priestly family but does not serve in the temple as a priest like his father, Zachariah. In fact, he is quite critical of the temple. McGrath suggests this is because his mother, Elizabeth, dedicated him as a Nazareth from birth, similar to Samson or Samuel. He suggests John may have struggled with his father’s desire for him to serve as a priest and his mother’s oath that he be a Nazarite. McGrath’s solution is that Nazarites had similar roles to priests and may have been “priests in the order of Melchizedek” (70).
Little can be known about John’s early life. McGrath rightly dismisses the view that John was not an Essene or that he spent any significant time with the scenes at Qumran. there are similarities between John’s criticism of the temple and his washing in the wilderness and the Essenes. Although he was not a sect member, the Essenes may have been dialogue partners with John (24).
John did not go into the wilderness to live a solitary lifestyle. He was “calling people to revisit the wilderness as a prelude to becoming the people that Israel was called to be from its beginning” (32). John’s activity at the Jordan River met with pilgrims from Galilee on their way to Jerusalem (71).
In the second chapter, “I Will Destroy This Temple,” McGrath argues that John’s baptism was an alternative attempt at Temple sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin. He begins with Isaiah 10:10–15, a text he suggests was “John’s manifesto” (64). Like Isaiah, John was preparing exiles to return spiritually through the wilderness. John was preparing Israel for the final eschatological temple. John “came to predict God would destroy the temple and replace it.” Although this is never actually stated in Matthew or Luke, this seems to be built on McGrath’s argument that baptism replaced sacrifice and that the prophets looked forward to a new eschatological temple. The old Herodian temple had to go if a new eschatological temple was coming.
McGrath goes further. When Jesus did the temple action, it would have been perceived as a message from John” (53). He suggests that John sent Jesus to deliver the message at the temple. Jesus served as John’s emissary (57), and later in the book, he suggests that Jesus was “John’s leading apostle” (93). This raises an important theme that occurs throughout the book. Many studies of John the Baptist suggest some tension between John and Jesus. For example, in Matthew 11:2- 6, John’s disciples ask Jesus if he is really the one to come (read my comments on this passage here). There were also differences in how John and Jesus went about their mission. McGrath calls these “superficial differences” and no real disagreement (115). McGrath does consider Jesus an innovator, “even in relation to John, whom he esteemed highly and to whom he owed much” (141).
In chapter 3, “The Lost Sheep of the House of Israel,” McGrath argues that John is an apocalyptic prophet. Like Jesus, John made no effort to organize a separate community from the Judaism of his day. With John’s ministry, God is creating a new people of God. McGrath suggests this is a “direct line” from John the Baptist, through Jesus, to Paul. “Paul is building on a foundation that John laid” (75). I don’t think McGrath means that Paul intentionally built on the foundation of John. It is not even certain Paul knew the teachings of John the Baptist. Nevertheless, McGrath is correct in understanding John’s ministry as standing on the foundation of the prophets and within the larger world of Second Temple Judaism.
McGrath deals with the question of what John thought about Jesus in his fourth chapter, “Someone is Coming.” He argues that John did not see himself as Jesus’s forerunner, nor that Jesus was “the one who is coming.” McGrath does not think a historian can investigate whether Jesus was actually the coming one. Some of John’s followers may have been disappointed after Jesus’s execution. He wasn’t becoming one who would begin eschatological judgment. Jesus’s followers reinterpreted the kingdom of God might mean (115).
In chapter 5, McGrath deals with John’s death. He begins by stating the famous story of John’s head on a silver platter (Mark 6:14-29; Matt 14:1-12) is a “concoction of Mark” (117). Comparing the Gospel of Mark with Josephus (Ant. 18.116-119), he rightly observes that Herod Antipas angered the Nabatean king Aretas IV when he divorced the king’s daughter to marry Herodias. Aretas then defeated Antipas in battle, a victory in the eyes of many people vindicated the preaching of John the Baptist. Therefore, Antipas had John arrested and executed. The gospel of Mark shifts the blame from Antipas to Herodias, which is less plausible from McGrath. He suggests that Mark draws a parallel between Antipas and Pilate. Pilate also yielded to pressure to execute Jesus, and Mark shifted the blame for the execution from Pilate to the Jews. Josephus also reports that John was taken to the Herodian fortress at Machaerus near the Dead Sea. McGrath finds this “extremely unlikely.” If Herod held a banquet with his officials, it would have been in Tiberius (127). In addition, Mark reports that John’s disciples took charge of the body, unlikely if John was held in the remote fortress of Machaerus.
An important aspect of this book is that McGrath takes the Mandean literature seriously as a source of information about John the Baptist. He suggests the “best way to get behind the later developments to what Jon himself did is by triangulating from things that Mandean and Christian baptism share in common” (60). For some readers, this might be their first hearing of the Mandeans. I suggest Edmondo F. Lupieri, The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics (Eerdmans, 2001) as an excellent introduction to this obscure Gnostic sect. He cites an example from the Mandean Book of John, which describes “a fisher who summons the poor” and enthrones his disciples after they rise. “You will likely have noticed some striking similarities to language. Jesus used in reference to discipleship” in this Mandean text, “most likely because John the Baptist used it” (72). He suggests that when Jesus used the phrase “fisher of people,” he was “deliberately echoing John’s language” (72). Mandean sources do not report John’s violent death. Rather, a celestial messenger removes John’s spirit from his flesh, adding a “gnostic angle” (134).
The final chapter, “No One is Greater than John,” traces the trajectories of John’s influence from the first century to our own world. He begins with the gospel of John, which is “readily intelligible as a polemic against the followers of John thought they had no need of Jesus” (142). The chapter includes expansions in the pseudepigraphic Infancy Gospel of James and in Manicheism, Judaism, Islam, the Mandeans, and the Theosophical movement in the early nineteenth century (which was sparked by the rediscovery and publication of Mandean literature).
Throughout the book, McGrath relates experiences from his year-long sabbatical studying John the Baptist. He had the opportunity to visit many of the sites in Israel and Jordan related to the Baptist and his movement. These are always fascinating, even more so after seeing much of this happen in real-time on McGrath’s social media. The book might have been enhanced by including maps or photographs of key locations.
Christmaker is a companion volume to McGrath’s forthcoming John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer (due October 2024). This is the source of my main frustration with Christmaker. There are many times in the book where McGrath asserts something that needs additional support, making me wonder if his point is valid. For example, he assumes a close connection between baptism and healing (62). I do not see this in the New Testament. John the Baptist did not have a reputation as a healer, and there are only a few examples of washing related to healing in Jesus’s ministry (John 9, for example). None of these examples are baptisms like John’s (and lack explicit reference to forgiveness of sin). This lack of detailed argument (and footnotes) makes sense since the book is intended for a broad, non-academic market. Many of these questions will likely be answered when John of History is published.
Conclusion: Can you say anything new about John the Baptist? Apparently, quite a bit. McGrath suggests in the introduction to the volume that many doubt whether a biography of John the Baptist can be written based on the data available. By taking data from Mandean sources seriously, McGrath draws on a larger database than most monographs on John the Baptist. Whether or not readers agree with McGrath’s view that Jesus was John’s disciple or that Jesus taught the gist of John’s message, this book will challenge common assumptions about John the Baptist.
NB: Thanks to Eerdmans for kindly providing me with a review copy of this book. This did not influence my thoughts regarding the work.