BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

The Quest for John the Baptist

New book examines the historical and biblical evidence

John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer

By James F. McGrath
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024), 486 pp., $59.99 (hardcover and eBook)

Reviewed by Zeba Crook

In a style that is easy to read, James F. McGrath has undertaken this study into the historical John the Baptist in the true spirit of scientific inquiry: It is daring, creative, and exploratory. As with all novel scientific experiments, however, value is not always measured in terms of success but rather learning, for one can learn as much from a failed experiment as from a successful one.

In terms of goals, McGrath is emphatically not attempting a biography of the historical John the Baptist. Rather, he is interested in exploring the challenges and possibilities of such an undertaking. As such, this book is structured around topics related to the search for John, not around topics related to his life or chronology, though McGrath does in the process make many claims about what we can know about John (all of them interesting, some of them provocative, and many of them unpersuasive).

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In the book’s nine chapters, McGrath successively argues that John the Baptist is as central to the New Testament’s Q source (a hypothetical collection of Jesus’s sayings) as Jesus is; he defends the use of Mandean sources (third-century CE gnostic writings) in the search for the historical John the Baptist; and he argues that if one assumes continuity rather than rupture between John and Jesus, a good deal of information about John can be revealed. He then posits that shared echoes and phrases in several late infancy narratives of John suggest access to early (and therefore reliable) features of the John story, and explores the unique aspects of John’s baptism. McGrath also claims that Jesus’s use of the term “son of man” can be related to John’s reference to the one coming after him. Finally, he traces the origins of Gnosticism to the intersection of ancient Israelite traditions and John’s baptism itself, and traces the use of Abba in prayer to John the Baptist, from whom Jesus learned as one of his disciples. There is so much here that is creative and provocative that it will take scholars generations to unpack.

For many of the claims of this book to be persuasive, one must first accept that the Gospels are essentially history with bits of theology that can be easily spotted and removed. One must also accept that collective memory is essentially reliable and that unreliable memories are easily spotted and explainable. The problem with both presuppositions is that they are no longer defensible.

First, scholars used to imagine theological influence on the Gospels like chocolate chips in a cookie. They believed they could discover the bits of theological influence and remove them, leaving historically reliable material. But contemporary historiography sees theological influence more like the flour used to make the cookie, not the chocolate chips added to it. And one cannot distill flour from a cookie once it is baked. New Testament scholars have realized that there can no longer be any quest for the historical Jesus: Our sources and criteria simply cannot get us there. McGrath knows and cites this critical work but does not appear to take it very seriously in many of the claims he makes about John and Jesus.

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Second, I concur with McGrath that we need to think of the various pieces of information about John the Baptist (e.g., the Gospels, Josephus, Mandean) as forms of collective memory. They are collective memory because none of the sources was written by an eyewitness, or even likely by a person with access to an eyewitness. The problem is that McGrath relies on the popular perception that collective memory is essentially reliable—especially if focused on a story’s general essence as opposed to its details. But there is a good deal of research that shows that accuracy is far from the primary concern of collective memory. This does not mean, of course, that there is never anything accurate in collective memories. The crippling problem is that there are no methods or criteria that can distinguish accurate collective memories from manufactured ones (except perhaps in the most fantastic cases, such as snakes speaking to humans). Yet McGrath repeatedly imagines that collective memories about John the Baptist are essentially reliable.

This study reflects many of the very best traits of long-past scholarship on the New Testament: It is rich in research, erudite, sweeping in its expertise, and thoroughly familiar with a wide array of primary sources. But it also approaches its task in ways that reflect some of the naiveté of this past scholarship: that we can know the thoughts and motivations of Jesus or John the Baptist, and that we can access those through a nuanced reading of ancient Christian writings (suggesting a very high interest in historical accuracy on the part of those writers). Repeatedly, McGrath makes statements about John based on things Jesus said or did, without first establishing the historical accuracy of those things. A book on John the Baptist that took seriously the demise of the criteria used in the search for the historical Jesus might have looked very different.

McGrath correctly opines that perfect certainty is not required for historians to be able to say something. However, historians also need to be able to admit when the number and nature of the sources on a topic do not allow them to say very much at all. I think the topic of John the Baptist is perhaps one of those topics.

Zeba Crook is Professor of Religion at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He focuses on Christian origins and the historical Jesus.

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