The overarching goal in McGrath’s ambitious new book on John the Baptist is not merely to explore the diverse and complex receptions of John, but to reconstruct John the man himself. To that end, McGrath distinguishes his work from the mass of other literature on John on two grounds. First, he asserts that his book will use tradition about Jesus (a disciple of John, he says) to understand the historical John – hence expanding the set of possible material available to the historian. Second, he promises to show the value of much later Mandaean sources for reconstructing John in his first-century Palestinian context. McGrath does indeed pursue these two unique angles in the pages that follow, but whether they take us any closer to the ‘John of History’ is another matter.
The first four chapters are really about sources. Chapter 1 takes up Q, which McGrath treats as a unified document. He suggests that John the Baptist is the central thread holding Q together, arguing that its purpose was to show that Jesus is the coming one John predicted and that Jesus continued John’s work. McGrath then reconstructs a putative Sitz im Leben for this document, suggesting that it emerged at an early time when Christians were trying to convince followers of John to get on board with Jesus. For McGrath, then, Q is a persuasive or apologetical document, focused on the very question of Jesus’ relationship to John. Chapter 2 seeks to resurrect later Mandaean sources for the study of the historical John. McGrath tries to chart a middle path between the uncritical acceptance of these sources by some in the old History of Religions School, on the one hand, and the casual dismissal of them by C. H. Dodd and most scholars since, on the other. He argues that while these texts in their final form surely betray knowledge of Christian literature and much later historical developments, they also include independent tradition that is historically veridical. Chapter 3 returns to the Gospels again, as McGrath tries to show that teaching material from Jesus (including certain activities) can be used to inform us about the behaviour of Jesus’ mentor, John. Finally, chapter 4 tries to reconstruct a now-lost infancy narrative about John the Baptist that McGrath claims was used by the Gospel of Luke, the Protevangelium of James and the Mandaean Book of John.
The remaining chapters take up specific case studies about John. Chapter 5 reconstructs the origin and meaning of John’s immersion ritual, suggesting that it was not related to ritual purity but rather the forgiveness of sins in contestation of the temple in Jerusalem. John’s baptism, and its remarkable authority vis-à-vis the temple, were inspired by Ezekiel’s vision of the heavenly temple that has water flowing from it, and also traditions about Noah’s flood. Chapter 7 argues that Jesus spoke of himself as ‘the son of man’ in order to point back to John’s ambiguous description of ‘one coming’ after him. McGrath proceeds to identify ‘ripples’ (for this language, see p. 9) of John’s own teaching in many of the ‘son of man’ sayings in Mark and Q. Chapter 8 argues that John the Baptist had a decisive role as a ‘catalyst’ (p. 343) in the formation of Gnosticism, once his anti-temple and Torah-cautious teaching was combined with an underground Israelite movement that was sceptical of exclusive monotheism. And chapter 9 argues that we have evidence of the very prayers that John the Baptist taught his disciples, not only in Luke 11 but also in later Mandaean sources and some others.
The field always benefits from a new study that makes bold and provocative suggestions: it causes scholars to reassess what they think is sure and ask questions of the material that they might not otherwise ask. Critics are indebted to McGrath for creating such an opportunity with this book. In my estimation, however, there are a few significant problems with McGrath’s arguments. The first is that some genuinely good ideas are taken to rather extreme ends that outpace the evidence. This happens, for instance, with McGrath’s rather heavy-handed insistence on the continuity between John and Jesus throughout the volume. Of course, many other scholars have wisely suggested that Jesus did not depart in significant ways from John’s message and practice. But for McGrath, the continuity of John and Jesus has become an unquestioned rubric through which he filters nearly everything in the Gospels. He even leverages the continuity of John and Jesus to identify John’s influence on Jesus material not otherwise flagged or noted as such – an argument that, to my mind, flirts with circularity. I fear that we find in such instances not compelling arguments about how data support a certain model, but rather a model in search of data.
Second, if McGrath sometimes goes beyond where the data can take us, he also, to my mind, spends too little time with the very fragmentary evidence that we are lucky to have. The kinds of questions that animated earlier generations of scholars are still taken up by McGrath (e.g., Did John link his immersion with the forgiveness of sins, and, if so, in what sense? Did he anticipate a messianic figure coming after him? Did he regard himself as Elijah redivivus?). But McGrath moves much more quickly through these complex questions than some earlier critics did, asserting a position and then seeking to build further on it. This is unfortunate, because it means his assertions on these core contested matters lack sufficient demonstration (if only on the criterion of the rigour of earlier scholarship), and he makes the reconstruction of an ancient figure like John look easier than it actually is. McGrath claims at the end of the book that he has endeavoured ‘to lay the groundwork’ (p. 366) for even more expansive studies of John in new areas, but I am not confident he has built a foundation here that is stable enough to carry the weight of new structures.
Finally, I found unconvincing McGrath’s attempt to use centuries-later Mandean sources to reconstruct the historical John the Baptist. McGrath’s plea that historians should be open to the possibility that much later sources preserve earlier material is fair and should not be controversial. But that general admission does not take us any closer to identifying independent, early and historically valuable material in these sources, which I believe McGrath fails to do in his own argumentation. The unfortunate yet wholly predictable consequence is that McGrath’s portrait of John the Baptist has anachronistic features, evident especially in his view that the historical John had concerns about the ‘limitations of torah as a source of guidance and revelation’ (p. 342) and believed that Israel’s Scriptures were marked by deficiencies.
These concerns aside, McGrath has given historians a chance to revisit very important questions about the historical figure of John and the origins of the Jesus movement. Future studies of John need to engage McGrath, even if they disagree with him.
