New Reviews of Christmaker

Two new reviews have appeared online about Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist. Dave Courtney writes about my book:

Every once in a while I come across a book that I finish, set down, and immediately want to discuss with everyone and anyone. This is one such book,

Only to find that it’s near impossible to find someone else who has read it.
More people need to read this. While I had points of disagreement, it is inspired, fascinating, illuminating and important. Not to mention a perfect compliment for the Christmas season too.

At the core of this book is the idea that “Jesus and John were linked, not just in the minds of their opponents and of early Christian authors but apparently also in the mind of Jesus himself.” (P 11). So much so that “If we do not understand John correctly, we will misunderstand Jesus as well.”

It is this premise that shines a light not only on how John “prepares the way” for Jesus, but becomes the very model Jesus’ ministry is built upon. He sets the stage for the revolutionary spirit that Jesus carries forward. He frames the necessary question in the following way:
Scholars understandably suspect that those texts tell us more about what the gospel author thought the relationship between the Baptist and Jesus ought to be than about what John the Baptist actually said. Yet our earliest sources depict John as talking about someone who would come after him, who would be stronger than he (Mark 1:7–8). A central question that this book answers is how an individual whose contemporaries thought he himself might be the Christ (Luke 3:15) came to be thought of exclusively as the forerunner—or as we put it in the title of this book, the Christmaker. (P 11)

There is a concession early on that notes possible skepticism over how much we can actually say and know about the Baptizer. He clarifies some important shifts in the study of history that open doors not just to the earliest materials containing references and documentation, but on analyzing his influence through extant sources that eclipse his own name. In fact, part of what he is helping to uncover is how John is eclipsed by Jesus in a way that shadows his figure and impact, even as John is clearly integral to that development (Jesus being baptized by John being an important starting point).

He touches on the infancy narrative of John (the stories about Zechariah and Elizabeth in Luke 1 are very similar in style and themes to the stories about Hannah and the wife of Manoah in the Jewish Scriptures (1 Sam. 1–2; Judg. 13) p28. He contextualizes John’s choice of clothing (calling it a form of cosplay rooted in his unique family relationship and lineage, caught between the Priestly line of his father and the Nazarite commitments of his mother). He connects details like the wilderness and his weird diet as hyperlinking back to Israel’s wilderness wanderings and the manna. He challenges common conceptions of John as an Essene by instead making him a conversation partner with the Essenes.

The body of the book focuses on two key components of John’s ministry- his baptism for repentance and his critique of the temple and its centralized position. Proclaiming the forgiveness of sins outside of the temple and playing the role of the priest expressly challenged this centrality by making the practice, which was a baptism rite not a singular act (meaning it was practiced daily), available to all people anywhere as part of the universal nature of Israel’s story. This paves the way for Jesus to proclaim the forgiveness of sins apart from the temple and its priests and to challenge the religious order.

Here I push back on the author slightly, even if he is touching on some legitimate points. There is has been so much work lately on correcting misunderstandings of the temple and its practices, and I do wonder if he has fallen into the trap of perpetuating some of these caricatures. There is good reason to believe that domestication of the temple rites in the life of the common household was already widespread, and equal evidence that such notions of forgivness for individual sins was never something tied to those rites in the way the author suggests. If a sin was present, such individuals would be directed to actual reconciliation with the offense and offended. Temple rites were connected with purification of an external space, not repentance.

Which still has relevance connected to John. I just think he overplays his hand here and stands in danger of feeding some supersessionist tendencies. Perhaps some of this will gain further clarity with more reflection, and it’s certainty not a point that undercuts the book as a whole. I think these words from his final chapter are fitting:

“Yes, from our vantage point, we can see him as Christmaker, especially in relation to Jesus, but also as one whose own prophetic life and vision inspired would-be successors and imitators galore for centuries to come. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the highest form of praise, then perhaps no one in history has been appreciated as much as John, if we include not only those who emulated him directly but also those who imitated those who themselves patterned their lives on John, his predictions, or both.”

Jamie Rottneck writes about my book Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist:

I want to start by saying that any critiques I have of this book may be attenuated after I read the other volume McGrath published on John. He put out two books for this research project, the present volume, which is very much geared to a lay/non-expert audience, and a second, much more academic volume.

That said, on the whole, this is a good book. It’s well written, for the most part, and very engaging. McGrath puts forward a lot of interesting ideas and provides at least enough argument for all those ideas to be possible, if not necessarily likely.

However, McGrath often makes or implies claims and arguments that feel very much like a stretch, and these don’t receive enough discussion or support in the text. If these are better supported in his John of History, Baptist of Faith, that would be fantastic, because I like many of these ideas. McGrath attempted to write a scholarly monograph in that work, and a popular biographical account in this one.

He did a decent job of it, and frankly made fewer unsupported and unsubstantiated claims and assumptions than someone like NT Wright did in his book about Paul. This might just be because of my own preferences and biases, but I’d have preferred a book with maybe another 50 pages of supporting material, which is why I’m not giving this 5 stars. For the genre (semi-academic, popular biography of long-dead religious figure), it’s much better than the vast majority I’ve encountered, though.

When you read it, please do what both of these individuals did and leave a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or elsewhere. Thank you!