Candida Moss has a new article out in National Geographic titled “Why John the Baptist Was Once More Famous Than Jesus.” She quotes me in the article, and since I answered some brief questions with very long answers as she was writing it, most of which wasn’t included in the article, I thought I would share my full responses here, in case they are of interest.
(1) Who was John the Baptist?
There’s so much that we wish we knew about him! Sources that tell us about his family background indicate that his father was a priest named Zechariah. When we encounter him as an adult, he is doing something that seems diametrically opposed to his father’s work. Priests offered sacrifice in the temple in Jerusalem, for a variety of reasons, but in particular for the forgiveness of sins. John offered baptism for the forgiveness of sins. I think that places him squarely in the category of a rebellious son.
The Gospels and other sources indicate categories that some of his contemporaries placed him in. Some viewed him as a prophet. Some wondered if he might be “the messiah.” That word is widely known nowadays and yet often without its original meaning being clear. Messiah means anointed one, referring to the ceremony when a new king or high priest was installed in office, which involved smearing them with oil. There was no king of Judah or Israel in John’s time, and the high priesthood had passed from its traditional holders to others. Did they think that John was destined to restore the high priesthood, the kingship, or both? Not that long before his time, there had been a family of priest-kings known as the Hasmoneans. Some who supported John might have envisaged him playing both roles. Although his baptism for the forgiveness of sins is a quasi-priestly activity, we see an indication that there were other kinds of expectations around John in a puzzling section in an early Christian apocryphal work. At the end of the work known as the Protevangelium or Infancy Gospel of James, it suddenly shifts focus onto John the Baptist. It is the familiar story of Herod the Great wanting to eliminate a newborn king, but with a twist: the one he fears will rule Israel is Zechariah’s son John!
(2) How well known was he in comparison to Jesus?
John was more famous than Jesus in his time. We can tell this a number of ways, the clearest perhaps being the fact that when Jesus showed up doing what he did, the reaction from people like Herod Antipas was apparently to think that John the Baptist had returned. It is easy for those approaching the text steeped in Christian tradition and thinking to miss that. Antipas didn’t think “Wow, here’s something new and unprecedented.” He thought, “Wait, is John back?” It is hard to know how quickly Jesus rose to a comparable prominence in his own right, but the New Testament Gospels are still struggling to elevate Jesus in relation to John the Baptist. The Gospel of Luke has John filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb, while Jesus receives the Spirit later through baptism by John. The Gospel of John mentions the Baptist before any other human individual, and its emphatic insistence that he was not the light tells us that others assumed that the Baptist was indeed the light.
(3) Why was he executed?
The Gospel of Mark and the historian Flavius Josephus both inform readers that Herod Antipas executed John. Each provides different information, but rather than being contradictory I find what each says to be complementary. Josephus says that Antipas executed John because he perceived that people were ready to do anything he might ask them to. (That’s also another indicator of his popularity and influence.) There’s only one real candidate for someone doing something at John’s behest that might cause Antipas to worry in this way. According to all four Gospels in the New Testament, Jesus carried out a symbolic act in the temple in Jerusalem, driving out animals and money changers. The Gospel of John says that Jesus did it while John was not yet imprisoned, which would mean that at that point Jesus was still part of John’s movement, one of John’s disciples and perhaps even an apostle, someone John sent out to proclaim his message. The temple action would thus be a threat against the temple, a declaration of its impending doom, in keeping with John’s offering of a free alternative to sacrifice. In the Synoptic Gospels, when Jesus is challenged about his authority to do this, he asks about John’s authority to baptize, linking his own action and authority with John’s. I wonder whether it was Jesus’ action in the temple that led Antipas to decide that the ringleader of this movement needed to be arrested before he caused any more trouble.
The Gospel of Mark gives the impression that it was primarily because of John’s criticism of Antipas for marrying his brother’s wife Herodias that he was arrested and executed. This is often viewed as a divergence from what Josephus records. I view them as complementary. Here’s why. Josephus says that when the Arabian king Aretas defeated Antipas, people said it was God paying him back for killing John the Baptist. Why would people view that particular event that happened later as having that significance? The reason is what Mark tells us, filled in with what we know from Josephus and other historical sources. Antipas’ first wife, whom Antipas was going to divorce in order to marry Herodias, was Aretas’ daughter! What Antipas did led directly to there being hostility between these two rulers and their neighboring territories. John the Baptist would have been the many who viewed Antipas’ selfish lust as leading the people of his tetrarchy into war. The criticism was not just that Antipas did something unlawful in marrying his brother’s wife, but that if Antipas had obeyed Torah it would have kept him from making calamity likely to befall his people. When Aretas defeated Antipas, including taking his fortress Machaerus where John had been executed, it would have seemed to confirm John’s prophetic insight.
Note as well that there is nothing similar related to Jesus. Lots of people were thinking about John’s death. The number who were thinking in a similar way about Jesus was presumably much smaller. This sort of detail also serves to convey just how popular and influential John was.
(4) What was his essential mission?
The short answer would be “Repent!” But that term has connotations for people today that leave it likely to be misunderstood. John made the wilderness (which doesn’t mean the desert, I should add) his symbolic backdrop. He was associated with the imagery from the Book of Isaiah about a second exodus that would involve a return to and through the wilderness. The wilderness generation had famously perished according to the story in the Torah because they disobeyed. While others were hoping that God would finally fulfill promises of Israel’s greatness, John’s message was that the reason for them not being fulfilled was not a delay on God’s part, but the ongoing refusal of God’s people to practice justice and do what is right. John essentially said “Judgment is coming. This is your last chance.”
In connection with that, he made available a means of forgiveness and publicly declaring one’s desire to prepare for what was to come. The Jewish scriptures depict God as being ambivalent about the temple from the very beginning. It had served to lock up access to forgiveness in a king’s capital city. Temples in Jerusalem and on Mt. Gerizim now served to perpetuate the divide between Judah and Israel. This stood in contrast with the tabernacle described in the scriptures which could move around and bring the presence of God and forgiveness to where people were. Now those who lived far away from Jerusalem experienced sacrifice as more costly than those who lived closer. John’s passion for economic justice was directly connected with his offering of an alternative to sacrifice. This is presumably why he found a receptive audience at the places he was active in the wilderness. They were not remote locations in the desert. They were places along major thoroughfares and crossroads that people traveled when going to Jerusalem.
There is a tomb that is supposedly John the Baptist’s in Samaria. Is it his actual likely resting place? There is no early or other compelling evidence to support that. I mention it because it is one of several indicators that John’s vision included Samaria. When the Gospel of John recounts that Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman about living water, and a time when people would not focus worship either in Jerusalem or on Mt. Gerizim, what we are hearing are the emphases of John the Baptist on the lips of his most famous disciple, Jesus.
(5) Why didn’t all of John’s followers become followers of Jesus?
It isn’t clear precisely what Jesus’ role was in John’s movement prior to John’s imprisonment. But if not sooner, then at least when Jesus regrouped John’s followers after John was imprisoned, he would have seemed to many to be John’s successor. I suspect that the majority of John’s adherents in Galilee and other primarily Jewish territories would have supported Jesus. It was likely the crucifixion of Jesus that convinced many of them that, contrary to what they had hoped, Jesus could not have been the stronger one that John had spoken of. For a significant number of them, the parallels between the deaths of John and Jesus helped them make sense of both and find a way to reinterpret their mission as involving their deaths.
(6) Why did he dress the way he did and follow his peculiar diet?
The clothing of John is easier to explain than his diet. The clothing is widely understood to be a deliberate imitation of Elijah. Whatever the precise meaning of the reference in the Jewish scriptures (it is sometimes understood to mean that he was hairy, rather than wearing a garment made of haircloth), by John’s time it was understood to indicate how he dressed. John was cosplaying the prophet Elijah. At the very least, this conveyed that the people of God were in a similarly problematic state to what was the case in Elijah’s time, and the rulers were comparable to Ahab and Jezebel. It reinforced not only his message of national repentance, but more specifically his call to stop supporting the current regime as having pursued a marriage that led them away from Israel’s God.
Locusts and honey are more of a puzzle. Neither was an uncommon thing to eat. Meat (even if insect meat) and something sweet are not indicative that his had to do with asceticism (which is a surprisingly popular interpretation). I suspect that these were John’s foods at a time he spent in the wilderness figuring out his calling, relying on what God provided. His concern for economic justice may also have made it appealing or even to have seemed necessary to eat only things that he could be sure were not entangled with injustice or disobedience. The only way to be absolutely certain was to eat only what you grew or caught for yourself. But first and foremost I think it had to do with time spent in the wilderness, revisiting the place where his ancestors had repeatedly grumbled about what God had provided them to eat. Whether these were the only things that he ever ate, even later in his life, is impossible to know for certain.
What’s your reaction to my statement that “John the Baptist was once more famous than Jesus.” Obviously true, controversial, or something else? Check out the NatGeo article and let me know what you think! As Moss concludes there, “In later Christian theology, Jesus eclipses John in significance. But in their own historical moment, the balance of fame tipped the other way. To his contemporaries, John was not a supporting character in someone else’s story. He was a formidable, widely known political prophet whose voice carried across Judea, and whose death reverberated long after he was gone.”
For academics reading this, if you work on John the Baptist, please submit a proposal to the Society of Biblical Literature John the Baptist program unit with a view to presenting at the 2026 annual meeting!
For Further Reading
Regular readers know that I’ve spent a lot of time researching the historical figure of John the Baptist. For those who may be new here, that research resulted in two books that are very different in their contents and character. One is a biography of John the Baptist aimed at telling his story for a general audience. The title is Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist. The other book is an academic book that offers detailed explorations of questions related to method, sources, and of course the topic that is the focus of this post, the evidence that John the Baptist was once more famous than Jesus. The title of that book is John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer. Check them both out on Goodreads. Whether you’re an academic or not, Christmaker is the best one to start with, in my opinion.
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