Day: January 25, 2021

2021-01-25

John the Baptist Resources

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Early Christianities
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“Authentic” hand bones of John the Baptist on display in Constantinople.

Presentations and readings are now available at the online site for the John the Baptist Enoch Seminar (11-14 January 2021)

James McGrath has additionally posted his take on many of the presentations:

Last month a lengthy discussion ensued from a post linking Greg Doudna’s suggestion about the origin of the John the Baptist anecdote in Josephus’s Antiquities to the dating of the Gospel of Mark: Another Pointer Towards a Late Date for the Gospel of Mark? In the Online Seminar page linked above one can find links to Greg Doudna’s article, or you can simply click here.

Readers who are aware of my approach to historical enquiry will not be surprised to read that I wonder who anything at all can be known about a John the Baptist figure behind the literary/theological figure(s) that long post-date(s) the early first century and offer us no clear pointers to historical sources? To that end, my interest was piqued by comments on Rivka Nir’s book, The First Christian Believer : In Search of John the Baptist. It may be a little while before I can read beyond summaries, articles and reviews, however, given the cost of it. Nir writes in her presentation,

Given the sources as we have them, I am among the few who are skeptical about our ability to reach the historical figure of John the Baptist through the Gospels.

These writings are not sources for getting acquainted with the historical heroes and makers of Christianity, but for accessing how they were perceived and presented by those generations that shaped the traditions about them.

Exactly. (Nir further argues that the detail about JtB in Josephus is an interpolation.)

McGrath continues to call for a closer look at the Mandean literature. That is something I have not attempted for quite some time so I will be interested to read what he has to say about that.

There are many articles and papers on the Seminar site and I have only glanced at the smallest sample in this post. So much catching up to do!

One more thing — I was not aware of a John the Baptist Wiki Encyclopedia before.

Thanks to Greg Doudna for alerting me to James McGrath’s series that led me to the Seminar resources.