Interview with the Author—James F. McGrath

Meet the real John the Baptist.
For many, John the Baptist is a footnote in the gospels—Jesus’s unkempt forerunner. But if we look closer, John emerges as a fascinating and influential religious leader in his own right. James F. McGrath turns his critical eye to overlooked details in Scripture and long-neglected sources to flesh out John’s life story and his far-reaching influence on the history of religion. This fresh look at the life of John the Baptist will fascinate any reader interested in John, Jesus, and their dynamic world.
Read below for an exclusive interview with James and gain further insight into his upcoming book, Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist.  

An Interview with the Author
James F. McGrath



























What led you to write Christmaker in the first place?

This book (and my longer monograph about John the Baptist that Eerdmans will be published later this year) b asically connects almost every dot along the path of my academic career. I started off working on the Gospel of John’s portrait of Jesus for my doctoral work, and certain things came onto my radar although I d id n’t focus on them at the time. First, t here’s the way that right from the opening prologue w e’re made aware that the author is arguing against another point of view offstage, a view of John the Baptist. H e’s overly emphatic. “He himself was not the light. He just came to bear witness to the light.” And then later h e’s made to say of Jesus “He must i ncrease and I must decrease.” What was that all about? The second blip on my radar that I ignored to an even greater extent in my doctoral work was the group known as the Mandaeans. They are an ancient religion, still around today, whose adherents consider themselves followers of John the Baptist, and who view Jesus and his followers as having d eparted from and distorted John’s teaching.
Both those seeds were planted back then ; even as my academic work continued to focus more on the historical Jesus, and then for several years also on translating a Mandaean text that had never been available in English in its entirety before then, I knew that I would want to bring all those threads together and write something about the historical John the Baptist. Despite him being the focus at the beginning of several of our earliest summaries of the Christian message and story, we tend to rush past him in our eagerness to get to Jesus. I ’m convinced that if we d on’t stop long enough and pay enough attention to understand John correctly, w e’ll inevitably get things wrong about Jesus too.  




What are some common misconceptions about John the Baptist?

One misconception that scholars and historians have had is that we don’t have enough information to write a serious well-informed biography of his life. I hope that Christmaker will change their minds. Not that we have as much information as we would like to. But we never do. The big issue is that most of us have rushed past John in our hurry to get to Jesus. Yet because of the way the two were connected, if we do not understand John correctly then we’ll inevitably get things wrong about Jesus too.  
Many of the popular misconceptions about John are about how he supposedly differed from Jesus. While Jesus is a character that even many who aren’t Christians find appealing, the stereotyped portrait of John the Baptist is Hagrid dressed like a caveman, eating bugs and shouting at people. That has to be wrong for multiple reasons (not that he didn’t eat locusts, but that wasn’t uncommon in that time and place). John is said to have had the tax collectors and prostitutes respond positively to him. Imagine either a shabby derelict or a modern fundamentalist preacher of fire and brimstone. How well would either connect with prostitutes and tax collectors? We need to envisage John as much more like Jesus, someone who initially served as a mentor to Jesus and whose influence on Jesus can be seen in some of the things we most appreciate — his compassion, his parables, his inclusive vision.  



Can you break down Luke 3:15? How does an individual whose contemporaries thought he himself might be the Messiah come to be thought of as the forerunner?



That is a fantastic question! On the one hand, I do think that John spoke of one who would come after him who would be more powerful than him. “One who comes after me” indicates that it would be one of his own followers who would prove stronger in this way. John dressed in a way that emulated the prophet Elijah and so he may have expected that there would be someone like Elisha who would enact his vision in a more direct way. John ’s i nfancy is depicted in Luke’s Gospel in a way that echoes the story of Samuel, and so just as Samuel was a prophet and judge over Israel who anointed the king, John may have been understood to be the prophet who would anoint the Messiah , perhaps while nonetheless still remaining the spiritual authority (as in Samuel’s interactions with Saul and David). Another possibility is the expectation of two messiahs in that era. “ M essiah ” m eans anointed one, and the two anointed figures in Israel were the king and the high priest. John may have been understood to be a priestly figure who would be followed by a royal one. There are lots of possibilities when it comes to how John could have been viewed as a messianic figure and yet also the precursor to someone else. It is difficult to choose between them.  





How can we better understand Jesus by studying John the Baptist?


When Christians over the years have drawn stark contrasts between Jesus and his Jewish context, it has distorted their understanding of both Jesus and ancient Judaism. The same happens with John. John is made to be an ascetic to Jesus as bon vivant. John is made to be eager for judgment to come while Jesus compassionately seeks the lost sheep. Yet t he Gospel of Matthew makes a particular point of emphasizing that the summary of Jesus’ s message — repent , for the kingdom of God is at hand — is in fact the summary of John’s message. We also have Jesus depicted using John’s turns of phrase (like “brood of vipers”) and imagery (related to bearing fruit and eliminating the unfruitful). By pushing John and Jesus apart we end up with caricatures of both that exclude things they both emphasized in common .


Where does “the Baptist” moniker come from?



In the first century, ritual immersion for purity and Greco-Roman bathing had both become more widespread. I’d say that it was arguably the most difficult time in history for anyone to acquire the nickname “the Baptist.” In that context of widespread popularity of immersion John somehow stood out, and that is an important clue about the significance of his baptism. He proclaimed a baptism that had to do with repentance and the forgiveness of sins.   
When people sought forgiveness for sins, they went to the temple to offer sacrifice. Many were too far away from the temple for this to be feasible, and found the expense of the offering itself as well as the travel there to be cost prohibitive. John offered a means of forgiveness that was available to rich and poor alike, anywhere there was flowing water.  


You mentioned that you have another title on John the Baptist coming out in October. What are the differences between the two?


This was my first time trying something that I definitely want to make part of how I approach major writing projects in the future. In the past I’ve tried to write books that gave a general audience and fellow scholars what they were looking for, and I’m sure the result was that I bored the interested layperson with excessive detail while scholars felt that I skimped on detail. This time I wanted to try writing two distinct books for two distinct audiences. Note that this is not the same material simply packaged for different audiences, the same content with different levels of detail. The two books do very different things that are complementary, each reinforcing and supporting the other.   
I knew that I wanted to tell John’s story, to narrate his biography, in a way that had never been done before. That’s what Christmaker is. I also knew that I would need to discuss in a lot of detail key New Testament texts, not to mention first persuading my fellow academics that Mandaean texts are relevant and important and then digging into why, in order for my portrait of the life of Jesus to be anchored in an understanding of the relevant sources that would persuade experts. That’s what I do in my forthcoming book John of History, Baptist of Faith . The two books are genuinely different in what they do, and just as I hope those curious and hungry for more detail after reading Christmaker will take a look at John of History, Baptist of Faith . I also hope that academics will read both books. It isn’t enough to work on individual themes or historical questions about Jesus, Paul, John the Baptist, and other ancient figures. We need to show how those details fit together into a portrait of the individual’s life as a whole. Between them , the two books present the story of John’s life and a ton of detail about some of the more puzzling questions about him.  










What do you hope readers take away from reading Christmaker ?



I hope they feel like this figure they once found odd and enigmatic seems to them real, intelligible, and more familiar. I hope readers will appreciate why Jesus described him as “more than a prophet” ( Matthew 11:9 , Luke 7:26 ), said that there was no one greater among human beings, and answered a challenge to his authority by invoking John’s baptism (Mark 11:28 – 30). I hope that by getting to know John better, by coming to appreciate his impact and influenc e to a fuller extent, they will come to know Jesus better as well.  




When you’re not writing or teaching, what do you like to do for fun?






What do you mean? This is fun! The truth is that I enjoy what I do, and so on the one hand I get to teach and write about things that I genuinely find interesting, while on the other hand I turn the things I do for fun into work, for instance by writing and teaching about science fiction. Music and sci-fi are two of the big ones.  





What are three things about yourself that most readers don’t know?



Because I blog and am active on social media , I suspect that most of the things I try to list will be met with “I knew that!” I’ll try nevertheless.  
First, I wonder how many people know that I am a member at Crooked Creek Baptist Church in Indianapolis and am involved there teaching adult Sunday school and also from time to time playing piano. If readers enjoy the way I explore topics, they should come along!  
Second, I have a much greater love of music than I think a lot of people know. When I was in Oxford working on these books about John the Baptist, I was a fellow at Magdalen College and attended chapel almost every day. I particularly love late Romantic era music from the early twentieth century onward. That includes some of the great composers of Anglican choral music — Herbert Howells, Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry, and many others. I also really love the music of Kurt Atterberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, in addition to more familiar names like Ralph Vaughan Williams, Maurice Ravel, and Sergei Rachmaninov.  
Third, some readers may not know that in addition to writing academic nonfiction , I also write science fiction and have had a few short stories published in various places.  




What’s next for you?





There are already two more books in the pipeline forthcoming from Eerdmans. One is a big monograph about John the Baptist with the title John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer . As I said earlier , this isn’t merely a denser version of Christmaker but a genuinely different book, even if there are of course some intersections. John of History, Baptist of Faith offers detailed studies of the most challenging questions related to John the Baptist. It doesn’t offer a biography but rather provides research on specific details that are woven into a story of John’s life in Christmaker . If you read Christmaker and want more detail, this will be a good place to turn next.  
Then in 2025 I will have a book out provisionally titled Reconstructing Your Faith . There is a lot being written and talked about related to “deconstruction,” the process of analyzing and dismantling older ways of thinking about God, the Bible, and the world. Often what people experience might be better described as destruction , since the discovery that one’s simplistic worldview has flaws often leads to a catastrophic collapse. In recent years there are more and more people who would say that they are “not that kind of Christian” or identify as “nones.” This book is written because I think it is crucial to have a worldview that is not merely against something but knows what we are for . 










Browse Books by James F. McGrath
 


The A to Z of the New Testament
You’ve graduated from Sunday School. Ask the hard questions. Take Scripture on its own terms. Invigorate your Bible study with  The A to Z of the New Testament  as your guide.
READ MORE
 

Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist
For many, John the Baptist is a footnote in the gospels—Jesus’s unkempt forerunner. But if we look closer, John emerges as a fascinating and influential religious leader in his own right.
READ MORE
 

John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer
The first study of its kind, John of History, Baptist of Faith sheds light on the historical John the Baptist and his world.
READ MORE