Dr. James F. McGrath is the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University in the United States. He is the author of Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist, and John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptizer. Both will be published by Eerdmans this year
You’ve seen him in pictures and maybe also on TV. Dressed in rags, eating bugs, shouting angrily at people. You understood why eventually he was locked up and died in prison. You never looked closely at him. Why would you spend your time on someone like that? For Christians, John remains something of a puzzle,
Gnosticism – the belief that the creation of the material world was a mistake, and the creator deity a bungling lesser entity distinct from the supreme God – has been vigorously opposed by both Jews and Christians down the centuries. Yet even when censured, the gnostics’ views retained a certain appeal. They said that human
