Christmaker! With James McGrath

Dan McClellan (0:01)

It's in the Gospel, he must increase while I must decrease. He kind of passes the baton.

James McGrath (0:05)

Yeah, and that's made so explicit in the Gospel of John that scholars, historically skeptical scholars, are like, yeah, right, okay.

Dan McClellan (0:15)

How convenient. Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (0:22)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (0:24)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things, Dan?

Dan Beecher (0:37)

Man, I'm ready to go. I'm excited because we've got a guest today and I think some minds are gonna get blue. We're gonna blow some minds.

Dan McClellan (0:49)

Yeah, and not in the arrested development sense, but in something hopefully a little more productive, a little more constructive. Our guest today is a long time friend of mine, James F. McGrath.

Welcome to the show, James.

James McGrath (1:04)

Thanks so much. So good to be here on D&D, D over D.

Dan McClellan (1:10)

And James is a professor of New Testament at Butler University in lovely Indiana. I don't know that I've ever, what city in Indiana is it?

James McGrath (1:19)

Indianapolis.

Dan McClellan (1:20)

It is in Indianapolis, okay.

Dan Beecher (1:22)

Right there in India, all right.

Dan McClellan (1:23)

The namesake itself, all right.

Dan Beecher (1:24)

Well, James, I want you to know that I was talking to Dan about you, and at one point he said a sentence that I heard as he's a butler. And I was like, he's got a side, you've got a side job as a butler? No, no, no, okay, fine. He's at Butler, I get it, all right.

James McGrath (1:46)

Yeah, well, when I was on sabbatical working on the book that we're gonna be talking about today, I was in the UK for part of it, and hadn't heard of Butler University, and I was thinking they were gonna think Butler Training School or something like that.

Dan Beecher (2:00)

I like it, I like it. It's good to have a career you can fall back on.

Dan McClellan (2:03)

There you go.

The Indianapolis School of Butlery, or Butlerage or whatever it's called. And when I was, I hung out with you for a day in Oxford last October at lovely Maudlin College, overlooking to some degree the garden there, which I was actually, I was there back in October with my family. We decided to go hit up the garden since I had such a lovely time last time. So thank you for introducing that to me.

James McGrath (2:34)

Oh, no, thanks for stopping by and hanging out. It was, you know, that's always fun.

But yeah, this was, I basically took a year and did very little else other than think about John the Baptist, write down the results of that.

Dan Beecher (2:48)

So I think that's a great intro into what we are going to be talking about. The title of your book, which I think is a great title, is Christmaker, which is fantastic. And what we're talking about John the Baptist, who I thought I might know something about, but it turns out I knew almost nothing. I mean, and you've mentioned this sort of in the intro to the book, you talk about how when people, people just sort of assume that they know what, you know, if they've read the New Testament, they kind of, they feel like they got a sense of John the Baptist. You know, if you go to galleries around the world, you see paintings of a guy with crazy hair and some sort of caveman loin cloth made out of camel. And that's, and then you let any, you know, he got a guy wet. And that's kind of what you know about John the Baptist. And I was surprised to learn that there is a lot more that we, that, to know about this figure. And so I'm excited to get into it with you.

And maybe we should start with just who was this guy?

We know that he was the same time frame as Jesus, but he wasn't a disciple of Jesus. It was kind of the other way around.

James McGrath (4:22)

Yeah, and that's one of those things that oftentimes is, the first, it's like, wait, Jesus was someone else's disciple?

No, can't be, can't possibly be. And a lot of people respond quite forcefully in a negative way to that idea even being floated.

But on the one hand, we have Jesus being baptized by John, which seems to indicate at the very least, it indicates Jesus' acceptance of John, his teaching, his movement, right? In some way, shape or form. But Jesus also, I mean, he praises John in a way he doesn't praise anyone else. He connects his own authority and activity with John in a way that John keeps coming up. It's like, John, the son of man, there's, you want to know by what authority I do these things, well, let me ask you one question. John's baptism. And so he constantly is linking himself with John.