Everybody thinks they know John the Baptist. He has good name recognition. There are at least a couple of things he is famous for that most people can rattle off. Yet I bet most readers of this book know him the way they know a homeless man they pass on their way to work each day, or a teller who tallies up the cost of their groceries every week at the supermarket. If the individuals in question suddenly disappeared and you were asked to describe them, where you thought there was familiarity, you would instead find an astonishing lack of detail, little apart from vague impressions. John is like that and yet different in at least one important respect. While every human being is inherently deserving of our respect, and our full attention when we interact with them, John the Baptist is someone who deserves to be not merely familiar but famous, for reasons that this book will explore. He presents the classic case of someone you would expect to be famous in their own right, yet who has been almost completely overshadowed by those who followed after him—even by individuals and traditions that explicitly give John credit for influencing them.
Our comparison to a homeless man was not chosen at random. Whether you have encountered John in stories in the Bible, in paintings, or in movies, you have probably been given the impression of John as someone who looked like something of a mess. For modern people, all you have to do is say that John ate locusts, and they will immediately envisage an unhinged bug-eating vagrant. Add to that the camel-hair clothing, and it cements the impression. If you have seen movies and television shows in which John is a character, his hair seems to become more wild and unkempt every time a new one is made. As it turns out, John’s hair will prove to be very important to his story. His clothing, on the other hand, is something that traditional artwork and on-screen depictions get badly wrong. Admit it—you probably have the impression that John dressed like a caveman. Paintings and cinematic depictions might lead you to think that John had wrestled a camel to death, torn off its hide with his bare hands, and casually wrapped it about himself. John’s clothing was not at all like that. Clothing from camel hair was rougher and less luxurious than that made from other types of fabric, but it was clothing. Indeed, you can still get yourself a camel-hair suit today (although, to be clear, I am not suggesting that John the Baptist wore one of those). John would not have been the only person wearing clothing from such material in his time. It was the fact that he wore it consistently—especially as the son of a priest, who could have dressed in something more comfortable—that made it striking. Add the leather belt, and it became clear to his contemporaries that John was essentially engaging in what we today might call cosplay.
John’s clothing was reminiscent of what the prophet Elijah had worn (2 Kings 1:8). By dressing as he did, John styled himself as a prophet in the vein of those who shake things up, challenge the status quo, and even bring about regime change. John had the attention of political and religious leaders. According to Acts 19:1–7, he had followers as far away as Ephesus. This was no recluse, no street-corner oddball that people might be inclined to avoid. This was someone who was taken very seriously, on whose every word many people hung.
So perhaps we don’t know John as well as we think. The reason people today are even aware of John is one that would have been unimaginable in his own lifetime. We know John because of Jesus. Equally unfathomable for most people alive today is that when John and Jesus were contemporaries, Jesus was known through his association with John. We are provided many indications of this in early Christian literature. At the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, the author tells his patron Theophilus that he has thoroughly researched the momentous events that had recently unfolded and wishes to present him with an orderly account of it all. He then starts not with Jesus, or even with Jesus’s parents, but with Zechariah and Elizabeth and their son John. Toward the end of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:27–33), when religious leaders challenge Jesus and ask by what authority he does such things as driving out money changers and sellers of animals from the temple, Jesus responds by asking them about John’s authority and the source of his baptism. Jesus and John were linked, not just in the minds of their opponents and of early Christian authors but apparently also in the mind of Jesus himself. When we consider this, we realize that in our tendency to rush past John on the way to Jesus, we have made two mistakes. On the one hand, we have failed to pay adequate attention to someone who had a profound influence on Jesus. If we do not understand John correctly, we will misunderstand Jesus as well.
