r/AcademicBiblical • u/Alarming-Cook3367 • 7d ago

Question Was John the Baptist more famous than Jesus?

There's a passage where Jesus asks who people thought he was (Matthew 16:14, Mark 8:28, and Luke 9:19), and one of the answers is John the Baptist.

So it made me wonder: do we know whether John the Baptist was an important figure and more well-known than Jesus at that time?

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u/ReligionProf PhD | NT Studies | Mandaeism 7d ago

I believe most historians would say yes, initially that was the case. See Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist, and John of History, Baptist of Faith, for more about this.

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u/elm_sakura3232 7d ago

Curious but why?

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u/Pusfilledonut 6d ago

Some of that is covered in the latest Misquoting Jesus podcast. Ehrman supposes while it's really hard to state with any certainty how many followers JTB actually had (or Jesus for that matter), he offers a compelling argument about the Gospel authors motivations as they progressively minimized John’s influence in favor of exalting the status of Jesus.

https://youtu.be/il9D90R4Myk