Malachi151

I find it interesting that Paul, as far as I can see, never mentions John the Baptist, yet the things that Paul says about Jesus correspond to things that we have record of other people saying about John the Baptist, and indeed there are John the Baptist religions that developed in parallel to Christianity and still survive.....

Toto

Jay Raskin has put forth this hypothesis. The Evolution of Christs and Christianity (or via: amazon.co.uk).

I only know of one religion that still thinks of John the Baptist as the main prophet, the Mandean sect, and I believe that most scholars think that it is a later sect of Islam that adopted John to distinguish themselves from other sects, not a surviving sect that can be traced back to John.

andrewcriddle

I think there is reasonably good evidence that the Mandaeans are originally a gnostic group going back to around 200-300 CE.

I agree that their emphasis on John the Baptist does not go back to John himself, and may be rather late.

Andrew Criddle

spin

Do you think that Mandaeans' connection with John could be analogous to the christians' connection with Jesus?


spin

andrewcriddle

IMVHO both later Christianity and Mandaeanism go back in different ways to Jesus and early Christianity, and share (some) common elements.

The Mandaeans distinguished themselves from their Christian rivals by claiming (non-historically) that these common elements originated with John the Baptist, came to them directly from him and were preserved by them accurately; but had been distorted by Jesus (the renegade disciple of John) and were present in Christianity only in a corrupt form.

(I can't prove this, the evidence isn't good enough, but you asked me what I thought.)

Andrew Criddle

spin

Well, thanks. It was an interesting response.


spin

Chili

They are kind of right because Jesus is the way but not the end. The end is when the favorite disciple was introduced as Mary's son and that was John in the merger of the old with the new but no longer called John because the new was added to the old and therefore became known as Christ and later Jesus Christ.

That would be the reason why Jesus left and Christ stayed so that Jesus can come again to show us the way in a one-by-each kind of way (Jn.21:22). Hint, there is no second coming of Christ in Christendom.