Why John the Baptist was once more famous than Jesus

With the arrival of Lent, many Christians enter a season marked by fasting and renewed spiritual focus. The 40-day observance recalls the period when Jesus of Nazareth withdrew into the wilderness following his baptism—a decisive moment in his story, and one set in motion by the influence of another preacher whose presence electrified 1st-century Judea: John the Baptist.

It was John’s forceful message and swelling popularity that drew people, including Jesus himself, out to the Jordan River. John is, in fact, one of the most securely documented individuals mentioned in the New Testament. Beyond the Gospel accounts, he appears in the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who describes his messianic message and his eventual execution on Herod Antipas’s orders. John is often reduced to a colorful desert eccentric, one overshadowed by the Gospels. But in antiquity, John had an independent fanbase and his fame continued long after his death.

A Prophet in the Wilderness

John the Baptist is perhaps best remembered for his austere way of life. The Gospels describe him as clothed in camel’s hair and sustained by locusts and wild honey. The rough garment evokes Israel’s past prophets, especially Elijah, who is called a “hairy man” in 2 Kings (which later readers understood to mean that he wore a garment of hair). John’s clothing visually aligned him with the great prophet expected to return before the day of the Lord. It also served to equate the rulers of John’s time—Herod the Great and his son, Herod Antipas—with the morally problematic Ahab and Jezebel of Elijah’s era. John’s self-representation suggested that, just as in the days of Elijah, the people were once again in a dire situation and needed to be called to repentance.

His diet, too, carried symbolic weight. As scholar James Kelhoffer has argued in his book The Diet of John the Baptist, the point of John’s insect-rich meals was not novelty but purity and independence. By living off what he could gather himself, John avoided the social entanglements that came with shared meals and patronage. His diet underscored his embrace of simplicity and his separation from ordinary society. Far from being repelled by this regimen, some late antique Christians admired it. John’s asceticism became a model of disciplined devotion. In certain Syriac traditions, the portrait grows even more rigorous: John is imagined not merely as a desert forager but as a vegetarian, an exemplar of radical bodily restraint.

(What archaeology can tell us about the real Jesus of Nazareth)

In his own day, John was viewed as a prophet. Some even wondered if he was the Messiah. James McGrath, the Clarence Goodwin Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, points to an interesting detail at the end of an early Christian text known as the Infancy Gospel of James. Toward the conclusion of the work, the focus shifts from Jesus to John the Baptist. Herod the Great wanted to eliminate a newborn infant, but in this story, he worries that the future king is Zechariah’s son, John.

Though John the Baptist may seem unusual to modern readers, he was the leader of one of many Jewish prophetic movements that emerged in the 1st century. Against the background of oppressive Roman rule, many Jews hoped for divine rescue. The historian Josephus refers to “deceivers and imposters” who, “under the pretense of divine inspiration,” fostered revolution and “persuaded the multitude to act like madmen and led them out into the desert under the belief that God would there give them signs of deliverance.” One such prophet was Theudas, who lived around 45 CE and who, according to Josephus, led people to the River Jordan promising that he would part the waters as Moses had done. In comparison to Theudas and others, John the Baptist was well liked, at least by Josephus. While Josephus was eager to condemn others as “false prophets,” his assessment of John was positive. He described John as “a good man” who urged the Jewish people toward virtue and righteousness.

A central tenet of that urging was baptism. The idea that immersion in water could cleanse a person of sins was not John’s invention; analogues can be found in the Torah and in ancient Jewish practice. Leviticus suggests that those who need to be cleansed of ritual impurity should bathe themselves in water. The prophet Elisha told Naaman, a military commander afflicted with leprosy, to immerse himself in the River Jordan. Members of the Qumran community—the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls—also practiced ritual immersion. Several scholars have suggested that John adapted his baptism ritual from that practiced at Qumran.

Along with ritual immersion, John the Baptist called people to moral reform. His essential message, like the prophets of Israel before him, was one of repentance from sin in anticipation of God’s imminent action in the world. It is within this atmosphere of urgency that he encountered Jesus of Nazareth.

John and Jesus: Cousins or Competitors?

In the earliest Gospel, of Mark, Jesus first appears not at his birth but at the Jordan River, where John was baptizing. At that moment, as Jesus emerged from the water, the heavens split open and a voice identified him as God’s son.

The scene, however, generated theological tension. The Gospels portray John as administering baptisms for those repenting their sins. Yet Christian tradition insists that Jesus was without sin. Why, then, would he submit to such a ritual? The author of the Gospel of Matthew appears to recognize the difficulty and revises Mark’s version. In Matthew, John protests: “I need to be baptized by you.” Jesus’ reply is somewhat opaque, but later Christian theologians would argue that Jesus underwent baptism not out of personal need, but for model obedience and righteousness for others.

A further complication concerns the relationship between John’s movement and Jesus’ followers. John and his disciples did not immediately align themselves with Jesus after the baptism; instead, the two had separate, arguably competing ministries. In one episode, the imprisoned John sent messengers to ask whether Jesus was truly the expected one—a question that raises its own puzzles. If John witnessed divine confirmation at the baptism, why the uncertainty later? And if he recognized Jesus’ status, why did his own circle not merge seamlessly into Jesus’ movement?

(How the Bible became a holy book)

The Gospel of John addresses this tension by having John explicitly testify that Jesus is the Son of God. Yet in the earlier Synoptic accounts—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—John continues his ministry independently. This has led some scholars to suggest that the two figures may have been perceived as parallel or even rival leaders.

Evidence of John’s independent following appears elsewhere in the New Testament. In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul encounters disciples of John who continued to practice baptism after his death. Some contemporaries even speculated that Jesus might be John returned to life. When Jesus asked his own disciples who people thought he was, they reported that some identified him as John the Baptist. Even Herod Antipas is portrayed as wondering whether Jesus was John raised from the dead.

One Gospel attempted to soften any hint of rivalry by deepening their personal connection. In the Gospel of Luke, John and Jesus are linked before birth. Mary visits her kinswoman Elizabeth while both are pregnant, and Elizabeth’s unborn child leaps in recognition. By presenting the two as relatives whose destinies were intertwined from the womb, Luke reframes their relationship: not competitors, but cousins—participants in a shared divine drama from the very beginning.

Popularity and Politics

In Josephus’s Jewish War, the historian notes that vast crowds gathered around John and he explains that Herod Antipas ordered his execution out of political anxiety, fearing his influence could spark unrest or even rebellion. This assessment paints a portrait of John as a magnetic and potentially destabilizing public leader. It also offers a more historically plausible motive for his death than the dramatic Gospel scene in which Herod executes him at the request of his stepdaughter Salome.

(Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Science may have an answer.)

Josephus adds a striking detail: some believed that Herod’s later military defeat in 37 CE was divine retribution for putting John to death. The rumor only makes sense if John’s execution was widely regarded as unjust and momentous, and if his movement and popularity continued after his death. McGrath notes that “John was more famous than Jesus in his time. It is hard to know how quickly Jesus rose to a comparable prominence in his own right, but the New Testament Gospels are still struggling to elevate Jesus in relation to John the Baptist. The Gospel of John mentions the Baptist before any other human individual, and its emphatic insistence that he was not the light tells us that others assumed that the Baptist was indeed the light.”

In later Christian theology, Jesus eclipses John in significance. But in their own historical moment, the balance of fame tipped the other way. To his contemporaries, John was not a supporting character in someone else’s story. He was a formidable, widely known political prophet whose voice carried across Judea, and whose death reverberated long after he was gone.