Stephen, perhaps this question will help us achieve clarity, if not consensus.

Why Jesus and not his teacher, John the Baptist?

I have some ideas, but would like to hear yours  Which I certainly hope will be original, but better to be derivative and persuasive, I’ve long thought. 

We must wait in joyful hope for Stephen’s response.  🙂

John was beheaded.  Jesus was crucified.  Crucifixion was far less respectable at the time, as we have discussed in excessive detail.  John was charismatic, better known than Jesus, and probably had a much larger following.  Hard to say how ‘original’ John’s teachings were, since there’s much about the Essenes we don’t know (we don’t even know for sure John was one of them, though it seems a fairly good bet there was a connection).  But we can be very sure Jesus’ ideas stemmed in part from John’s. 

Why did Jesus’ cult become dominant, and ultimately lead to a new religion that is still the largest in the world today?  Jesus had no more intention of starting a new religion than John did.  Both men were apocalyptic in their thinking.  Both inspired Messianic rumors.  John’s cult seems to have survived some time after his death.  John wasn’t crucified. 

Why Jesus and not John?  John is largely remembered now because of Jesus.  Forever in the shadow of his disciple.  Explain what was different. And avoid using words like ‘bluster’, lest you give the impression you have no arguments to make.  I’m right on topic here.  And the topic isn’t me.  🙂

I wasn’t asking to move on.  I wanted an answer. Let’s see how you did.

Jesus had literate followers--actually no, he probably didn’t.  Not while he was alive–maybe a few, but probably not his inner circle, or at least they left no writings behind them, which I think they would have done. You’re right about the power of a written tradition (nothing original there), but why did that happen with Jesus and not John?  Why did he attract more and better writers, after he was crucified?  You don’t know.  Let’s try again.

Christianity contained the ability to modulate and adapt–again–why?  What was different?  When you beg the question, you should be ready to answer it.  Why were Christians more flexible in the way they adapted their traditions?  Why couldn’t John’s followers adapt?  They were faced with exactly the same shock that Jesus’ followers were–the violent death of their teacher (and as they saw it, Messiah) at the hands of the state.  They clearly did about the same thing as Jesus’ followers–went on insisting too all that he was the Messiah, after having suffered and died (so that wasn’t original), very possibly saying that he would return in glory (and they didn’t have to explain why he’d been crucified).  The gospel accounts are all trying in some way to make John subordinate to Jesus.  Wouldn’t have happened if John’s followers had just melted away.  But as time passed, they did.  Why?  

There are more, many more.  Are there now?  Such a short post, if there’s so many.  I know there’s a lot of books, more than everyone on this forum could read in a lifetime, if we divvied them up.  But most of those books don’t really say anything much, and a lot of them are flat-out nonsense. As to the church obscuring Jesus’ doctrines–not entirely, or we wouldn’t know they were being obscured.  They were simultaneously preserved and rationalized, because what Jesus was really asking of people wasn’t practical for an institution to ask–Jesus was imagining a world with no human institutions at all.  I dunno, sounds pretty original to me.  

You’re missing the obvious–but I’m not sure that’s because you can’t see it, or don’t want to.  Show me.  

Okay, I’ll have to assume you can’t figure it out for yourself.

One word–gentiles.  (How did you miss that?)

The reason John’s cult, which probably was larger and more influential than Jesus’ at the time of the crucifixion (and for some time afterward), fell behind was that Christianity became increasingly focused on converting non-Jews.  There were only so many Jews that either cult could hope to bring over to their way of thought (the Messiah wasn’t supposed to be beheaded either), and they were dividing that limited number between them.  Both were headed for extinction, if they remained exclusive.   

But Christianity was already bringing in gentiles, well before Paul had his revelation on the way to Damascus.  Not very many at first, but the precedent was already well-established when Paul showed up.  Paul’s principal innovation was to say they should not be forced to eschew easily available foods and undergo a surgical procedure no adult male can contemplate without disquiet–it was their duty to save as many as they could, before the Kingdom came. 

Nobody was arguing against trying to convert pagans, merely over the terms under which they should be allowed in.   Because Jesus had set that precedent of openness to non-Jews before his death, made it clear that it was faith and good works that mattered, not what religion you’d been raised in, not who your parents had been.  Not a tribe.  A community.  Paul happened along at a time when they’d pretty much gotten as much Jewish support as they were ever going to get, and it wasn’t enough.  So Paul’s argument would have been that Jesus wanted this, and there were stories about him that bore that out. 

There’s no reason to believe John set any such precedent–if he had, things would have been very different. He seems to have waited for people to come to him for baptism. Jesus went out looking for lost sheep.  Primarily fellow Jews, but not exclusively. Pagans were not likely to come to the Jordan to be baptized, but they certainly might stop to listen to a charismatic preacher on the street, who told good stories, and was reputed to be a gifted healer.  (Something pagans all believed in–healing magic.)

You can say the gospels overemphasize this part of his mission–that’s probably true–because they were written by converted gentiles.  Q.E.D.  They didn’t make it up out of whole cloth.  That was a legitimate memory of who Jesus was–the way he would talk to anyone, without regard to background, social class, gender, nationality.  Anyone.  This is consistent with the beliefs he professes in the gospels, and with his rebellion against the Jewish religious establishment. 

Well before Paul recognized the potential of talking to gentiles as if they were God’s children also, Jesus was doing it.   He was also reportedly not so persnickety about following the letter of the Jewish law.  Again–perhaps overemphasized, but not made up out of whole cloth.  How did Paul win that argument?  Because there was a living memory of Jesus’ own unconventional ministry. 

And without any way of increasing their numbers, with the chaos and destruction of the Jewish wars coming, the reorganization of Judaism, and the Diaspora, John’s cult simply died out (unless you count Mandaeism).  Reabsorbed into more traditional forms.  Christianity, by contrast, mutated to the point where it wasn’t part of Judaism anymore, even though it continued to possess many of the strengths of the Jewish tradition, but in a more flexible adaptable form (see, I’m using your terms!).

You can and will quibble with a lot of this.

But none of this explains why you didn’t mention what any scholar would agree was the single most important factor in the rise of Christianity. 

I have to at least suspect that it’s because you don’t want to believe this about Jesus. Because you want to see him as a more limited close-minded person than he was. 

But leaving that aside, if this isn’t originality on Jesus’ part, then neither was anything The NT writers and the early church leaders did.  In the main, they were expanding on (and yes, often partly obscuring) what he’d already said and done, taking it to what seemed like its logical conclusions, in ways he would not have approved of (as has happened with every influential thinker in history).  They took something profoundly original, and incredibly powerful–and remade it into something that could serve the purposes of a growing institution.  Not that they knew they were doing this, at first.  But this is what had to be done, in order for any part of his message to be remembered.

So–Catch 22. 

Robert said

Stephen said
It is unlikely that the historical Jesus had a ministry to the Gentiles.  There are real reasons to think he did not.
Matthew 10:5-6
These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
It’s difficult to see why a later generation which included gentiles would have made this saying up.  
Mark 9:1
And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
Matthew 10:23
When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.
Part of the apocalytptic viewpoint was the expectation of the coming of the kingdom very soon.  These predictions by Jesus are so obviously wrong that once again it’s difficult to imagine a later generation of believers making them up.  If they go back to the historical Jesus as seems likely there just wouldn’t have been time for a gentile ministry. … 

I agree, but again this still begs the question about Jesus’ attitude towards the inclusion of righteous gentiles in the kingdom without necessarily thinking that he himself should organize a missionary outreach toward the gentiles. And we need not trace these statements back all the wway to Jesus. They could also find their origin in early Jewish followers of Jesus or early members of the sect who held a more exclusivist attitude toward gentiles. Matthew seems to be trying to find a balance between at last two groups in his community, one of which had a strict view toward the permanence if the Jewish law.   

Once you’ve opened that door–which might not have been opened by Jesus, but I think it probably was, at least a crack–then it’s a matter of time.  But John didn’t leave that door open–not even a crack–not saying he hated gentiles, or wouldn’t have considered pagan converts–there were Jews who tried to proselytize, even in Rome, and there’s a tradition of conversion in the OT–but it’s marginal.  

Something about Jesus–his openness to all kinds of people–made it easier for Paul and others to push for including gentiles, and once that happens, you’re on a new road, that leads away from Judaism.  Which isn’t what Jesus wanted, but he wouldn’t have objected to trying to reach anyone who could be reached.  “Anyone not against us is for us.”  

Not a ‘ministry.’  Just a door left ajar.  But for an Apocalyptic Jew, that was pretty original.  

Robert said

What is your basis for thinking John did not have a similar attitude toward gentiles as Jesus?   

What is your explanation for Jesus’ cult reaching out to gentiles–before Paul–and John’s apparently not doing that?

We have nothing much specific about John except the gospels (Josephus doesn’t do much more than confirm his existence).  But I don’t see why the gospels (written by pagan converts, as Bart believes) would not depict John as open to gentiles, if that was the case.  John is depicted in Matthew as asking Jesus some questions that could be interpreted as critical.  John was more conservative.  

Everything we hear about Jesus says that he associated with people that respectable Jews considered beyond the pale.

So why would Jesus draw the line at talking to pagans, if they were interested in what he had to say?  

But I don’t see why pagans would come a long distance to get baptized by a Jew.  John simply didn’t get around as much.  

What makes more sense to you–that the gospel writers made up stories about Jesus interacting with pagans–or that he really did that, and they just played those stories up for an audience increasingly made up of pagan converts?  To me, very much the latter.