Stephen, why do you even bother to bring up scholarly consensus when you feel free to thumb your nose at it on a daily basis?

So what are you saying?  That we must either accept the scholarly consensus unreservedly or completely throw it out? Actually I’m not sure the last time I appealed directly to the scholarly consensus. Perhaps you can refresh my memory as to the context.  My position seems a pretty standard one.  In areas where I’m not qualified to have an opinion (which is a lot) I note the scholarly opinion realizing it is subject to revision.  In those few areas where through my study I have enough expertise to actually have an opinion I note when I agree or disagree.  I’m not sure what’s so flabbergasting about this approach.  I suspect Robert feels the same way.

You have zero evidence for Jesus being arrested at the temple courtyard, and does that deter you one iota?  Heaven help anyone who asks you to back that up!  It’s just OBVIOUS!  

I freely characterized this as a “pet hypothesis” and explained as clearly as I could why I presented it.  I don’t have video of course but my surmise is based on the way the gospel writers treat the story and what we do know about the conditions that would have obtained in the Temple.  As I’ve said before nothing about this area of study is obvious.   It’s certainly not obvious that you read my posts except in the most cursory fashion.  On the other hand I think long and hard before I respond to yours.  (Sorry thinking is a bad habit and I’ve been at it so long I can’t seem to shake it as this point.)

Why would they bring up John at all in the gospels?

A significant question.  There’s clearly some sort of relationship.  Having Jesus be baptized by John is an amazing depiction considering that the writers assumed Jesus’ spiritual superiority.  Any scholar you ask will tell you that the exact nature of that relationship is occluded to us.  Scholars speculate and like Prof Marcus they admit they’re speculating.

…you would have to work damn hard to say there was little or no connection between Jesus and John…

To be such a big literary guy you are a piss poor reader.  I didn’t say this at all.  I said the presumption that Jesus was John’s chief disciple (Elijah/Elisha)  was not born out by the evidence we do have which is very little.   As far as we know Jesus might have been baptized and never talked to John again.  You simply can’t take everything in the gospels at face value.  I’m asking questions here not providing answers. Saying “I don’t know” is not a weakness.  You’re not required to fill up all the gaps.  There will always be blank spaces on our maps.

 …finally having an interesting discussion…

Can’t speak for anyone else but reading you constantly insulting people because they poke holes in your opinions is not very interesting. 

…and you’re sulking because you don’t want Jesus to be interesting…

After all this time you still don’t get how stupid you sound when you pretend you can read my mind.   I find Jesus one of the most interesting subjects imaginable.  But the Jesus I find interesting is the historical Jesus not the Jesus I make up to fit my own needs.  And certainly not the Jesus you make up to fill your needs.

In their religious mythology the Mandeans  have a divine figure named Dinnanukht, described as half-man, half-book, said to sit on the banks of the river that runs between the worlds, reading himself.  A very invocative image.  As I wrote before they’re a contemporary “gnostic” sect in the Middle East who claim a lineage back to John, consider Jesus a Jewish apostate, and perform baptism as a sacrament.  If anyone is curious here is an informative ** you do not have permission to see this link ** managed by Mandeans themselves in the west. 

How seriously should we take their claim to go back to John himself?  Well interestingly enough we can trace them back to the third century before the trail runs out.  They survived by being private and very secretive as you would expect for a community living in areas dominated first by Christians and then Muslims, neither of whom would find their views palatable.  Perhaps inevitably they were treated better by the Muslims than the Christians.  In the late twentieth century until now they have been especially victimized by Islamist groups and many Mandeans have fled to the relative safety of the West.  Here they face other pressures.  They’re an ethnic religion, meaning that you can’t convert.  You’re either born into it or not.  And their youth growing up in the West are distracted by modern culture and understandably enough are more and more separated from the old ways.

They have a large literature and religious scholars in the West have known about them for a long time.  But it is extremely difficult to find translations of their works.  As the group dwindles there have been attempts to disseminate their work lest it be lost.  I have a modern English translation of the GINZA RABBA, “The Holy Treasure”, overseen by the Mandeans themselves, but I had to get it in Germany.  I have a copy of their BOOK OF JOHN, containing their traditions about ‘you know who’ but it was in a single volume of a multi-volume set of translations of Gnostic texts done in the 19th century which I just happened to stumble on at an estate sale!

Fascinating stuff, at least to me.  Here we get a glimpse through the survival of this sect of an ancient world where literally hundreds of these groups must have flourished and thrived and then passed away, lost to time.  Why did the Mandeans survive?  Like the question of why of all the various sects in first century Palestine, it was the Jesus movement that mutated into a world religion, perhaps there is no answer.      

I think you mean ‘evocative’? 

Oh yes, thanks. 

But very unlikely to be directly descended from the original Cult of John. 

True but see Robert’s description of Joel Marcus’ view which is very possible.  These gnostic groups were extremely syncretic.  We can trace the Mandeans back to the third century and we know there were still followers of John in the second, so…it’s just not that big a leap.

But why persecute the Jesus cult, and not John’s?

Well first of all we don’t really know what Paul’s “persecution” actually consisted of.  But the answer to this question isn’t that mysterious.  John’s movement was widely popular and he was seen as being in the direct lineage of the classic Hebrew prophets.  Jesus’ followers were disrupting local synagogues claiming that Jesus, a crucified criminal, was the Jewish Messiah.   

Joel Marcus compares John and Jesus to Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X

Weeell… we can intuit that there was some kind of relationship.  It also seems pretty clear that Jesus drew  some of his followers from John’s movement.  But assuming that Jesus was some kind of chief disciple of John goes beyond the evidence.  The latter engages in a bit of question begging as well.  (The informal logical fallacy not  the pretentious euphemism for ‘raising the question’.) It assumes that Jesus was special and that John would have perceived him as special.  This is of course the strategy of the gospel writers to rationalize the relationship between Jesus and John.

Oh right, because the Jesus cult happened to attract geniuses, and John’s didn’t

Mocking a point of view is not the same as addressing it.  I’m not sure why this is even controversial.  If the oral traditions about Jesus had not been committed to writing by a literate strata of followers then Jesus would have gone the way of most of the messiahs and prophets and gurus in the past, lost to history.

One more item about the Mandeans.  I found a website devoted to the Gnostic scriptures that have survived to the present and it includes some selections from the ** you do not have permission to see this link **.  None of the translations are very recent but it will give anyone interested a flavor of the Mandean “style”.  What it reminds me of is the poetry, and especially the so-called “prophetic” works of William Blake.   It’s interesting how similar the gnostic imagination was over the centuries.  It tended towards the liturgical, poetry and ecstatic speech over historicism or narrative.   We’re reminded how lucky we are to have the material we do and invited to consider all that has probably been lost due to suppression or neglect.