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patrick457
Guest
Why would you think that the Mandaeans are valuable for studying the historical John the Baptizer or his teachings just because they revere him?I haven’t seen any serious scholar so far hypothesizing that John was a zealot, except from Hagan… oh, wait, Hagan isn’t a scholar… ok. I know it doesn’t mean anything, often an amateur can see things scholars with high credentials can’t, but hey you can’t infer that from Josephus. All “historical jesus” hypothesis fall in the same trap: none of them are agnostic enough. Hagan is biased and unilateral, not agnostic. He doesn’t consider the church fathers for one because he didn’t consider them “serious enough”. Scholars give too much credit to Josephus while we all know his work has several inaccuracies. He is an important source of historical study, if I may, but that doesn’t make him accurate. Not only he didn’t consider the church fathers, as well as he didn’t consider the apocryphal gospels, or even the parallel sects traditions, such as the mandeans. Why? Because they aren’t “academically serious” to him. Cross Josephus with the fathers, parallel sects, apocriphal gospels, etc. and Hagan’s theory is all torn apart. IMHO, if you want to trace the historical John, studying the evolution of the mandean sect is far more accurate than if one infers from a couple of lines from Josephus that may have several unknown interpolations. So far, there’s no historical Jesus, historical John theory that can’t be refuted - “secular” or “conservative”, although it’s been much easier to refute the secular.
I know and agree that you can’t take what Josephus writes entirely on face value (that’s what higher criticism is for), but the fact is, Josephus is our only contemporary literary source for the period in question.