Come hear the latest from our inscrutable biblical scholar, Bill Sharp, on his further journeys and explorations into topics drawn from the Bible.

The authors of the canonical gospels of the New Testament go to great lengths to insist that John the Baptist was an opening act to warm up the crowd for Jesus’ ministry.

Yet there is evidence to suggest that Jesus was at least for a time a disciple of John. Secular historians are pretty much in agreement that John baptized the historical Jesus, one of perhaps two facts about Jesus deemed accurate from a purely historical perspective.

Some suggest that John and Jesus were running concurrent ministries that competed for followers.

How and why did the gospel authors acknowledge the importance of John yet assert that he was subordinate to Jesus?