Introducing John the Baptist

 This next part is about a person: John the Baptist. John the disciple Jesus doesn’t seem to go into details about the personal lives of the characters in his Gospel. He leaves that to the other Gospel writers. He does, on the other hand, seem to give a lot of background information.

19 Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders[c] in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. 20 He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”

21 They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?” Malachi 4:5 "See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes.”

He said, “I am not.”

“Are you the Prophet?” Deuteronomy 18:15-18: 15 “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him. 16 For this is what you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, “Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire anymore, or we will die.”

17 The Lord said to me: “What they say is good. 18 I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in his mouth. He will tell them everything I command him.”

He answered, “No.”

22 Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”

23 John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’” Isaiah 40:3 “A voice of one calling: "In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

24 Now the Pharisees who had been sent 25 questioned him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

26 “I baptize with[e] water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. 27 He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

28 This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

I’m going to take a quick detour back to the previous section I analyzed. Though more poetic than this section, John 1:1-18 has an uncanny resemblance to Genesis 1. I think that is purposeful. At least so far, John seems to be trying to connect the old with the new. He does the same here. Instead of using flowery wording, he uses the conversation John the Baptist had with the religious leaders.

John actually has a fascinating story. The most in depth version of John the Baptist's story would probably be Luke. I'm not going to go into it here as that would be a whole other Bible study. It does give the point though that it is always a good idea to look at everything related to a passage in the Bible. The people John the Apostle were talking to were probably already well versed in who were the main characters of the Gospels. John was giving a different view on it not retelling the story verbatim (though if you read the gospels in chronological order, some of it is verbatim to one another, which makes me think they had the same source).

So, there you have it, John the Baptist, a man foretold thousands of years before he was a twinkle in the eye of his parents (or they there's)

The references I gained to the linked Bible passages comes from: http://biblehub.com