James McGrath, welcome to the show. Hi, Alex. Good to be talking to you. You've written two books

about who I think is the most mysterious character of the New Testament. I mean, there are

literally characters that we just know less about. But given how important this person is,

and given how much people think they kind of know about him John the Baptist is in my estimation the most mysterious person in the New Testament. I've taken an

interest in him recently and I've been asking people like, so you know John the Baptist?

I go, yeah, of course I know John the Baptist, yeah.

Okay, who is he?

Well, he's the guy that baptized Jesus.

Okay, what does that mean?

Like, what is, what is baptism in that time, like before Christianity existed?

What, like, what was he doing?

Oh, well, he prepared the way. Like,

in what sense? What does that mean? And you only need to dig a little bit beneath the surface

to realize that we kind of don't really know much about any of this kind of stuff. So,

why was it that John the Baptist was, like, enough of interest to you that you decided to write about?

Yeah.

So there's a long version of that story, which I'll try and keep, I'll try and give as much

of it as I think will be interesting and leave out at least some of the details.

You mentioned I wrote two books on the subject, so that at least hopefully indicates the level of interest that I'm bringing to this topic.

But they're two very different books, right?

So sometimes academics will write, you know, scholarly monograph, and then we'll do a sort of a popular version that's just like without the footnotes and stuff.

But what I tried to do for this project was much more, what I think we really

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