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Dear Catholic Exchange,
How long was John the Baptist’s ministry? Where did he preach? How many disciples did he have? Thank you,
Ania
Dear Ania,
Peace in Christ! I have included a hyperlink to our Faith Fact on the Baptist which will provide you a little background information.
To answer your question, we do not know exactly how long he preached or how many disciples he had. But the indirect evidence from Scripture suggests that he was a very influential preacher with a large following. In fact, it is very likely that there were many followers of the Baptist who never became believers in Jesus (cf. Acts 18:24-19:7). Apparently the followers of John the Baptist who considered him a prophet were numerous enough that the Scribes and Pharisees could not risk offending them in their plot against Jesus (cf. Mt 21:25-27; Mk 11:30-33; Lk 20:1-8). The New Testament writers almost certainly wrote the Gospels with the idea of bringing John’s many disciples into the Christian fold. They tended to believe a variety of things about John and Jesus. Some thought that Jesus was not the one to whom John bore witness. Luke 7:18-29 records John himself uncertain about Jesus’s identity, but is straightened out by the signs and wonders performed by our Lord, who goes on to praise John with great testimony (cf. Lk 8:28) Thus, there is reason to believe that Luke wrote this passage really to attract the followers of John the Baptist to belief in Jesus as Lord. Indeed, all four Gospel writers make great effort to show John passing the torch to Jesus as if to point the way for the followers of the Baptist who may not have understood John’s true role or Jesus’s identity (cf. Mt 3:11-17; Mk 1:1-11; Lk 1:5-80, 3:1-22; Jn 1:19-42, 3:22-36).
John also was apparently so highly esteemed that the many signs and wonders performed by Jesus caused many to wonder if Jesus was really John the Baptist come back to life. Perhaps because of this belief, all the gospel writers go to some lengths to set the record straight. John’s Gospel has John the Baptist denying that he is the Christ (cf. Jn 1:6-9; Jn 1:19-23). Matthew, Mark, and Luke all depict as erroneous the belief that Jesus was really John the Baptist raised from the dead. Luke associates it with Herod (cf. Lk 9:7-9) while Mark and Matthew actually attribute it to him (cf. Mk 6:14-16; Mt 14:1-2), probably in part to discredit the belief in the eyes of John’s followers who detested the murderer of their leader. All three evangelists then correct the error by having Peter (who was probably himself a disciple of the Baptist; cf. John 2:35-41) correctly identify Jesus as the Christ (cf. Mt 16:16; Mk 8:29; Lk 9:20).
Where John conducted his ministry is not known for certain. All four Gospel writers make it clear that John ministers “in the wilderness” (following Isaiah 40:3) and in the area of the Jordan wearing camel hair subsisting on a diet of locusts and wild honey (cf. Mk 1:6). It is likely that John would have ventured to Galilee at least once to confront Herod about the illegitimacy of his marriage to Herodias. Only John the Evangelist tells us that the Baptist’s main place of ministry was in Bethany “beyond the Jordan” (cf. Jn 1:28). The puzzling thing about this assertion is that the only Bethany that is known to history is not “beyond the Jordan” but is in fact near Jerusalem (cf. Jn 11:18). There are a few textual variants however which have John baptizing not in Bethany but in Bethabara, which would make more sense for three reasons. One, it is a known location truly “beyond the Jordan.” Two, it means “house of crossing over” which would be prophetic since Jesus does bring with Him a kingdom which crosses over from the Old Testament to the New. Three, it was the place where Gideon won an important victory against the Midianites which helped to secure Israel’s possession of the Promised Land.
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