To tell you the truth, you might not like him if you met him. Chances are you would not invite him for cocktails at the club or for dinner at home with some of your prestigious friends. The likelihood is your children would think him curious and your teenagers would scorn him as not worth an autograph. The tabloids might attempt to puff him up as an oddity or curiosity piece for the sake of profit. But the respectable newspapers might think the news he had was not fit to print. I speak, of course, of John the Baptist.

After a long silence in the unique and influential strain of biblical prophets, John the Baptist appeared in the sparsely settled Jordan River valley preaching a startling message of judgment and repentance. Ascetic, gaunt, austere, and uncompromising, he resembled the auster…