The saying about John as the greatest, and then about the
least in the kingdom, makes the best sense when it is understood to involve a
temporal/eschatological contrast. Two options present themselves. One possibility
is that the focus is on the privilege those have who will be alive to see the
kingdom of God fully dawn, an advantage that John, having been executed, missed
out on. As an analogy, one can imagine someone saying that among those born of
women there was none greater than Moses, yet the last of those who entered the
promised land was greater than he. The point would not be that Moses’s
greatness was being affirmed and yet immediately denied, but that those who
entered the promised land had a privilege Moses did not. Another possibility is
that the statement means that as great as John is with the present age, the
least in the kingdom of God when it fully dawns will then be greater
than John the Baptist is now. The greatness of the very least of those
who enter the kingdom of God, once they are transformed into that new kind of
existence, will exceed the greatness of the greatest person to live in human
history, mainly John. The Gospel of Thomas uses a future tense in the saying:
the last in the kingdom will become higher or more exalted than John. (James
F. McGrath, John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical
Baptizer [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2024], 24-25)
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