The John the Baptist Podcast via Youtube
IMAGE: The Locust or Carob Tree, also called the Saint John's Tree of the Middle East. Hanging from it are carob pods. Yeah, they do somewhat resemble "locusts" to some extent, thus the name.
John the Baptist has a tarnished caveman reputation of being all about bugs and bees, eating locusts and honey in the wilderness. But this is really a story about one religion misunderstanding another, and a copiest mistranslating a Greek word and then his mistake is declared to be enshrined as scripture. Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcast @ Youtube: https://youtu.be/rBM34Cm4laE
I just received my copy of, New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. III, edited by Tony Burke. As with the earlier volumes there are some John the Baptist books included. In one of the earlier volumes there was a vegetarian passage. In this new volume are, The Birth of Holy John the Forerunner, and, The Decapitation of John the Forerunner, both containing plant-based passages about John's diet consisting of "locusts from the tree" and "wild honey", also "an abundance of bread and wild honey dripping from a rock". Clearly there was an understanding by some in early Christianity that "locust" was referring to the carob pod and maybe a kind of carob flour flat bread, and the "wild honey" was not from bees but sticky fruit of some kind, not a diet from bugs and bees.
Indeed, there is a ‘vegetarian’ depiction of John’s diet in the Gospel of the Ebionites: "His [John the Baptist's] food was wild honey that tasted like manna, like a cake cooked in olive oil." (Verse from the Gospel of the Ebionites found translated in, The Other Gospels, Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament, by Bart Ehrman)
“Probably the most interesting of the changes from the familiar New Testament accounts of Jesus comes in the Gospel of the Ebionites description of John the Baptist, who, evidently, like his successor Jesus, maintained a strictly vegetarian cuisine.” (Professor Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, pp. 102, 103)
