JOHN026 - Ol' Fred Karno and His Famous Successor

John 1:6-8

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

I'm gonna give you a name here. Let's see if you know it. Frederick John Westcott. Does that ring a bell? It's okay if it doesn't. It's not an assassin, by the way. I know it sounds like an assassin because I said all three names, but no, no, he's not that. He's an entertainer. Let me give you his stage name. That was more famous. Maybe you've heard of this. How about Fred Carno? My guess is that almost none of you are gonna have that. I didn't. I had to look it up. I couldn't remember the guy's name. Boy, let me tell you, if I was asking this question a hundred years ago to your great or great-great-grandparents, oh, they all would have known who Fred Carno was. And they'd be making fun of you for being totally out of touch. What do you not even old timey radio? Kids these days, man, they just don't appreciate the classics. No, they all knew who Fred Carno was because Fred Carno is the guy who invented the pie in the face gag. He was an English comedian who did satirical silent slapstick sketch comedy at music halls. He recruited and trained up young comedians. To this day, in Hollywood, if somebody's doing slapsticks, sometimes that's called doing a Carno. So this guy was a huge deal, yet pretty much none of us have ever heard of him at all. He recruited some very famous people and he trained them up. And my guess is you have heard of a couple of these people, like Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy. This is still really old timey. Or how about Charlie Chaplin, his most famous student and understudy? He made Charlie Chaplin famous. He gave him his big break. Yet it's funny the way history works, right? Because if you wanted to explain Charlie Chaplin, whatever, yeah, a hundred years ago or so, you would start by explaining Fred Carno, and then you'd be like, and this Charlie Chaplin fella, he was his understudy, and it would be like, oh wow. That's how we know Charlie Chaplin is important. But now, if you want to explain Fred Carno, you got to explain Charlie Chaplin. And then people are like, oh wow, okay, so I've never heard of this Carno guy, but he seems like he was a pretty big deal. This isn't rocket science that I'm throwing out here. This is just the nature of how fame and celebrity ebbs and flows over time. Well, when we pick up the Bible or really any ancient work of writing, we have to keep in mind this reality about how name recognition works in the larger world. History has a compressive effect. When we look back, we don't tend to notice the nuance between 50 AD and 100 AD, but we definitely notice the nuance between 1975 and 2025. Well, who was famous and a name that everybody should know? And how could you not know this name? That changed over the course of a hundred years in the first century AD. And one of the biggest names in the whole Roman world in the first century, after you got past emperors and military leaders and maybe some artists or writers or whatnot, was a religious figure named John the Baptist. This dude had no money, he dressed like a homeless guy, he ate locusts and honey, and he lived out, not even in the nice part of Judea. He lived out in the desert, and yet he led this huge religious revival that you could say was a reform movement within Judaism, a resuscitation of Judaism, a reorientation, maybe within Judaism. John the Baptist comes along in the early part of the first century AD and is a complete rejectionist. Nah, we're not doing any of that. Instead, I'm going to orient all of you back to this idea of the kingdom of God and the Messiah. John the Baptist calls people to repentance and baptized them. Apparently, a whole bunch of people went out into the desert to figure out more about what he was doing. Apparently, there was a hunger for this. Apparently, God was moving people's hearts. And if it feels like I'm just really fast skipping over a bunch of important details about John, don't worry. We're going to talk about John the Baptist a lot this week because this is the next thing we're getting dealt here in the Gospel of John, chapter one. You know, when we look back at the first century AD, and I'm like, hey, who's the most famous religious figure of the first century AD? None of you are going to say John the Baptist. I mean, he was awesome. Jesus said great things about John the Baptist, but I mean, come on, it's Jesus of Nazareth. He's the big deal. But remember, fame and celebrity, and all of the it ebbs and flows. Takes a while for a name to disseminate. And John the Baptist had a bit of a head start on Jesus. People had a sense of what his religious revival was about before Jesus. And even though John the Baptist died young, like his cousin Jesus would later do, his followers were still very active. We're going to talk a bunch more about this as well. And they went way beyond Judea to all different parts of the empire. We see evidence of that in the New Testament. So this guy was a huge, huge deal. Now, his name held up a lot better than Fred Carno's name. And obviously, Fred Carno to Charlie Chaplin is a lot different in terms of implications than John the Baptist's relationship to Jesus of Nazareth. But hear me out here for just a minute. Again, there was a time in history where if you wanted to explain who Charlie Chaplin was, you would have to start by explaining Fred Carno, and then people would be like, oh, now I see why Charlie Chaplin's a big deal. It would seem the same arc of fame is happening in the first century AD. Lots of people probably heard about John the Baptist first. Also, there was no New Testament in the early going. So as people heard about Jesus, they probably viewed that early on as something that maybe had to do with John, but John was the big deal. It's later on that it comes into focus for everybody Jews, non-Jews, Christians, non-Christians, that okay, Jesus was the point all along. He's the big deal here, but John the Baptist was the very ultra famous forerunner. Why am I telling you all of this stuff about why are we talking about fame? Why are we talking about Fred Carno and Charlie Chaplin? Well, because I'm trying to set up, I'm trying to make sense, that is, of why John, the gospel writer, is organizing John chapter one the way he's organizing it. To me, at first glance, it seems a little bit weird that he's spending so much time talking about John the Baptist in John chapter one. Why? Just tell us about Jesus. He's the famous one. And most of the prologue is about Jesus. I mean, movement number one in the beginning was the word. Ah, so Jesus, the Logos, the Word, He is God. Movement number two, Jesus the Logos, the Word. He is fully participatory in creation. Movement number three, ah, Jesus Logos, the Word. He is the light of man. He's a revelation of God to humanity. Movement number four, ah, Jesus Logos, the Word. He is God in the flesh. But right in the middle of those four movements, we get this, verse six. There came a man who was sent from God. His name was John. Now I keep saying the Baptist every time I read this, because I just want to differentiate between the John who wrote John, who was a disciple of Jesus and younger than John the Baptist, and John the Baptist, who is the Fred Carno to Jesus Charlie Chaplin. He, John the Baptist, came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. I'm going to read that again in a second. But think about what we've been talking about here, about the arc of fame and how one name might pop first, but the name that pops second is the one that really sticks, the one that really matters. And remember that John is writing this to an audience that maybe doesn't have clarity yet on how Jesus and John fit together. They're aware of the fame of both. They've been aware of the fame of John the Baptist longer. It seems like John the Baptist in their mind, therefore, is kind of the OG who holds the keys to this whole religious revival movement that maybe is for me as a reader. I don't know. I'm not Jewish. I don't understand all of this, but I've heard of John the Baptist and I've heard of Jesus. John is probably writing to an audience here who is well aware of the fame of both, but in their brains, they might have John the Baptist as being famouser, older, and more established. And this whole thing kind of has to run through the fame of John the Baptist. So, John, you got to explain that to me here as you're writing this gospel. It's really hard for us to picture that because obviously history's happened and we've read the rest of the Bible or heard about it, and we've heard of Jesus, and we know how this plays out. But remember, there was a time where the best way to explain Charlie Chaplin was to attach it to the much more famous Fred Carno. You and I know that Capital W word or Logos means Jesus, but I don't think the original audience knows this yet. I think there were many people who were brand new to this in this audience who were thinking the capital W word, the Logos, is going to be John the Baptist, because that's the bigger name, that's who they've heard of. And so imagine them encountering this for the first time. The Logos is God. The Logos made everything. The Logos is the light that shines in the darkness. And this original audience who's just going on reputation and how many times they've heard a name repeated, maybe they're like, okay, and the Logos is going to be John the Baptist. But it's not. So the gospel writer John, then, if I'm thinking straight about this, is correcting that misconception, that very understandable misconception that comes with the gravity of fame and celebrity. He's fixing that misconception right at the top. And what he's saying is, well, I'll tell you what I think he's saying right after I read it. So bear all that in mind. Let me read it again. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. There came a man who was sent from God. His name was John. And the audience is like, Oh, I've heard of him. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. Oh, wait a minute, says the original audience. So I'm not supposed to believe in John the Baptist, but i wasn't he famous first? Isn't that's the name I keep hearing? I hear Jesus. So wait a minute. So I don't put my faith in John the Baptist. I I gotta read more. What are you talking about? Okay, so John the Baptist came as a witness to testify concerning that light. So the light is somebody else, so that through him all men might believe. John the Baptist himself was not the light. Oh, that's pretty explicit. He came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. Okay, well, who is that? Now at this point, I think there's a ton of people in the original audience who are going, okay, well, I've also heard of the reputation of Jesus. He was raised from the dead. We haven't heard his name yet here in this document, but the reader is probably thinking to themselves at this point, okay, John the Baptist, bigger name recognition? But you're telling me there's something better than that? Okay, I'm teased, I'm intrigued, I want to know more. Then John goes back to the rest of the prologue and he spells out more about the incarnation, still talking about the light and the logos and all of that, but he still has not dropped Jesus' name. And then in verse 15, which you and I haven't touched yet, he comes back around to John the Baptist. And we'll get into exactly what he says there next time around. But what I wanted to try to accomplish today is to orient ourselves more like the original audience would have felt reading this cold for the first time, going only on name recognition and rumors and stories and hearsay, and knowing John the Baptist is a big deal, but also knowing Jesus is a big deal, and maybe not knowing exactly how the two relate. With that in mind, John is doing even more work with this prologue than it initially looked like to me. And obviously, we have a ton more to unpack here, and we'll get to that. All right, that's probably plenty for today, except for this note. Every time moving forward that you see somebody getting a pie in the face, make sure to think of Fred Carno. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.