I believe so. But i think John the Baptist went a lot further than that, its my belief that much of what is attributed to JC was actually John.
I am afraid this doesn't really 'work' Christine, insofar as the available textual evidence and scholarship is concerned.
According to most critical scholars, Jesus
did begin as a disciple of John the Baptist and the Gospel of John is the most explicit in affirming that the earliest followers of Jesus had originally been '
Baptists' (in the Second Temple Jewish context of course, not the modern Protestant church!).
Undoubtedly, therefore, the '
Jesus movement' originated as one such splinter group from this preceding Johannine sect and you're quite right in saying that the Baptist is often unfairly relegated to a subsidiary role (as the 'forerunner' to his far more famous protege), whereas he was the motive force in pioneering some rather innovative practices that ultimately distinguished the early Christians from other Jewish sectarians.
However Jesus, in point-of-fact, actually repudiated
much of the lifestyle choices and theology of his old master John. He sought to define himself, in a number of ways, as a very different 'character' to the former.
As the historical Jesus scholar E.P. Sanders explained in his much-acclaimed and now standard study,
The Historical Figure of Jesus:
We must note one of the most interesting aspects of Jesus' ministry: he called 'sinners', and apparently he associated with them and befriended them while they were still sinners. In Matthew 1 I . 1 8f. , quoted just above, Jesus' critics accused him of this behaviour.
Jesus' didn't shun the company of even the worst elements of society. On the contrary, he courted it. Jesus was not given to censure but to encouragement; he was not judgemental but compassionate and lenient; he was not puritanical but joyous and celebratory...
Jesus was conscious of his differences from John, and he commented on them more than once. The prostitutes repented when John preached - not when Jesus preached. John was ascetic; Jesus ate and drank. And Jesus was a friend of tax collectors and sinners - not of former tax collectors and sinners, which is what Zacchaeus was after he met Jesus, but of tax collectors and sinners. Jesus, I think, was a good deal more radical than John.
Jesus thought that John's call to repent should have been effective, but in fact it was only partially successful. His own style was in any case different; he did not repeat the Baptist's tactics. On the contrary, he ate and drank with the wicked and told them that God especially loved them, and that the kingdom was at hand. Did he hope that they would change their ways? Probably he did. But 'change now or be destroyed' was not his message, it was John's. Jesus' was, 'God loves you'.
Jesus told the tax collectors that God loved them, and he told other people that the tax collectors would enter the kingdom of God before righteous people did.
(
p.233)
Jesus certainly seems to have been eschatological in his outlook - which isn't surprising, given that he was at first a disciple of the explicitly apocalyptic figure of John the Baptist, who railed against alleged abuses of power by the Herodian Tetrarchs in Galilee and the Jerusalem priestly establishment, and would appear to have instituted his rite of water baptism (which Jesus affirmed and continued) as a rival to the rituals of the Temple cult in a process of cleansing and moral reform that would lay the groundwork for a restored Israel.
Yet Jesus, whilst calling for or prophesying the Second Temple's destruction, appears - if we can judge by the practices of his first followers - to have been somewhat more even-handed and even a bit more positive in his appraisal of the Temple cult than John, although this is obviously contested amongst scholars.
But he was definitely, at the same time, a much more scandalous person than John.
Because unlike his mentor John - who espoused an austere, heremetical desert lifestyle defined by asceticism in places siphoned off from mainstream society, not unlike the Essenes - Jesus was adamantly
not asceticly-minded. Quite the contrary, he was viewed as a shameless hedonist in his dietary and table-fellowship habits, with his only '
ascetic' quality being a celibate mode of life that he didn't impose on his followers (most of whom, including the Twelve Apostles, were married and thus sexually active men who took their wives with them while spreading the gospel).
As Jesus himself stated in response to his Pharisaic and priestly critics:
John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the
Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Behold, a glutton and
a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' (Matt. 11.1, 8f. / Luke
7.33, 7.33)
