Claim. After baptizing Jesus and bearing witness to him, John the Baptist separated from Jesus and continued baptizing independently rather than serving as Jesus’s foremost disciple — directly contradicting his father Zechariah’s prophecy that John would “serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life” (75).
Elaboration. Per 2.3. The Faithlessness of John the Baptist: “John the Baptist’s mission as a witness ended when he baptized Jesus and testified to him. What should his mission have been after that point?” Zechariah, “filled with the Holy Spirit,” had prophesied that JtB would serve the Messiah lifelong. “However, John left Jesus and went about baptizing independently.”
DP cites the consequence: “the Jewish people were confused to the point of even supposing that John was the Messiah. Their leaders were confused, too.” A quarrel even erupted between “a Jew who followed Jesus and the disciples of John the Baptist… over whose teacher was giving more baptisms” (John 3:25-26). JtB’s own statement “he must increase, but I must decrease” (30) is read by DP as evidence that JtB did not regard himself as “sharing the same destiny as Jesus” — if he had, “how then could John ever decrease as Jesus was increasing?”
DP reads “decrease vs increase” as confession, not humility — JtB framing himself as on a separate trajectory rather than as Jesus’s chief witness. The mainstream reading takes the same line as humble subordination; DP reads structural separation.
His life “was eventually lost over a relatively insignificant affair” — the Herodias episode — instead of being offered for Jesus’s sake.
See also. dp-jtb-prison-doubts-confirm-faithlessness, dp-jtb-faithlessness-was-main-reason-jesus-had-to-die