Sometimes it happens to students that they conceive ideas that are contextually original to them but which someone else has already beaten them to in print. That happens in every discipline, actually, and it can be really frustrating if someone is anxious to finish a dissertation and begin their academic life, so to speak (which these days usually means grunting around in a variety of postdoc opportunities and maybe, but not certainly, taking an assistant professorship at some off-the-wall university, and serfing along the way). I cycled through probably three different ideas for an MA thesis at MSU before I arrived at something that did not seem to me to have been done—deification in the Johannine Apocalypse—and the experience was tiresome enough that I did not bother to write a thesis when I did my Classics MA (though I had some genuinely original seminar papers in that program). As I pivoted to teach k-12 in the years following, I never had to go through the crisis of getting a PhD (but, to be clear, I’m sometimes sad about that and periodically think about what it could look like to go get a doctorate after all), so I have never had to have that kind of competition in publication pressure that other students feel. The glory of Substack is that I’m not peer-reviewed and I’m not claiming to be; I cite my sources here, but I also am my own editor, so I can print retractions or follow-ups to anything I want and not worry about the consequences for my career (teaching high school Latin and Greek is, thankfully, entirely separate from running this dispatch).
I say all of that by way of preface to this post, which is a review of a book I had not read when I published my recent “Why Did Jesus Get Baptized?”, Joel Marcus’s John the Baptist in History and Theology (Columbia, SC: USC Press, 2018). I thank Wesley Hill for informing me about the book, which I devoured in about two days earlier this week. In a nutshell, many of the ideas I arrived at through analysis of the primary sources in my blog post are things that Marcus has beaten me to. There are useful comparisons to be had, though, between the way we approached the material: not because I am Marcus’s equal (I am not, let’s be clear: Marcus is a giant in the field and he will be for a long, long time), but because there are nooks and crannies of the material where Marcus and I observe different things.
So here’s what’s basically the same, different (but informative!), and very different (and I might be in disagreement) between Marcus and I.
So, to wit:
Marcus also thinks that John was an Essene. In fact, after reading Marcus, I am convinced that John was an Essene. There is no other explanation that successfully accounts for the idiosyncratic similarities between John and Qumran that does not end up appealing to some nebulous, abstract, ad hoc aura of common belief or thought for which we don’t have evidence. Maybe we will eventually get that evidence that makes the identification of John with Qumran less certain, but it seems important, even necessary, to first use the data we do have rather than the data we don’t have, and doing so makes the idea that John had been an Essene all but certain. Several things follow from this observation, too: first, that John and his Movement are in some sense para-Essene, and second, that insofar as Jesus and his Movement “descend,” so to speak, from John’s, that there is something of a genetic relationship between the Jesus Movement and Qumran that can explain the parallels of Essene texts and ideas with the New Testament that scholars have observed since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls but for which there has yet been no straightforward explanation. But if John learned from the Essenes, and Jesus learned from John, then the Jesus Movement may have had secondhand influence from Essene traditions. For example, why did both John and Jesus speak and act in ways that suggested they were either trying to renew Israel’s covenant or were challenging the legitimate covenantal standing of other Jewish sectarians and ordinary Jews? Qumran did it first; John and Jesus do not have to be card-carrying Essenes to have received the idea of a covenantal renewal from the Essenes.
Marcus also thinks that John was understood to be a new Elijah. What’s unique in Marcus, that I feel like I agree with him about, is that he suggests the connection between John and Elijah started with John, based on the dissimilarity in the John-Elijah typology in Mark and expectation of an Elianic figure in Qumran texts. I had always basically considered that the New Testament’s identification of John with Elijah was a New Testament invention, one that John himself may not have concurred with, meant to boost the identity of Jesus as Davidic Messiah. But I think Marcus is right that the association between John and Elijah is more likely to have begun with John himself and to have undergirded the security of his later Baptist movement in some sense. What Marcus does not appeal to, though, that I think does illuminate this tradition, is the idea that John is a returned Elijah in the sense of some kind of reincarnation or descent and that we have some evidence from Ancient Judaism and from the Synoptic Gospels that would seem to support that. In Mark, John appears like Elijah; he dies; and then the Transfiguration happens, where a glorified Elijah is there with Jesus on the mountain; and then, Jesus says that John was Elijah to the disciples. The strong implication of the scene is that the glorified Elijah Jesus has just been speaking with is none other than the heavenly John the Baptist.
Marcus also thinks that John’s baptism was a rite of ritual purification meant to convey moral purification as well, in an extension of the ritual significance of immersion informed by his apocalyptic eschatology. I would say that among specialists this is a position in need of defense, which Marcus amply provides, while to me it seems like the obvious take—one that Jonathan Klawans anticipates but does not, as Marcus argues at length, get all the way to. Marcus emphasizes that John understood himself to already have God’s Spirit and that his baptism conveyed God’s Spirit to the baptized; in his view, the original version of John’s preaching was that John preached that he baptized in water and Spirit, while the coming one would baptize in fire. This seems credible to me insofar as I while I can admit that John expected either God or the Messiah to come along and complete the work of bringing the new age fully into being, and while I think John was comfortable seeing Jesus as a partial successor to his work (see below), I don’t find it credible that John understood himself merely as a herald of a successive prophet in Jesus. I agree with Marcus’s portrait of John as believing in his own finality, in other words, just like Jesus did.
Marcus also suggests that John probably understood Jesus as an Elisha figure. Marcus follows up on the idea that Jesus’s career as an exorcist was pre-baptismal, which he charted in a JBL article from many years ago (that I now need to read); he argues that our historical data in the Gospels suggest that John would have recognized that Jesus was not an ordinary disciple and that the beginnings of Jesus’s Movement are most likely to be rooted in John’s empowerment of Jesus to extend the baptismal ministry to new regions, which gradually became the basis for Jesus striking out on his own in light of, probably, new visionary experiences and apocalyptic reasoning about his role. I did not fully put these pieces together in my article, but they solve a historical problem I had not even considered: Jesus was hardly the only disciple of John the Baptist, so why did he start his own movement when John’s other disciples apparently didn’t? The most compelling reason would be because Jesus was already distinctive within the circle of John’s disciples and John himself acknowledged Jesus’s prophetic authenticity. I agree with Marcus, though, that John did not think Jesus was the messiah, and the pressure this created for the Jesus Movement as reflected in the Gospels suggests that the big debate between the Baptists and the Jesus Movement had to do with the claims of the latter for their founder which in the living memory of John’s followers their founder had not signed off on.
Marcus points out, and I had never thought about this in depth, that John’s protest to Antipas’ marriage to Herodias is sedition language, because all attacks on royal marriages are seditious, historically. This combined with Marcus’s insight that part of John’s complaint about Qumran leading him to lead the Essenes may well have been his sense that the Essene attitude towards gentiles was unjustifiably discriminatory makes Josephus’s suggestion that John drew “others” (read: non-Jews) into his movement and signaled potential revolt against the client tetrarch highly credible. Towards the end of John’s ministry he may well have inclined towards militant intent, seeking to bring the Kingdom with “violence,” as Jesus suggests in his logion about the Kingdom being seized by the violent since John’s time (Matt 11:12). Apocalypticists are often tactically, rather than philosophically, nonviolent, a fact that might also have been true of Jesus and his Movement (though I also don’t think Jesus was a zealot, as I clarified here).
Marcus thinks that John died during Jesus’ lifetime, as the Gospels say, rather than in the mid-thirties, as Josephus suggests. This is my most substantial dubium lodged in Marcus’s direction. Antipas divorced Aretas’s daughter and married Herodias around 35 and his military defeat by Aretas was in 36, the aborted follow-up happening in 37 when Tiberius died. The logical time for John to have died if we are following Josephus is there, in 35, as Tamás Visi argues, because prior to that year there is no marriage to Herodias for John to protest. So the options for resolving the chronological issue with the Gospels here are either a.) the Gospels are right that John died during Jesus’s lifetime and Josephus is wrong, b.) Josephus is right and the Gospels are wrong, or c.) our chronology of the life of Jesus needs to be moved up to accommodate John’s death. a.) is probably impossible short of transformative evidence about the events of the mid-thirties and c.) is probably a non-starter. The latest that Jesus can die is 36, because that was the last year that Pilate was prefect of Judea before being recalled by Tiberius, who died the following year. If we have any one historically secure fact about Jesus’s life it’s that he died under Pilate, so this is a hard line beyond which we cannot push him if we want to claim to be able to know anything about Jesus as a figure of history. John being imprisoned in 35 and Jesus dying in 36 seems possible, but it also seems to most scholars to be too late for other reasons. Just within the Gospels, neither the chronology of Jesus’s life suggested by Matthew nor the one suggested by Luke fits well with a death this late: it’s possible with Jesus’s birth in the last two years of Herod the Great’s reign in Matthew’s infancy Gospel, between 6 and 4 BCE, which would make Jesus between 40 and 42 at the time of his death, but then we cannot rely on John’s chronology as a check on the Synoptics, since one of the critiques of Jesus by his fellows is that he’s not even forty during his ministry (Jn 8:57). But it’s not possible at all with Luke, who mixes up his dates and suggests that Jesus was born in 6 CE, when Quirinius was governor of Syria, but also says that Jesus is around thirty at the time of his baptism (Lk 3:23). Even on the Synoptic chronology that Jesus was active for just a year, this doesn’t work: it puts him baptized in 36, dead in 37, but not under Pilate. So, it remains more likely that Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection happened sometime between 28 and 34—in the middle six years of Pilate’s tenure; I prefer 28-30—and this means that we probably have to admit b.), that Josephus is right and the Gospels are wrong. That raises questions for me about the apparent historicity that Marcus finds in John’s question to Jesus from prison about his identity. Yes, this is Q, but is it impossible that Q has already changed or confused the chronology? I’m agnostic on the question as it stands, but I lean towards the idea that John died after Jesus. That seems to make the best sense of the data we have. And that also provides an additional reason why John and his followers did not profess Jesus as Messiah and were reluctant to rejoin his movement: Jesus did not accomplish the messiah stuff in his lifetime and they did not share the enigmatic experience of his resurrection which kept messianic enthusiasm about Jesus alive after his very public death as “King of the Jews.”
Marcus strengthens existing arguments that Luke has incorporated a Baptist source, a Johannine infancy narrative, into his gospel, expanding it to include a comparable infancy story for Jesus which one-ups John’s. This would explain both why a.) John gets the limelight for so much of the infancy story in Luke despite being comparably absent for most of Luke-Acts and b.) why the Lukan infancy story about John seems to contradict Luke’s own theology later in the Gospel and in Acts, specifically around John’s relationship to the Spirit. In Luke 1, John is filled with the spirit from the womb and he is in fact to go forth in the “spirit and power of Elijah.” This seems a document designed to present John’s re-entry into the world as a return of Elijah as well as a priest (more on this below). So Luke adds his own infancy traditions about Jesus, meant to make Jesus one step up: Jesus is not only a rebirth of Elijah’s spirit but Son of God and Davidic Messiah. Marcus connects these traditions to Qumran by suggesting that the notion of John’s priestly background might have historical weight: if he was an Essene, he’s likely to have been a priest. And so I want to make a suggestion that, insofar as Elijah was often considered a priest in Second Temple and rabbinic texts (which Marcus provides), John may have been understood by his followers and maybe even by some of Jesus’s followers as the priestly messiah, the Messiah Ben Aaron, spoken of at Qumran. I find it not impossible that the earliest followers of Jesus may well have accepted that designation for John while also pitching Jesus as a Messiah Ben Israel, a Davidic Messiah. It may be that as the Baptist Movement refused to heel to that designation for Jesus, competition and line-drawing between them forced Jesus-followers to downgrade John and continually integrate more and more models of expected eschatological figures onto Jesus. I also think that perceptions of the Temple establishment’s corruption and the destruction of the Temple in 70 must have expedited this process immensely. Jesus as heavenly high priest is not an idea that would have had much credibility or compulsion (he wasn’t a priest, after all, but John was) until there was no longer a standing Temple. As I have argued here, the idea of Jesus as a surrogate for the Temple and heavenly high priest was also a key step in the ultimate deification of Jesus over the first three centuries of the Christian Era.
Marcus appeals to Chalcedon to explain a model for handling the iconoclastic/deconstructive character of this history. I do this often too—to say that Jesus, as fully human, does not need to have fully understood his own nature, role, the future, etc. to really have been God surely extends to include the idea that John does not need to have understood his own prophetic importance to have really been a prophet/the forerunner of Jesus. We can inform dogmatics with history without breaking dogmatics. I think this is a necessary first-step in the relationship between history and theology. But I also want to go further than that and say that I don’t think that dogmatics themselves are necessarily irreformable. If historical criticism can change how we understand the Bible, it can also surely change how we understand Nicaea and Chalcedon, too. The work of philosophy and theology remains to interpret our postcritical understanding of these historic resources. That might result in much weirder possibilities for faith, but it can also result in a much richer faith, if we let it. That’s what I try to model here at APD, however successfully or not.
Ultimately, I think this has been a fruitful read. The thing that continues to make me passionate about biblical studies is this power to reopen theoretically closed questions, not only for history but also for faith. But I thought this was an unpassable opportunity to see, more deeply, an experience in scholarship that plenty have had but that is hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it, which is arriving at an idea through careful reasoning only to find that it’s already been done bigger and better by someone else. In short, go buy Marcus’s book.
thanks for all your stuff
Do you think that postcritical understanding changes the task of philosophy and theology? Or is interpretation the same as it ever was?