Nota bene: An informed reader has told me that the argument of this piece intersects to some degree with the recent work of Joel Marcus’s John the Baptist in History and Theology (USC Press, 2018), which I am disappointed not to have read yet. I may follow this piece up with a review of that book once I’ve had the chance to read it!
In my apparent quest to be condemned a heretic in every community that might otherwise serve me the Eucharist I so desperately desire, I’ve been pursuing an informal series on Jesus that crosses over (pun intended) the methods of historical criticism, in which my goal is basically to construct as much of a biography of him as possible, and then engaging in theological review of the historical portrait constructed. To some degree, my goal has been to both show people of faith that history is not the same thing as theology but also to demonstrate that the historical method itself does not preclude either philosophy or theology. Insofar as very little of what I’m doing historically, if anything at all, is unique to me—I’m largely reproducing (with citation and attribution!) the arguments of other scholars—the willingness to then think theologically about the history I’m engaging in is likely what’s different in this dispatch. And, to be clear, that’s something as likely to upset some of my friends who are historians as the seriousness with which I take historical criticism upsets some of the theologians I know. Bu I am as free to make a philosophical or theological point about the ultimate meaning of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection apparitions, and the tradition of cult and preaching that descend from these events, as I am to reflect on the meaning of any other intrahistorical phenomenon, no matter how obviously or obscurely meaningful for our typical categories of “religion.” And I am likewise free to historicize anything, no matter how sacred it may or may not be to various people. To move from those freedoms to a sense of their necessity is what I take it to mean to be an aspiring scholar that’s also a person of faith.
Anyway, it’s about to be Theophany, so it’s worth reflecting on why Jesus went to be baptized by John the Baptist. I way why rather than whether because Jesus’s baptism by John is in fact one of the only historically solid facts that we can reconstruct about his life, second only to Jesus’s death on a Roman cross. Jesus was baptized by John. His mission took its origin from the circle around John the Baptist. He spoke highly of John and compared his authority to John’s. He, like John, proclaimed the imminence of God’s Kingdom. If we take away these elements from the life of Jesus and say they are unhistorical, then we risk being able to know anything about Jesus as a person of history. It’s bluntly that simple.
The next installment in this informal series will cover the ground of why I think the historical Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet, proclaiming an imminent Kingdom and an eschatological messiah figure who would bring it about. I would contend that that is the majority position in modern scholarship—from Dale Allison to Bart Ehrman to Craig Evans to Paula Fredriksen to AJ Levine to the emergent Nordic school of biblical studies to JP Meier—but it is worth explaining in detail why I buy it rather than simply appeal ad populum to consensus. For now, though, I’m going to continue asking the reader to suspend the need for me to show my math here so that I can focus on the more pressing issue at hand, which is why the historical Jesus was attracted to John’s message of a coming Kingdom. Because while we can argue about whether the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet or something else, John’s identity as an apocalyptic prophet is effectively beyond dispute: in fact, to suggest that John was anything other than someone possessed of a sense of an imminent change in history and cosmos is to fabricate an entirely fictional person in place of the one given us by our sources. And insofar as Jesus’s baptism is likewise beyond dispute, we will have to explain what John’s message was and why Jesus would have found it compelling.
Our two ancient sources for John’s life are the Gospels and Josephus; if we divvy up the Gospels, then Mark, Q, Matthew, Luke, and John (the Gospel) all talk about John.1 (Curiously, Paul—the other major source for Jesus’s life alongside all these same sources—is silent about John, for reasons I’ll suggest below.) John is also one of the figures of the New Testament about whom we get a lot of direct material in the first century Jewish historian Josephus—in fact, more material than Josephus gives us about Jesus (especially once one scales back the Testimonium Flavianum to its most historically probable shape). So we have a lot to go on for reconstructing John, as our sources for ancient lives go.
It is probably useful to start with Josephus, not because he’s earlier than the Gospels but because he writes without an apologetic bent vis-a-vis John and Jesus, where the Gospels, as we’ll see, are making an effort to subordinate John to Jesus, implying a polemical context in which this was felt necessary. Josephus also does to John what he does to other figures of first century Palestinian Judaism, which is to say, he presents them in a way that will be intelligible to his Greco-Roman readers, avoiding insider language that would not be meaningful to them (e.g., Josephus never calls any of the first-century brigands christoi, “messiahs,” but people who “seek the diadem”), and appealing to categories that would be familiar to them. Among these Greco-Roman readers are also, obviously, Hellenized Jews who would be more familiar with the Diasporic forms of their ethnoreligious culture than with its expressions in the homeland. Josephus is writing in the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War (66-74 CE), in which he was a participant, during which he was captured and held hostage by the Flavians, who later patronized him and his accounts of the War. Josephus wrote Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews with the express intent of trying to rehabilitate the image of his people in the minds of the Romans, and to distance their public reputation from the actions of the rebels. That he was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading Greco-Roman culture of this is easily seen from the long aftermath of Mediterranean anti-Judaism, but he was also deeply unpopular with his own people.
Anyway, this is the context in which to understand anything Josephus might have to say about John. For Josephus, John is a memorable footnote in the longer story of the breakdown of relations between Rome and the Jews in the aftermath of the loss of the Herodian client kingdom after Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE. Josephus tells us about John in his longer, and later work, Antiquities, while talking about a military failure of Herod Antipas (Herod the Great’s son):
[116] Τισὶ δὲ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἐδόκει ὀλωλέναι τὸν Ἡρώδου στρατὸν ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ μάλα δικαίως τινυμένου κατὰ ποινὴν Ἰωάννου τοῦ ἐπικαλουμένου βαπτιστοῦ. [117] κτείνει γὰρ δὴ τοῦτον Ἡρώδης ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα καὶ τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις κελεύοντα ἀρετὴν ἐπασκοῦσιν καὶ τὰ πρὸς ἀλλήλους δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν εὐσεβείᾳ χρωμένοις βαπτισμῷ συνιέναι· οὕτω γὰρ δὴ καὶ τὴν βάπτισιν ἀποδεκτὴν αὐτῷ φανεῖσθαι μὴ ἐπί τινων ἁμαρτάδων παραιτήσει χρωμένων, ἀλλʼ ἐφʼ ἁγνείᾳ τοῦ σώματος, ἅτε δὴ καὶ τῆς ψυχῆς δικαιοσύνῃ προεκκεκαθαρμένης.
But to some of the Jews it seemed that Herod’s army was destroyed by God and most justly in punishment for the murder of John called the Baptizer. For indeed Herod killed this good man who commanded the Jews to labor with respect to virtue and for the things toward one another in justice [Grk: dikaiosynē] and toward God in piety [eusebeia] to be brought together in baptism; for thus indeed baptism appeared to him not to be welcome for the forgiveness of certain sins, but for the health of the body, since of course the soul is purified by justice. (Ant. 18.5.2)2
A quick note here on Josephus’s Hellenizing tendency: John’s connection to dikaiosynē and eusebeia by Josephus reflects a common way of summing up the moral component of the Jewish Law in the Greco-Roman world, one that the Apostle Paul also draws on. As Paula Fredriksen argues, Hellenistic Jews living in the Diaspora consciously tried to present their tradition as the fulfillment of pagan ethical and philosophical wisdom, and many cherished eschatological and/or apocalyptic hopes of a future where the other nations would cease practicing their idolatry and immorality and turn to the God of Israel and the embrace of the Jewish Law. The way they often summarized the content of this Law was by focusing on the Ten Commandments and by presenting the first “tablet” of the Law—the first half of the Ten—as commandments focused on eusebeia or pietas, “piety,” broadly speaking, including fidelity to God, and the second half as dikaiosynē, justice.3 So, performing an act of cultural translation backwards, so to speak, into John’s Palestinian context, we can assume that what Josephus is trying to say is that John was concerned that a.) the Jews embrace the fundamental demands of the Torah about true worship of God and just behavior towards one another and b.) that this be represented in/culminated by baptism. I’ll get to how the Gospels parse John’s preaching below, but for now, I’ll just say that the parallels between Josephus’s summary of John, Paul and other Hellenistic Jews’ summary of the Law as eusebeia and dikaiosynē, and what we know about the later preaching of Jesus, who also seems to have focused his reading of the Torah especially on the Ten Commandments (e.g., Mk 10:17-27; 12:28-31) all render Josephus’s depiction of John contextually credible. These are the sorts of things a first-century Palestinian prophet like John is likely to have said, this is the way a Hellenistic Jew writing for a non-Jewish audience is likely to have depicted such a person, and we have a kind of multiple attestation across our sources. We can trust Josephus here.
Why baptism? Immersion in mikvot was an ordinary aspect of Ancient Jewish life both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. It was essential to the Torah’s particular protocol of “ritual purity,” by which people were able to approach the presence of the deity in the Temple. But it had virtually no role in moral purity, which had to do with avoidance of extreme, egregious sins (especially idolatry, adultery, and murder). It is only late in the history of Judaism—indeed, in the Essene halakha, preaching of John, Jesus, and the philosophy of Philo—that these two kinds of purity begin to meld, with the first serving as a metaphor for the second.4 Both John’s later followers and Jesus’ practiced this metaphorized form of the ritual, as an extension of the cult, but it seems more obviously to have originated with John. We should keep this in mind as we progress: while we are accustomed to seeing the Jesus Movement as unique in the ecosystem of Ancient Judaism, that’s largely a function of the nature of our surviving evidence; that evidence, though, preserves some acknowledgement of the fact that it is more likely to be the case that many of these shared features come from John, not from Jesus.
Given that we can trust Josephus’s depiction of John, we have other fish (or chaff) to fry. The battle in question, in which Herod fought Aretas king of Petra over his infidelity to Aretas’s daughter and plan to divorce her in the context of preexisting border disputes, is a historical red flag. There’s a problem here: as Tamás Visi correctly argues, given that the battle between Antipas and Aretas happened in 36 and Antipas’s chance for vengeance on Aretas was cut short by Tiberius’s death in 37, the subsequent accession of Caligula, and the eventual exile of Antipas, Antipas’s execution of John (multiply attested by the Synoptics and by Josephus) must have happened before this. Given the vindication that the defeat of Antipas by Aretas constitutes for the Jews in Josephus about the identity of John as a prophet, it is more likely that John’s death was close to the battle—Visi suggests 35—some five years after Jesus’s death. The Synoptics have reframed the chronology for apologetic purposes: familiar with the wider movement of John as competitors in the Ancient Jewish landscape, and acknowledging John’s status as a prophet, the Synoptic Evangelists kill John off before the start of Jesus’s ministry (Mark) or some way into his ministry (Matthew and Luke). But this might also explain why Paul does not mention John, Jesus’s baptism by John, or John’s death—at this stage, Jesus’s own baptism by John was not a fundamental part of the kerygma—and why John’s Gospel, which follows a different chronology from the Synoptics, does not remark upon any death of John (the Baptist).
The picture this paints, as many scholars recognize, is one where John the Baptist was the more important and publicly accepted prophet by comparison to Jesus during their own lifetimes. John was well-known and active in the 20s and 30s until his death; he is more visible in Josephus’s memory of the earlier first century than Jesus, who, in the portion of the Testimonium Flavianum that scholars hypothesize to be original, receives scant mention by comparison. In contrast to John, Jesus was briefly active from, probably, 28 to 30, during which he seems to have built a substantial movement but also to have generated less consensus as to his prophetic credentials than John among the Jewish populace. Some Jews liked and followed Jesus; some Jews liked Jesus without joining his movement; some Jews disliked or disbelieved Jesus. By contrast, John’s disciples were numerous and, apparently, widely spread throughout Jewish communities (Acts 19:2-7), with Jews even beyond his movement regarding him as a righteous prophet (Mk 11:32). The Jesus Movement shared a variety of features with John’s disciples, like belief in the imminent Kingdom, the call to repentance based on an apocalyptic reading of the Torah, and the practice of baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Add to this the memory of Jesus’s baptism by John (more on this momentarily), and the Jesus community must have felt rather strongly that John’s movement was a highly desired ally in their mission. From their point of view, John’s people should be joining forces with them in proclaiming Jesus as the messianic figure John preached about, the fulfillment of John’s hopes, and this would hasten Jesus’s reception among other Jews.
Yet, that John’s disciples continued to exist as a separate community seems evident in the Gospels’ and Acts’ depiction of enduring groups of John’s disciples who do not embrace Jesus or his followers and the ensuing anxiety in these texts to clarify the relationship between John and Jesus. John’s followers may have been like other Jews in respecting the zeal of some followers of Jesus, like those whose public outcry over the death of James the Just at the hands of the high priest Ananus in 62 CE brought about Ananus’s deposition from the post; they may even have been willing to respect Jesus as a prophet, or at least a righteous martyr. That the movements did not merge does not necessarily imply that they were adversaries; indeed, the question posited by the imprisoned John to Jesus in the Synoptics, about whether he was the one to come, probably reflects the same mix of openness and doubt that John’s later followers expressed to Jesus’ about his identity (Matt 11:2-6; Lk 17:18-23). But it does imply at a minimum that the non-obvious character of Jesus’s messianic identity to Jews generally in the ancient world was also non-obvious to Jews that followed John. Maximally, one could speculate that the growing claims of the Jesus Movement about the identity and character of their founder were growing ever more exclusive and aggressive to John’s followers. Or, perhaps, John’s followers were experiencing the same marginalization in synagogues in Judea and around the Diaspora, as their movement failed to attract more followers and as apocalypticism generally was falling out of favor with authorities that had to try to preserve good relations with the Romans. Perhaps groups like Jesus’s followers made things harder for John’s? We don’t have the evidence to know, but our picture of what the early Jesus Movement looked like and how it coded among Ancient Jews has to include John’s people.
What about John himself? It is an open question whether he could have picked Jesus out of a lineup. The Gospels of Matthew and John make Jesus’ baptism and presence around John (the Baptist) a matter of great significance to John himself, who variously emphasizes his own unworthiness and the role of Jesus as Spirit-bearer (Matt 3:14-15; Jn 1:32ff); in Mark and Luke the relationship between the two at the baptism is more relaxed. Only in Matthew and John does John have a revelation about Jesus’s identity at the moment of his baptism, in Matthew that Jesus is his superior and in John that Jesus is the one God has endowed with the Spirit. But the clearly apologetic character of this version of the story is hard to miss: once we elide the Evangelists’ interest in making John the forerunner of Jesus as a response to their own difficulty in winning over John’s later movement, the impetus to take this version of the scene seriously as history evaporates. The Gospels’ John reacting to the baptized Jesus as the one he has been waiting for—in addition to being later contradicted by the imprisoned John’s confusion about Jesus’ identity—is a theological, not a historical, insertion by the Evangelists.
So is Jesus’ baptism by John itself a similar kind of fabrication? Here virtually all modern scholars of the historical Jesus say no, for the simple reason that if the Evangelists wanted to have Jesus entirely free of John and the necessity to appeal to John’s authority then they would not have invented a scene in which Jesus comes to John while John is preaching “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” to be baptized. The theological awkwardness is great enough for both Matthew’s (who has John object to Jesus’s baptism) and for John’s Gospel (which does not depict the scene directly) to have to do gymnastics to explain how the superior Jesus is baptized by the inferior John. It would be simpler, and more efficient, if the story of Jesus’s baptism were not so firmly ingrained a part of the Jesus tradition by the time they wrote the Gospels, to simply exclude it. Moreover, in Q, Jesus himself offers his judgment that John the Baptist is the greatest person who has ever lived prior to the Kingdom’s advent (Matt 11:7-10, 14-15; Lk 7:24-27), which provides multiple attestation (Mk and Q) that Jesus acknowledged John’s authority (by going to him to be baptized and in the saying that he is the greatest among men). There is also Jesus’s statement that “The Law and the Prophets were until John” (Matt 11:13//Lk 16:16-18), implying that for Jesus the authority of John is the next link in prophetic succession from Moses. Again, if there had been no memory of Jesus’s dependence on John of any kind, it is deeply unlikely that the Evangelists would have invented these logia or the story of the baptism. Why link Jesus to John in these ways that suggest dependence if one could instead represent them as having been colleagues on a more equal footing?
So Jesus certainly knew John; but again, did John know Jesus? I think here there’s a bit of an academic tendency to overemphasize the asymmetry of the relationship in suggesting either that John had no idea who Jesus was or that John was necessarily hostile to Jesus. It’s true that the Gospels contain evidence of the idea that Jesus and John’s disciples were competitors with one another (cue, for example, the competition between Jesus’s disciples and John’s disciples in the Judean desert over baptism, which is settled by a clearly fabricated responsum of John meant to suggest that he anticipated the rise of the Jesus Movement; Jn 3:22-30). That may go back to Jesus’s own ministry, in which case it would imply that Jesus’s branching off to do his own thing while John was still active may not have been appreciated or approved by the master, and the disciples reported to have originated in John’s circle and gone to follow Jesus may also have been a sore spot between the two of them. But if it doesn’t go back to Jesus’s own ministry, then I think one can just as fairly argue that Jesus spent an indefinite amount of time in John’s circle before striking out on his own, and that Jesus’s initial commission was to take John’s message on the road, so to speak, to the synagogues, villages, and towns of Galilee and Judea. This is a piece of the “Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet” puzzle: the Gospels are fairly consistent that Jesus, like John, is preaching the imminent futurity of the “Kingdom of the heavens” or the Kingdom of God (e.g., Matt 3:2; 4:17). Jesus may well have stood out to John as a worthy candidate for taking this message to the rest of Judea that was not coming directly to John; if any historicity stands behind the idea of Jesus’ having had a spiritual experience at his baptism, or of that spiritual experience being shared or recognized by others, it is probably this. Nevertheless, as John Dominic Crossan once wryly remarked, Jesus had a franchise, but John had the monopoly: it is unlikely that anyone beyond Jesus and his own immediate following had any notion of Jesus as the senior of the two. Jesus may well have registered as a potential successor to John in the event of his death, had John died first; but given the likelihood that Jesus died before John, the memory of Jesus as a disciple of John carrying John’s mission to Galilee and Judea likely subsided in the memory of John’s community as well as in Jesus’, in the latter’s case in order to reverse the relationship entirely for apologetic reasons.
So, I’m open to the idea that John knew and positively appreciated Jesus for his work, even if John was not willing during Jesus’s ministry to concede power to him and neither were his disciples. Whether Jesus had upstart intentions in the wider prophetic network shared between the two is unclear to me: the Gospels’ presentation of John as Elijah (in the Synoptics, as I have argued, I think literally as Elijah, though John’s Gospel disputes the identity of the two) would logically position Jesus as Elisha (a connection explicitly drawn in Lk 4:16-30), and insofar as Elisha shares a “double portion” of Elijah’s spirit in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kgs 2:9), Jesus may well have identified himself as the successor to John who would do even greater things than his master. People construct identities for themselves all the time on the basis of mythic, legendary, historical, literary, and religious precedents; it’s a noted phenomenon in psychological literature. At a minimum, if the historical Jesus could come to see himself as the eschatological Son of Man from the Book of Daniel (and possibly though uncertainly the Parables of Enoch in 1 En 37-71), which I think he did, then he could also come to see himself as the prophetically superior and final successor to John. Whether he was public and forthright about this in teaching, or in communication with John and his disciples, is harder to say.
All of this has been preliminary: the fundamental question remains why Jesus came to John in the first place, and that requires that we explore a little bit further what John was preaching, doing, and asking for.
Cue the Gospels’ depictions of John’s preaching. I have for now ignored John (as he is of the four Evangelists the one most willing to let his theological vision of Jesus inform his history), and instead marshaled the relevant sayings of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. First, Mark:
1 Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ [υἱοῦ θεοῦ]. 2 Καθὼς γέγραπται ἐν τῷ Ἠσαΐᾳ τῷ προφήτῃ·
ἰδοὺ ἀποστέλλω τὸν ἄγγελόν μου πρὸ προσώπου σου,
ὃς κατασκευάσει τὴν ὁδόν σου·
3 φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ·
ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου,
εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους αὐτοῦ,
4 ἐγένετο Ἰωάννης [ὁ] βαπτίζων ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ καὶ κηρύσσων βάπτισμα μετανοίας εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν. 5 καὶ ἐξεπορεύετο πρὸς αὐτὸν πᾶσα ἡ Ἰουδαία χώρα καὶ οἱ Ἱεροσολυμῖται πάντες, καὶ ἐβαπτίζοντο ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ Ἰορδάνῃ ποταμῷ ἐξομολογούμενοι τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν. 6 καὶ ἦν ὁ Ἰωάννης ἐνδεδυμένος τρίχας καμήλου καὶ ζώνην δερματίνην περὶ τὴν ὀσφὺν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐσθίων ἀκρίδας καὶ μέλι ἄγριον. 7 Καὶ ἐκήρυσσεν λέγων· ἔρχεται ὁ ἰσχυρότερός μου ὀπίσω μου, οὗ οὐκ εἰμὶ ἱκανὸς κύψας λῦσαι τὸν ἱμάντα τῶν ὑποδημάτων αὐτοῦ. 8 ἐγὼ ἐβάπτισα ὑμᾶς ὕδατι, αὐτὸς δὲ βαπτίσει ὑμᾶς ἐν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ.The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ [son of God]. Just as it is written in the book of Isaiah the prophet:
Behold I send the messenger before your face,
who will prepare your way:
a voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the Lord’s road,
make straight his paths.’
John the Baptizer came to be in the desert and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And there went out to him all the area of Judea and all the Jerusalemites, and they were baptized by him in the Jordan River confessing their sins. And John was clothed in camel’s hair and a skin belt around his midriff and eating locusts and wild honey. And he proclaimed saying: there comes one stronger than me behind me, of whom I am not sufficient having stooped to loose the thongs of his sandals. I baptized you with water, but he will baptize you in holy pneuma. (Mk 1:1-8)
A few preliminary observations. First, Mark is probably written during the late 60s, while the Jewish-Roman War was still ongoing but before the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. First, Mark is not a contemporary or an eyewitness, and we should regard Papias’s claim that he was Peter’s interpreter in Rome skeptically: many scholars also feel it more probable that Mark was authored in Syria-Palestine. His memories of John, like his memories of Jesus, are traditioned from decades earlier and tailored to his own perspective. Second, the quoted section is a combination of Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1. The Isaiah verse begins so-called Deutero-Isaiah, or Isaiah 40-55, which is a separate section in the larger scroll by a prophet living during the Babylonian Exile and seeking to generate interest in returning home among Judean exiles in Babylon in response to Cyrus’s decree permitting it. The “voice” in question was originally Deutero-Isaiah himself, so the reuse of the verse in application to John has a kind of continuity with its original context. Historically, too, it rings true: John was a voice crying out in the desert for rectification of ways. Given that the “way of the Lord,” though, is God’s road back to Zion, the highway on which people will return, Mark is also reading the verse prophetically in application to John as signifying the content of John’s expectation and preaching: he’s calling for ways to be made straight because someone’s going to arrive soon by walking those ways. The Malachi text, though, seems very obviously deployed to suggest a biblical model for understanding the relationship between John and Jesus: John is the messenger, and Jesus is Malachi’s “Lord.” This nakedly apologetic scripturalization should give us pause when we assess Mark’s understading of John’s preaching alongside Josephus. On the one hand, both Josephus and Mark have a John the Baptist (or Baptizer) who is interested in repentance by the people and offers baptism as a way of catalyzing that repentance. On the other hand, Mark adds to John’s preaching the notion of an eschatological figure who comes with a baptism superior to John’s: where John baptizes in water, the one “stronger” than him will baptize in holy pneuma, God’s own breath.
Did the historical John expect someone to come after him? It’s an unsolvable puzzle, but one that’s interesting to think with. It’s at least as possible and plausible that John expected an eschatological messiah figure as it is that Jesus did; but insofar as we only have his words as recorded by the Evangelists, we have to take a pause and consider the possibility that this is an editorial insertion meant to make John already aware of his future eclipse by Jesus and his Movement, which seems unlikely given the fact that John himself neither joined Jesus’s Movement and neither did most of his followers. Josephus is no help in adjudicating the manner either, since as mentioned above he avoids explicit messiah-talk in his work. We may well find a middle ground in the idea that John did preach a messianic figure, but did not include in his preaching some notion that he was simply preparing the way for another, though this is speculative.
Matthew’s version builds on Mark’s by noting that Pharisees and Sadducees were coming to John (Matt 3:7), that John is also adversarial with them (another way of making John a precedent for Jesus), and that John spoke of “coming wrath” (μελλούσης ὀργῆς). The Matthean John warns his audience to produce the fruit of repentance lest the eschatological axe chop down one’s tree and cast it into the fire; he also discourages reliance on Abrahamic ancestry, noting that God can raise up children for Abraham from the stones (3:7-10). We also get more on John’s eschatological figure: he will not only baptize in holy pneuma but also in fire (3:11). He will be like a harvester on the threshing floor, separating grain from chaff and throwing the chaff into the fire (3:11-12). Matthew’s John also preaches the “Kingdom of the heavens,” as we noted above, where Mark’s Jesus does not use this language.
Where Mark was likely written in Roman Palestine on the eve of, late into, or at the climax of the Revolt, Matthew was probably written in post-70 Galilee or lower Syria by a community of Jewish Jesus followers whose expectation of their gentile converts was full embrace of Judaism. So when John speaks about God raising up children for Abraham from the stones, he means it: his language is meant to predicate the entirety of the later gentile mission already in the forerunner of Jesus, as anticipated by the prophetic critique of Judean society that John was engaged in, especially in its polemical bent against Pharisees and Sadducees. But how much of this is really John, and how much of it is Matthew? After all, scholars are fairly certain that most of the Matthean anti-Pharisaic language is Matthew’s, not Jesus’, polemics, and this would seem to be supported by otherwise unintelligible statements in Matthew to the effect that Jesus’ halakha affirms the Pharisaic and expects his followers to embrace it (Matt 21:1-3); it would also seem to be implied by the relative collegiality between Jesus and the Pharisees in Luke. So do we have solid evidence for conflict between John and the Pharisees? Not really. We can imagine that the Pharisees may have reacted to John the same way they reacted to Jesus: sometimes open-minded curiosity, sometimes harsh disagreement, sometimes embrace and support, sometimes even belief. Many Pharisees joined the later Jesus Movement, and so we can probably assume that many also joined John’s Movement, while others didn’t. While exclusivity might be a hallmark of Jewish sectarians like the Essenes and the Sadducees, it hardly obtains of the Pharisees, who were after all spread out among and very popular with the local people; we have to imagine that these popular prophetic movements not only cut across broad socioeconomic classes but also sectarian differences within the Jewish world.
Speaking of, it’s worth taking a second to think about whether John might have been an Essene. Scholars generally observe quite a few things in common between the John we can reconstruct from Josephus and the Gospels and the Essenes as Josephus describes them and as we can reconstruct them from the sectarian literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the archaeological remains of Qumran. James VanderKam and Peter Flint acknowledge four similarities between them: first, “John’s family background and lineage fit with the beliefs of the Qumran covenanters,” an idea which I will return to when I get to Luke’s John momentarily; second, “The location of John’s ministry may have at times included the vicinity of Qumran, and his activity in the Judean wilderness near the Jordan may have brought him into contact with the Essene settlement,” especially in the Lukan portrayal where John grows up in the wilderness; third, “John’s ministry shared many features with that of the Qumran community,” including “his urgent message that the time was at hand…which is reminiscent of the Qumran belief that the final conflict would come soon, that the last days were nearly here,” “the prominent place of baptism or washings with water in John’s ministry and in the life of the Qumran Essenes, which may suggest that John was at one time an Essene associated with the Qumran community”; and fourth, “John’s interpretation of Scripture was similar to that of the Qumran community,” especially his use of Isaiah 40:3, which also appears in the Rule of the Community to explain the Qumran covenanters’ self-understanding:
When such men as these come to be in Israel, conforming to these doctrines, they shall separate from the session of perverse men to go to the wilderness, there to prepare the way of truth, as it is written, ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of Yhwh, make straight in the desert a highway for our God’ (Isa 40:3). This means the expounding of the Law, decreed by God through Moses for obedience, that being defined by what has been revealed for each age, and by what the prophets have revealed by His holy spirit. (1 QS 8.12-16)5
So, it’s pretty possible that John was influenced by the Essenes. Indeed, John Bergsma even goes so far as to argue that John was himself an excommunicated Essene, which would explain his peculiar dietary habits.6 I do not think that one needs to settle on an opinion, exactly, about the relationship to see that very similar things animated John and the Essenes: belief in an imminent eschaton, apocalypticism, prophecy, repentance, and purity. If we admit that John had messianic beliefs, too, in a coming eschatological agent of God to bring about the new Kingdom, then we might add to this picture the fact that of all streams of Ancient Judaism the people who wrote the Scrolls were the most consistently interested in messiahs, prophetic, priestly, and royal, human, angelic, and divine (e.g., 1Q20 14.9-18; 4Q213a; 1Q28 8.1-11, 9.7-11; 1Q28a 2.11-21; 1Q28b 4.22-28; 1Q28b 5.20-29; 1QM 11.3-8, 17.5-9, etc.).7
The Essene connection also frames the Lukan material about John in an interesting way. First, Luke provides us with an infancy narrative about John’s annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel to the priest Zechariah, his father (the first time we get a name for John’s father), his mother Elizabeth’s semi-miraculous conception in her old age as a result, and his father’s prophetic canticle at John’s birth. As this narrative encapsulates Mary’s own annunciation and conception, some scholars suspect that this story was originally John’s conception story, into which a similar infancy gospel for Jesus has been added. The important thing here is Luke’s attribution to John not just of Levitical but of priestly descent: no other source that we have about John names him as such, but our knowledge of the priestly ethos of the Qumran community and its leadership might suggest its plausibility, and give us some sense of how John may have coded for some of his followers and sympathizers. Qumran’s sectarian texts evince expectation of at least three messianic figures: an eschatological prophet, a new high priest who will restore the cult in the now-corrupted Jerusalem Temple in the future (the Messiah Ben Aaron), and a Davidic warrior-king who will liberate the people from foreign rule and preside over their judicial affairs (the Messiah Ben Israel). It may well be, as some have suggested, that John struck his followers as a Messiah Ben Aaron in waiting, now a prophet, later an eschatological high priest of a purified cult and a purified people, of which his present calls for repentance and baptism were the advance step.
Luke’s John also seems to constitute a precedent for the overall Lukan focus on a prophetic career of social justice, which Jesus also engages in. Luke’s John qualifies repentance as redistribution of goods, modest collection of taxation, and refusal to extort (Lk 3:10-14). Otherwise, his John is very much Matthew’s John—to the point that the John of Matthew 3 and Luke 3 is probably Q’s John, while the John of the infancy narrative is just Luke’s.
The composite portrait from the Synoptics of John is of an apocalyptic prophet who believed in an imminent eschaton and baptized people as an advance act of ritual purity symbolizing moral purification through repentance. He’s a prophet that expects someone else—which may or may not be an Evangelistic apologia and therefore may or may not be true of John himself—who could well have emphasized social acts of repentance, based around a deepened interpretation of the Ten Commandments (“Do not steal,” for example, reinterpreted to mean sharing of goods and non-extortion; cue Josephus’s dikaiosynē), as the criteria of the final judgment which was soon to come. He may or may not have been a former Essene, para-Essene, or influenced by the Essenes; he would at least have coded very much like them in the public consciousness of ordinary Jews.
One last association made with John in the Gospels is also relevant for us, which is his connection to Elijah. John is dressed in camel skin with a leather belt, living in the wilderness and eating locusts and honey; these accoutrements are meant to signal him as Elijah. In the Synoptics at least, as I have argued before, I think there’s a decent argument to be made that John is presented by these authors as a reborn or reincarnated Elijah, or even, to put it crudely, an “avatar” of Elijah. In Mark and Matthew, John appears in Elijah-like clothing, is explained by the oracle in Malachi which mentions that God will send Elijah in the future, he dies, and then later, at the Transfiguration scene, a glorified Elijah appears on the mountain with Jesus and Moses and afterwards the disciples ask Jesus why the scribes say Elijah has to come first, in response to which he tells them that, if they can handle it, John was Elijah (Mk 9:1-13; Matt 17:1-13; Lk 9:28-36). In the Lukan infancy narrative, the point seems even more deeply emphasized when we are told that John will go forth “in the spirit (pneuma) and power of Elijah” (Lk 1:17). Now, we are accustomed to reading this as a metaphorical statement, but for some reason not taking it metaphorically when we are told that Jesus will be born from miraculous conception by a holy pneuma in the same chapter (1:35)! My guess is that if all someone had were the Synoptics, and we read as educated Hellenistic readers of the Gospels (Jewish or pagan), we would be inclined to think that John was a rebirth or a return or a descent or whatever we might wish to call it of Elijah. We are disinclined to read it this way because of John’s statement in the Gospel of John that he is not Elijah (Jn 1:21). But my guess is that this says less than we want it to. For one thing, metempsychosis does not equivocate between successive incarnations: John can “be” Elijah without “being Elijah,” let the reader understand. For another thing, John is insistent that Jesus, as messianic Son of Man, is the only person who has descended from heaven (3:13), which may also preclude the Synoptic concept of John as an avatar of Elijah. John’s Gospel also has no Transfiguration scene and even an uncertain baptism of Jesus, in which John’s preaching is entirely to draw Jesus out into open view in Israel (1:29-34). That John the Evangelist bothers to parry with ideas that John could be Elijah, though, implies that they were real beliefs held by ancient followers of John and perhaps even by other followers of Jesus.
So, collectively, John seems to have left quite an impression on Ancient Jews in and around Judea and Galilee with his message of the coming Kingdom and the offer of forgiveness through repentance and baptism, mingling the ritual and moral senses of purity in a show of eschatological mercy prior to the coming trial and judgment. Jesus, along with many others, must have been deeply impressed by this message, convinced that he, too, should seek out purification, and wait for the coming eschaton.
As far as historical criticism goes, this is one of those places likely to be pretty uncomfortable for Christian theology. There’s no use denying it: our data suggest that at least during their shared lifetimes, John was a longer-active, better-received prophet among Ancient Jews than Jesus was. As James Dunn puts it chastely, “John seems to have had as great a claim to historical significance as Jesus, if not greater.”8 Their respective movements remained in competition for decades after their lifetimes, and Jesus’ followers in particular felt a special anxiety to construct the superiority of their founder over John while also retaining John’s importance to them. The Gospels—all authored decades after the deaths of both Jesus and John (probably in that order)—are at special pains to make John the forerunner of Jesus, while having to acknowledge at the same time that Jesus’s ministry began with his baptism by John. Dunn again: “[I]t is highly probable that Jesus himself first emerged from the circle round John. Indeed, it is quite possible that Jesus began, properly speaking, as a disciple of John. The key fact here is that Jesus was baptized by John. This is one of the most securely grounded facts in all the history of Jesus.”9 And, as the very composition of Mark’s Gospel makes clear, “the gospel of Jesus did indeed begin with John!”10 So in separating out history from theology, the question now is what theology can say by way of “Yes, and” to history’s challenges.
One of the first and most easily dispensed challenges that a historical perspective offers here is the fact that the historical Jesus, in going to John for baptism, almost certainly thought of himself as someone going to be purified from sin by John’s baptism. Theologically we might be able to claim that this is not the case, but historically, we are duty-bound to acknowledge that we have no reason to think Jesus would have gone to John for something other than what John was preaching or what his compatriots were doing. Yet this is a problem for the Christian Tradition which has historically insisted that Jesus was without sin (2 Cor 5:21; Heb 4:15), the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” on John’s own lips (Jn 1:29). Are these seemingly irreconcilable perspectives capable of balance? The issue seems to me to turn on the question of the historical Jesus’s own self-perception, what I could appeal to as the depth of the incarnation. Jesus was a first-century Jew: like every first-century Jew, he would have assumed that no one, not even the most righteous person on earth, never sins (Eccl 7:20) and, simultaneously, that God was gracious, merciful, and only moved to retribution by some particularly offensive sins. For human beings, it is typically hubris that drives the belief that we are beyond or without sin, or incapable of error: infallibility is a luxury of the self-assured, not a habit of the self-aware. In the Christian Tradition at least, even very great saints deemed to have lived utterly holy lives regularly reproach themselves as sinners—this, indeed, is a mark of sainthood itself. I think we can assume the same about Jesus. Insofar as Jesus was human—which, whether you are a Dyophysite or Miaphysite, is absolutely, completely human—Jesus was part of a culture that would have discouraged him from believing he was sinless and that would have equated spiritual maturity with a self-awareness about the possibility of sin, no matter how clandestine. We can affirm that Jesus went to John to be purified of sin without believing Jesus was actually sinful or even capable of sin. Indeed, there’s an intriguing mysterium for us to ponder in the idea that the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world lowered himself to a human status and to the phenomenological experience, if not the actual ontological state, of being corrupted by sin and in need of purification. To some degree, this continues the line of thought traditional in the Church’s choice to see Christ’s baptism as laying out the pattern of our own Christian initiation: we hear the announcement of the Kingdom and the call to repent, we believe, we repent, and we are baptized.
The second problem is a bit thornier. It has to do with the question of John’s clear historical superiority to Jesus during his lifetime considered over against Jesus’ deification by his followers, in the earliest decades and centuries as Messiah, Son of God, cosmic Lord, and Wisdom/Word of God, secondary god alongside God, and finally consubstantial with God the Father. The Gospels are already written from the assumption that Jesus is the person John was expecting and Matthew and John realize the awkwardness this creates for having Jesus submit to John for baptism. So the Matthean John tells Jesus that he (John) needs to be baptized by him (Jesus), but Jesus tells him to let it happen anyway, to “fulfill all justice” (Matt 3:15). In John, again, we don’t get Jesus’s baptism directly: Jesus is just there among John’s disciples and John identifies him as the one upon whom the Spirit has descended, the Lamb of God who takes away sin, the person he was commissioned to reveal to Israel in his ministry. What I am saying is that we have to take these stories for what they are: advance attempts to theologize about the history that these stories only thinly veil, which is John’s historical superiority to Jesus. In reading these stories theologically, we read them from the vantage of the later community of Jesus’ followers, who not unjustly have the following in mind when they write them. First, the apostles experienced Jesus risen from the dead; no comparable experiences that we know of are reported for John. Second, Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom brought the Kingdom to Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem, seemingly extending and fulfilling John’s mission from their perspective. If Jesus is also risen from the dead, this perhaps vindicates Jesus as John’s prophetic successor and the true bearer of the legacy. Third, by the time of the later Gospels, written after the destruction of the Temple and well after the establishment of numerous different and competing streams of the Jesus Movement, it may well have seemed that Jesus’s Movement simply had the upper hand in credibility as a path forward for Jews and non-Jews in fidelity to Israel’s God than John’s did. From their perspective, it may have seemed more dignified to retcon Jesus’s baptism by John as a prophetic passing of the torch than to simply elide the entire tradition.
This is the theological value of the stories of Jesus’ baptism as we have them: whether John acknowledged it in his own lifetime or not (and I’ve presented possibilities on both ends here), that Jesus and his Movement carried on the major elements of John’s ministry and message more widely and more prominently in the late first century and beyond is indisputable. Whatever the case was in the earliest decades, the Jesus Movement has long since outmatched and outlived John’s: even if we admit the Mandaeans as their modern descendants, we have to admit that most people on earth today know about John the Baptist not because he was a Jewish or Mandaean prophet but because he was a Christian saint. In Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and some high-church Anglicanism, in fact, John is considered alongside Jesus and Mary to be one of three people who never actively sinned. It is these three who appear on every Orthodox iconostasis (together with the Archangel Gabriel). It is these three who appear in the Deesis icon that may appear above the iconostasis, in an apse, or in a few other places, liturgically and architecturally speaking.
To come to terms with this model—intrahistorical and transhistorical role-reversal between John and Jesus—we have to understand that it is the experience of the resurrection in the aftermath of his prophetic career and ignominious death that most compelled Jesus’ followers to come to the conclusions that they did about his messianic and divine identities. The Gospels express not a barren history of Jesus but that elevated consciousness, that awareness that looks back on history and is able to see things in it that are not directly perceptible to the senses. Without the resurrection, Jesus would have been another interesting and perhaps venerable individual in a long line of prophetic and messianic hopefuls; with the resurrection, the Jesus Movement is able to rethink the meaning of his death and life in the light of his resurrection as a mission of messianic humility and the revelation of divine love. I have written elsewhere that this is exactly what’s going on in the Synoptics and John around the relationship between Jesus and his death; but it is also what’s going on in the Gospels around the relationship between John and Jesus.
So theology’s answer to the possible problem of sin is that the historical Jesus can have understood himself as a frail human being prone to sin like anyone else without him actually having been a sinner, and that the historical Jesus can have been subordinate to John both within his prophetic circle and in the minds of the wider population while, from a transcendent perspective, being the greater of the two. Is there anything that theology might say by way of reply to history—anything distinctive that the theological vantage gives for understanding the meaning of the history around Jesus’s baptism?
I suppose I could treat the traditional themes of Theophany: Christ engaging in watery theomachy with the powers of the deep already in his baptism and rendering all water holy water, all water the Yardna, as the Mandaeans call it. I could say that from theology’s perspective Christ’s baptism is the revelation of the Trinity on earth, with the Father giving assent via the bat qol that proclaims Christ his beloved Son and the Spirit descending from the Father upon the Son revealing the first two fundamental movements of the inner life of God, the third being when the Son gives up the Spirit back to the Father on the cross. All of this would be worthy of deep contemplation and prayerful meditation at great length. But I also sense that there are other places, even within this dispatch, that one could go for it, so I will instead offer a different responsum theologicum that might be more pertinent here.
Specifically, I think theology can say to history here what Solon is reported to have said to Croesus, King of Lydia, that he would “call no man blessed until he saw that he died beautifully.” I would reframe that as saying that we cannot make judgments about the meaning of history from within history, at least not judgments that are of ultimate and lasting value. That can come back to bite Christians too, of course—in the hypothetical event of a Mandaean revival (which, I mean, wouldn’t be the worst thing, to be clear) or in the concrete supersessionistic rhetoric of Islam towards Christians. But theology does not only engage in verbal iconography, in mythopoiesis under the guise of historiography, as I suggested of the virgin birth, or in typological and allegorical exegesis of history, as I suggested in my post about Jesus and miracles. Theology also engages in what a Daoist might call the Qi Wu Lun or “Smoothing Things Out” of history, in which the ordinary categories, dualisms, and sequences of history, the perspectives of things, are rearranged from a transcendent perspective.
I maintain that it is very important to do good historiography before one begins to do theology. If Jesus is fully God and fully man, it is only through engagement with his full humanity that we meet his full divinity; this, of course, is the whole point of the Christological Controversy, the entire source of the anxiety around how divinity and humanity truly interrelate in Jesus. And so as far as that goes, I’m unwilling to settle for theologized history as sufficiently history, even if it expresses sufficient theology. I think there is a spiritual, not just intellectual, value in the iconoclastic work of historiography, of stripping bare our assumptions about how the past was to help us really organize our ideas. Without doing so, in fact, we will not understand what we are doing when we do theology, because theology is always already response to that which we experience and may historicize. At the same time, theology need not be a pushover. As a particular kind of philosophy, theology is able to assess the data that history acquires and stratifies, to retrace its own steps in scripture and tradition in how it moved from the raw ipseity of the past to the interpreted past of these resources, and then to think through how it might integrate the whole into a common vision. Modern sciences, including the social sciences within which the humanities exist, are trained to look down on this kind of integral consciousness, but it is precisely the height of our human powers of cognition not merely to quantify up and down scales of efficient and material magnitude but to look to the formal and final whole. We look, in other words, both with the fiercely critical eye of Christ Pantokrator cast in judgment—that’s history—and the warm, embracing eye of compassion and union that is theology. Without both at the same time, we will either see the trees or the forest, but not the trees in the forest and the forest in the trees.
It’s a pity that I’m writing this before the publication of James F. McGrath’s two forthcoming works on John the Baptist, but I encourage the reader to watch for them.
Here’s the rub on Josephus: the old school translation of Josephus that you can find in many a Barnes & Noble is W. Whiston, and it’s basically unusable today. The newer, better translations of Josephus are put out by Brill, edited by Steve Mason. (Funny story: I’m sure he doesn’t remember this, but when I was a freshman in high school I was in a course called Advanced Language Arts and Research Presentation, or ALARP, and I had to pick a thesis to argue to three teachers [like a mini version of a grad thesis assignment] and I chose in my first semester to do mine on Josephus. I entitled it How the Jews Got Their Groove Back: Josephus and the Legitimization of the Jews to the Roman People. For my outside expert that I had to contact, I chose Steve Mason, who graciously answered five questions that I wrote him. I got an A on the project. Yes, I really have always been this way.) Anyway, they’re not finished. But you can go read Josephus’s Greek at Brill Scholarly Editions, from which I’ve hastily produced the above translation.
Paula Fredriksen, “Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the Ten Commadnments, and Pagan ‘Justification by Faith,’” JBL 133 (2014): 801-808.
Here I’m summarizing the work of Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and idem, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). The metaphorical meaning of ritual purity in relationship to sin and moral purity is also something I’ve touched on here, here, and here.
For this passage and all of the secondary quotes cited above, see James C. VanderKam and Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2004), 453-456. Ordinarily, though, for the text and translation of the Scrolls I commend Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1997-1998). There’s also an edition that just has the translation: Martínez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1996). Other competent translations include Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 7th ed. (New York: Penguin, 2012). For the archaeology of Qumran no one surpasses Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021).
John Bergsma, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Revealing the Jewish Roots of Christianity (New York: Image, 2019), 31-43.
See Gregory J. Lanier, Corpus Christologicum: Texts and Translations for the Study of Jewish Messianism and Early Christology (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2021), §§41-82. On messianism in the Scrolls more generally, see John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
James DG Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Christianity in the Making Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 348.
Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 350.
Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 352.
I think you hit it on the head when you said this - "The picture this paints, as many scholars recognize, is one where John the Baptist was the more important and publicly accepted prophet by comparison to Jesus during their own lifetimes." That explains why Jesus went to John. Jesus was, like most people seeking a spiritual life, going to the best teacher around. He was part of John's group for a while, and then left. And went off on his own. According to history, Jesus was a blip. john, at least, has some recognition. And I think that's accurate. This is a whole other story, of course, but the Jesus of history appears to have made little to no impact. Gospels (fictional) came out, and that's the Jesus who became god and so on. But Jesus (Yeshua) was finding his way as a teacher, so he went to John, to learn. Simple. My own view of the synoptics is the view many scholars have talked about but that Robyn Walsh has most recently put forth, that Mark (and the redactions of the rest of the synoptics) was a persuasive piece of fictional literature written by a highly educated Greco-Roman writer, basing it on previous literary tropes and Old Testament writings. Unfortunately, all historicity is highly suspect in this view. The equation that John the Baptizer was an apocalyptic teacher therefore Jesus left John to continue that message has only the gospel accounts to bear that out.. The writer of Mark surely wished to preach an apocalyptic message coming out of Jesus' mouth, but that is also the Pauline message, and we quite plainly do not have enough actual information to know what Yeshua of Galilees' message was. We do know that Paul would have approved of the message in Mark. Why Paul doesn't mention John the Baptizer is strange and perplexing, but Paul cares only about his vision of the resurrected Christ. Maybe he simply didn't care about John, since John's followers weren't a Jesus group. If Jesus was historically an apocalyptic preacher, and if he caused enough of a ruckus to have the Romans kill him on grounds of sedition and claims of being a messianic King (rather than on the grounds of a single disgruntled holy man disrupting the Temple during Passover, an instant little problem to be dealt with swiftly and brutally) surely this would have made it to Josephus' radar, as John's actions did. Then we would have the historic certification needed to end of this endless but endlessly entertaining conjecturing. What that tells me is the story of Jesus in the Gospels, starting with Mark, give us a superhero god in the mold of other figures of Roman-Greco literature, and that personage is the figure that took hold over people's imaginations - as opposed to a wandering teacher, Yeshua, who said some good and possibly profound things. I realize this view kind of squelches a lot of supposition about Jesus, but I feel that the next movement in uncovering the historical Jesus will be focused on the writer of Mark, who may just turn out to be the person who created Christianity. Not Paul. And not Jesus, whoever he was.