The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  What was Herod afraid of? Was it a matter of public demonstrations? General noise and disturbance, public chanting, insults to his family, and the like? Did the ruler fear an armed coup, led by or inspired by John, which might happen once Herod ordered his army to war with Aretas in 36 CE? And if John’s following was armed, or ready to be armed should occasion arise, why did Josephus not lump John’s following in with the zealot “bandits” (lestai), “addicted to liberty” and insurrection at all costs, whom he habitually condemns? This is not a question easily dismissed. When, according to the historian, Herod feared a rebellion, since John’s followers seemed ready to do anything he told them, was rebellion something John was likely to recommend? He obviously had not done so yet, but was Herod Antipas privy to additional intelligence? Was a plan afoot? We must suppose Herod did not act on hearsay alone. Spies were cheap enough for a king to hire. Were John’s exact motives and activities difficult for the tetrarch to interpret, given stressful political circumstances? The presence of holiness could be socially and politically inflammatory.

  Josephus, aware of the potential pitfalls in his narrative, would have his readers suspect it was Herod who was overzealous in his suspicions, not John. Curiously, Josephus has nothing to say whatsoever about why John might have led a rebellion against his overlord. Josephus concludes that John’s arrest was basically a precautionary measure, not a remedial one: a political necessity. Herod could not risk even the possibility of John’s following turning actively dangerous. Certainly he would have had Rome’s approval for such a measure. Locking people up, at the very least, was normal Roman practice in such cases. Josephus does not condemn outright Herod’s taking John into custody. He does not question the right to rule, nor should we expect him too; he was himself the guest of the ruler and was himself ruled.

  Josephus records that John was sent to Herod’s castle at Macherus, close to the Nabataean border in the south of his territorial jurisdiction. Again, we are not told why. It may simply have been because Macherus looked, and today still looks, pretty impregnable. Conversely, he perhaps hoped John would escape and, having been given the warning, would go into exile. But excavation has revealed that Macherus was also a palace with all civilized amenities, a very comfortable place for those with the liberty to enjoy it. It might have been a matter of John enjoying the “hospitality” of the tetrarch.

  Was John executed straightaway? Was that the original plan? We are not told, but it is clear from Josephus’s account that John had his liberty, and thereafter his life, taken because of a crisis. That crisis was the war with King Aretas, based at Petra in what is now Jordan. Was Herod concerned that John might be “lifted” from Macherus by Aretas, King of Nabataea? For that is what happened to Herod’s wife, Phasaelis, daughter of Aretas, as we shall explore in chapter 5.

  And that, loaded with unspoken factors as it is, is the most objective account of John the Baptist that we have. That, we can say, is what straight history has to tell us about John the Baptist.

  THE NATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT EVIDENCE

  It is a persistent, if unconscious, prejudice of many biblical scholars to think as if the Gospels were written by people like themselves. I try to make no such assumptions. Since we really know nothing of any concrete value from the historical and biographical point of view about the actual personalities who composed the Gospels, we can never be sure what precisely their motives were, or how much they really knew that they chose not to make manifest in their writings. Levels of ignorance are very hard to detect.

  The Gospels do not debate their contents; they assert them. They never refer seriously to anyone else’s writings about their sole subject, Jesus and salvation—other than what is now known as the “Jewish Bible”—and they never express doubt as to a source. They are all conscious of themselves as being in some sense in continuity with, as well as being the fundamental transformation of, holy writings sacred to the Jewish people and respected in parts of the Gentile world. The evangelists borrow style and language from the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, and they quote from it repeatedly. What is more, the Gospels are full of the certainty that Jewish prophecy prefigures and refers directly to everything they have to say. The evangelists almost certainly had copies of the words of the Hebrew prophets and the Psalms on hand when they commenced dictation. The prophetic “footnotes” become the text at practically every opportunity, and the prophecies and declarations of God’s demands and future plans do more than illustrate the narrative; they become the raw, pulsing core of it. “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they, which testify of me,” Jesus is supposed to have said (John 5:39). The gospel writers did search the scriptures—and how!

  The Gospels are written on the assumption that every living word of their contents stands as a stone in an edifice of aggregate and definitive proof that the Hebrew prophets were right, even if the prophets themselves were not fully aware of the nature of the eventual fulfillment of the primal mystery to which they gave voice. According to the Gospels, the prophets’ promises were fulfilled at every point: such is the Gospel. Looking for the messiah? Hoping for salvation? Jesus is your man: Ecce Homo. This progressive ticking of all the qualification boxes is evident in practically every line of every Gospel. The Gospels are religious texts about religious texts. They are didactic and absolute; to get caught up in them exclusively may do much for the conviction of religious salvation, but little for the critical faculties. The history or story they tell is a spiritual history, not a political history or a social history. They are complex works and unique as literary phenomena, sewn together from disparate sources as they undoubtedly are. They are the work of determined human hands, and it goes without saying that their influence has been incalculable.

  The Gospels are not, however, histories in any strict sense of the term. Historical works might inform and even entertain on occasion, but they are not intended to transform lives or reveal spiritual truth, even though we can all learn something from history, such as the fact that people seldom learn from history. Today, the writers are given the dignified term “evangelists.” And that says it all. The Gospels are tools of evangelism: preaching and conversion. The Gospels do not “win” because a first-century Roman pot is discovered in Natseret (Nazareth) in Israel, but because a sinner repents and enters the church. Archaeology cannot prove a religion is true.

  The Gospels are religious writings. They contain religious thoughts, words, symbols, metaphors, allegories, and stories. Though the setting for all of this is a specific period of history, the point about them is the practice of religion and the presence of spiritual truth; they are concerned above everything with stating what the authors are convinced is shattering religious truth. And what is shattered, be it understood, is the course of history itself, both for the individual and for humankind. History is just part of the pallet.

  In the case of Luke’s Gospel and his Acts of the Apostles, there is a late attempt (ca. 80–130 CE) to dress the kerugma, or “proclamation,” in historical form, but in spite of Luke’s more urbane approach, an approach that has something of Josephus’s desire to allay Roman suspicions about it, the point is still the same: Jesus is Lord. Accept it or be damned. We must presume Luke’s readers did not object to the hard sell. After all, what they were most interested in was salvation. That was what the Gentile churches were offering the pagans. And salvation must mean, ultimately, the end of history. You cannot have salvation without damnation too.

  So great indeed is the gospel conviction that history is soon to end that the political structures, which undoubtedly shaped the early first century, pass unexamined and unexplained, time after time. The Gospels are, in a sense, full of missing history. There are Romans in Judea. So what? It doesn’t matter. Galilee is undergoing a boom in building construction; it doesn’t matter. Zealots are being crucified; it doesn’t matter. The Emperor nicknamed Caligula is killed by his own guard; it doesn’t matter. There’s a war between
Herod Antipas and Aretas of Nabataea; it doesn’t matter.

  Jesus is walking on water; that’s what matters!

  History, as far as the gospel writers are concerned, is simply the vehicle by which salvation has been delivered. It is background. As in the Hebrew books of Kings, Genesis, and Exodus, what we get is “salvation history.”

  John the Baptist only matters so long as he plays a part in this.

  In John’s Gospel this process of spiritualizing history reaches a most otherworldly pitch. We think we are moving in time, but at every moment of the text, we are touching a great eternal circle, the presence of an aeon, a spiritual kingdom: not of this world, calling us off the Earth, above the waters of flux and change, or history. In John’s Gospel we feel that we are leaving terra firma altogether—and time with it. As water was a Gnostic symbol for the flux of the material world, we too are walking on water, that is, above it. So elevated is this Gospel’s apparent perspective, you might think it had been written by God himself, or one of his angels. But it wasn’t. The whole epic magnificence is nonetheless swathed in an aura of heavenly blues and golden bread blended with pale flesh and splashed with glittering blood that threatens to unhinge the story. Jesus’s speeches seem to go on forever. He’s got all the timelessness in the world. Nevertheless, few would reckon that the narrative lacks bite, or even venom. There are some very vicious things in the “spiritual Gospel” of John, but you need to look carefully to find them. Nevertheless, in the main, we are in the presence, not of mere events, but of divine signs: signs to take you out of time altogether and upward through a sky-blue infinity to the colorless radiance of eternity beyond.

  You are being taken to God.

  Powerful stuff, as my father used to say.

  Great propaganda too.

  And history it is not.

  The church did not start with the Gospels; they joined the train later. The church started with people. And, according to all four canonical Gospels, the story they have to tell started with John. John the Baptist, that is. This is remarkable since no one can be in any doubt that the problem with the Gospels as “historical sources” is that they are utterly Christocentric. Jesus is the star. He gets the dressing room, top billing, and the plaudits. He is center stage even when he is not physically, or metaphysically, present. There is no real room for the supporting cast or bit-part players. They are brought on and off like props. There are no real “character parts.” There is no sidekick or moll. Any actor in a biblical epic has a real problem if he or she lands one of these supporting roles; they destroy actors’ pride. The names “Peter,” “James,” “John,” “Andrew,” “Mary”; you could interchange most of them at any point in the narrative and most people would not notice, even after a lifetime of church attendance. Apart from the historical cameos—Pilate, the Herods, Salome, Herodias—the only figure who really stands out, other than Judas Iscariot, is John the Baptist. He comes in with a big splash at the start, but you quickly feel an impatience in the gospel writers to get him off the stage as quickly as possible. He is almost too big for the story. It is no surprise that when the big bucks are splashed out on Jesus epics we find major-league hunks Chuck Heston and Robert Ryan given the role of the “wild man” up to his manly waist in the Jordan in his One Million Years B.C. furs, braced with beefy biceps and sun-burnished face and a voice with built-in, heaven-shaking echo. The world is his studio. Surely, this man deserves extra scenes! The producers of The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) duly provided some. Heston/ Baptist tells José Ferrer’s Herod “what’s what” in snappy dialogue that competes with holy writ and turns John’s execution into his liberation. Sounds like the scriptwriter had been reading Josephus on the beliefs of the Essenes: canny stuff. They had, note, to go outside the Gospels to make the historical context work. In King of Kings (1961), the majesty of Orson Welles delivered a better introduction to first-century Palestine than St. Luke.

  So, what can we learn about John the Baptist from the New Testament? Well, first we can learn what some people thought about him within a century of his death. If we were writing a biography, we might put this information under the heading of “John’s Influence,” but that might be misleading if, as it may be suspected, the picture presented has been distorted. It could be that John’s real influence has been obscured deliberately, or even falsified through ignorance, arrogance, or malice.

  Nevertheless, there must have been things about John that stood out, things that were too well known to reshape or reinterpret, facts that we must presume were not invented. Such may be listed as follows: John existed. His name, “Johanan,” means “God comforts,” a common Jewish name in the first century CE. He lived in Judea. He kept the Law and was holy. He baptized. He had a following. He may have had something to do with Jesus. He upset the Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea. He was arrested and executed. In death, he still had a big following.

  These seem to be irreducible facts.

  After that, we have to be very careful indeed in trying to extract historical knowledge from the New Testament. There are things that the gospel writers know but which they are going to ignore. And there are things that the gospel writers do not know and therefore cannot tell. Let us look at what the gospel writers probably do not know or do not care to mention.

  From a historical point of view, the Gospels can be viewed as palimpsests. A palimpsest is an old manuscript that has been reused. The old text may just be visible beneath a new, clear text, even though it has been rubbed out. The original text is vague, but it occasionally “comes through” into visibility. I do not mean that the oldest manuscripts of the Gospels that we have are actually palimpsests! What I mean is that there is a real historical background to the events described in the Gospels, but the force, implications, and content of that true background seldom come through into the text as we know it. This is in part a result of the Christocentric focus we have already discussed. The problem is that such is the distance of the gospel text from an authentic historical setting that the meaning of the text may suffer a crucial change in emphasis, and therefore meaning. There is history behind the text but it is vague; key determinants are missing. Thus, a particular saying attributed to one person may have meant something quite different before being placed in a new context, even if the words of the saying are rendered more or less fairly. I gave an example of this earlier with regard to the meaning of John’s tirade in Matthew referring to the “children of Abraham.” Until one knows about the grounds for vociferous objection to the Herodian dynasty among pious Jews, one cannot be sure precisely to whom John’s words, if they are John’s words, were properly intended. And yes, it does matter. We may be missing something important, whether or not for one’s salvation, I cannot say, but illumination may occur when we get the joins right.

  Why is the historical background vague?

  The Gospels were written long after the political events took place that shaped the drama of John the Baptist’s life. In many respects, they were deemed irrelevant to later generations because almost the entire picture of Jewish life changed so radically between the 30s (John’s heyday) and the period after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem’s temple in 70 CE.

  The critical period may be divided into two: first, from the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE until John’s execution (probably 36 CE), and second, from 36 CE until the beginning of the first Great Jewish Revolt in 66 CE. That entire period consisted of a prolonged ferment of agitation, violence, apocalyptic prophecy, resistance, and repression. Moments fit to enjoy the “lilies of the field” must have been seized eagerly, for they were few. Roman legions trampled the lilies into the earth.

  The main protagonists of the infra-Jewish conflict consisted of a number of groups of Judeans and Galileans who believed that the Herodian dynasty was a disaster that, having befallen the nation, spelled anguish for its religion. If Jews did not respond to the crisis, they believed that God would damn them. If they did respond to the crisis, they knew that the Romans woul
d try to destroy them. They put their faith in their religion because that was the only honorable and righteous choice for them as patriots subject to divine judgment.

  What all of the most active anti-Herodian elements had in common was a belief in a messianic solution to the crisis. God would send his “anointed one” to redeem the kingdom from God’s enemies. We find this messianic fervor abundantly expressed in the writings of the so-called “New Covenanters.” The New Covenanters is a name now given to those people who sometime between ca. 160 BCE and perhaps the early first century composed and were uplifted by the original works of commentary and community rule we know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were people who subjected themselves to a new covenant with God in the region of Damascus, far from what they considered a corrupted Temple in Jerusalem. Their answer to the crisis was the strictest possible adherence to the Jewish Law, the formation of an ultrarighteous community, and a willingness to fight in a messianic struggle in the future.

  Josephus does not mention such a group by such a name, though it is common among contemporary scholars to imagine that Josephus’s Essenes be identified with the so-called New Covenanters. Josephus does give us qualified information about so-called bandits: Zealots who fought Romans and collaborators in the uncompromising spirit of the Jewish hero Judas Maccabaeus, the “Hammer” who by force of arms expelled the Seleucid army of Antiochus IV, ruler of Syria, from Jerusalem in 167 BCE. Zealots were sometimes inspired to arms by the idea that if they rose against the invader then their act of faith would trigger the messiah’s coming to lead them to final victory. It was a gamble. Others thought the messiah should come first. But it had to be the right messiah. How could one be sure? Some believed there was one messiah; others two: a priest and a king. (Might this expectation account for an authentic political relationship between Jesus and John?)