Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the Temple precincts echoed to the noise of a persistent, rude, and sometimes violent struggle within the Temple organization for control and influence. One nepotistic high priest followed another, with constant appeals for the deposition of unpopular or allegedly corrupt high priests. As in Iran today, the political tempest of the country was largely fought out in arguments between priests. The conflicts of the priesthood occupy many pages of Josephus’s fascinating history of the period. There were poor, “lower” priests who kept to righteousness and pious devotion to the Law: men who romanticized about the golden days of old when Israel was pure and God poured his blessing on the great men of renown, when the dew of heaven fell on the lips of the prophets, and Solomon was arrayed in glory, and God loved his precious people like a shepherd loves his lambs. Then, in the dark corner, so to speak, were the richer priests. The richer priests came from families supported by the Herodians: realists, players, men of the world. They could afford to pay for bullyboys when the occasional riot demanded the heavy hand. The more powerful Sadducees were among these realists of the political situation; for them it was a choice between the Herodians and anarchy: tolerate the Romans or risk having no country at all. And with the Herodians came the power and the glory. If a messiah ever did come, it would wreck the whole show.
Needless to say, among the messianic groups, God favored the “poor.”
As I demonstrate in my book The Missing Family of Jesus, every shred of historical evidence points to these conflicts within Jerusalem’s priestly factions as the true setting for the upbringing and self-understanding of John and of Jesus: Johanan and Yeshua. Their background was priestly, and they may themselves have been priests, either practicing as priests in the Temple from time to time or having been trained as priests. According to Luke’s account, Jesus’s mother, Mariamme, had been a Temple slave girl, given wholly to what many considered a corrupt temple system until redemption by marriage; husband Joseph was probably a priest. The less politically influential and powerful priests of the first century were moved either to support or to denounce groups such as the New Covenanters or the various Zealot factions. Priests—possibly fellow priests—would have watched the activities of John and Jesus with great interest.
Why do the Gospels show so little interest in this priestly background? Admittedly, Luke tells us something about it in his selective narrative of John the Baptist’s birth, but the crucial political facts are missing; the setting is fundamentally pacific. Striving to fill out the gospel story as he received it with additional research and fresh material long after the events, Luke pacified the story with Pax Romana soap suds. Centurions could be nice guys.
The fact is that for the gospel writers, practically all of the political setting and much of the authentic religious setting had ceased to exist. In 70 CE, a soldier in Titus’s army “accidentally,” it was claimed, set fire to Herod the Great’s Temple complex in Jerusalem. From that point onward, the Temple system with its twenty-four divisions of priests and six yearly rotations of priestly courses was set at nought. The Jewish Christian community lost for good its established stomping ground (though tradition says that the Jewish Christian community was supernaturally advised to leave Jerusalem before the war erupted). Meanwhile, the center of power of the “Christian” churches had since the 50s been moving westward toward the seat of political power: Rome. Most Christians now appear to have been Greek-speaking former pagans or Jews dwelling beyond Palestine, still fired by the expectations and hopes of apocalyptic messianism. The converts knew that they faced the possibility of persecution and even death. Nero’s famous persecution, stimulated by the Great Fire of Rome of 64 CE, which coincided with the Jewish Revolt, was a recent memory. Their religion was very much “of the moment”; they were not disposed to look in too much detail into the past. The words of Jesus were living doctrine concerned wholly and immediately with their lives in the here, now, and hope for the ever-after. Again, salvation was the issue. They were called to witness the triumph of God over the powers of the world.
The great fact for converts and their teachers was that the Christian Church now existed, and you did not have to be a Jew to join it and receive salvation. Consequently, in telling a story of Jesus, its authentic Jewish setting, especially the political setting, could be significantly toned down and in potentially inflammatory areas rubbed out. The polemic grew in force that the Jews had rejected Jesus, even though his coming had been foretold by the prophets and announced by John; Jesus was a prophet without honor in his own country. His “own” allegedly rejected him. Exactly how far this rejection had penetrated his family had not yet coalesced into the later conviction visible in John’s Gospel that Jesus’s brothers, like Joseph the patriarch’s (the one with the colorful coat), were fundamentally against him. The idea of Jesus crucified at the will of his “own,” that is, “the Jews,” was a convenient untruth to tell Gentile converts: the Jews wanted Barabbas, which is to say, destruction.
They got it.
This point of view, unpleasant as it is to record, does not qualify as anti-Semitism in the racist sense, for it was recognized that there had indeed been a body of righteous Jews, true, though few indeed: a remnant. There was John the Baptist, there were a few miscomprehending disciples, and there was Paul (formerly “Saul”) of course. Adopting the Roman form of his name, Paul had announced that the righteous tree of Israel had received a new graft: the believing Gentile who paid his taxes and respected Roman authority was now part of the tree of salvation, promised by the prophets and fulfilled in “Christ Jesus.” That the Temple had been destroyed by God’s appointed authority (Rome) could only mean that not only was the old prophecy against Herod’s construction fulfilled, but that God no longer had any use for either it or its priesthood. There was only one High Priest now: Jesus. He was the last—that mattered. Jesus was a priest of the Order of Melchizedek, and that was supernatural and went on forever (Epistle to the Hebrews 5:6–10).
And with the destruction of the Temple, came the end of the dynasty that had built and rebuilt its controversial precincts. In 68 CE, the last Herodian King of Galilee, Agrippa II, was recalled to Rome and deprived of his kingdom. The Herodians were history too. And history meant “gone for good.” So the Gospels were not really bothered about telling converts and catechumens about the facts, mere facts, of first-century Judea and Galilee. The miracles were what mattered, the signs. And the fulfillment of the signs: Jesus reigning as Lord and High Priest over his church. He was gathering in his flock, storing his wheat up in the Great Garner, and before long, the spiritual—and actual—fire would burn up the old husk of the world and reveal a new heaven and a new earth.
Who needed history?
This was history.
And, of course, we must not forget about the Romans. The Romans triumphed in Judea. It was the Romans, not the Zealots, who wiped out the corrupt Temple system in Jerusalem. It was the Romans who unseated the Herodians: the entire apparatus was smacked flat by the legions of a man Josephus, for one, reckoned a universal savior (Vespasian).
There was many an inconvenient fact about the presence of the Romans at the time of John and Jesus, some very touchy subjects. Just what level of contact did John and Jesus have with armed resistance to Rome? How far had John or Jesus gone in condemning legal authority in Judea, backed by the will of the senate and people of Rome? What was Jesus really trying to achieve? Who was behind him? Did he pay his taxes? Was he a magician or an inciter of terrorism?
All of these were critically uncomfortable questions. What respectable Gentile would want to join a religious cult whose leader had been executed as a terrorist or pretender “king of the Jews” among terrorists? After the Revolt that brought the Temple to its ultimate destruction, Jews were suspect in the Roman Empire. People paid taxes to pay for the legions that crushed the Jews’ futile, fanatical revolt. For many, the word Jew was a dirty word; for others it betokened weirdness, magic, astrology. If “Jesus”
was to make any headway in the Gentile world, especially in the West, it would have to be made very clear indeed that Jesus had his own scrap with the Jews, his opponents. It was as vital for the evangelists as it was for Josephus to make it clear that there was something decent and honorable and inoffensive, even admirable, in Jewish religion and history and that this skein of righteousness was as far removed from politics and rebellion as could be imagined.
Pilate, it was asserted, could find no fault in him.
And John the Baptist, as Josephus asserted, was really a decent fellow, a virtuous man.
Now, when we take all of this into account and understand the implications of it, we shall find ourselves in a better position to make a judgment about the treatment of John the Baptist in the New Testament as regards its historical value. And there is one final tweak we must apply to our focus. By the time the Gospels were written, John the Baptist had been dead a very long time. We know from Paul’s letters however (Galatians especially) and from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles (which is really the “Acts of Paul”) that John’s following continued to flourish into the 40s and the 50s, though we know little about it. From the tiny fragments left to us, it appears John’s followers did not share, in the main, the convictions of, well, certainly Paul, concerning baptism and salvation. Paul attacked John’s church. Yes, John’s church. John’s followers had their own organization. Paul declared their “baptism” insufficient unto salvation. It was only “of water.” The true church—Paul’s organization—had the Holy Spirit, and, Paul claimed, he and his followers had “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16).
Problem: John’s baptism had been good enough for Jesus. Why was it not good enough for members of the new, growing Christian Church? Well, we think we know the answer because we have been told many times that John was only the herald of Jesus. And if we believe the Gospels, John himself said as much, and more. He was his own witness. “Believe what John himself has to say,” the Gospels urge.
It is not pleasant to suggest that the evangelists wrote things down that may not have happened. However, it must be recognized that to Christians, living toward the end of the first century, God himself had revealed the facts, that is, the truth. It was simply obvious that John had been the herald, since he was dead and the Church of Jesus, which had “come after,” was very much alive. And since the prophet Malachi had said that the coming of salvation would be preceded by the return of Elijah, then was it not obviously true that since salvation had indeed come, then the messenger, John the Baptist, was Elijah? And however great Elijah was, he was not as great, nor could he ever have claimed to be as great, as the one whose coming he announced. Furthermore, if it was the case that John prophesied the coming of the messiah or at least a divine intervention, as we should have every reason to suspect, then John would have been familiar with the prophecies (such as Joel) that in the day of “the Lord’s” (not explicitly the “messiah’s”) coming, there would be an outpouring of the spirit of the Lord. It only required the gospel writer to be familiar with Paul’s arguments about baptism with rival preachers to conclude that John the Baptist must have foreseen, since he was the aforementioned “messenger” (Malachi means “messenger”) that his baptism would become redundant! It would be wrong, the believer would I think argue, not to make the Baptist’s witness clear on these issues, for his role was to serve the Lord. And Jesus was Lord.
The question we must eventually face is whether or not John did in fact either foresee or share, in any respect, Paul’s point of view. We must also ask the question, Did the conclusion of some of the leaders of the Gentile Church in the late first century, taking Paul as their authority, play back Paul’s conceptions of rival baptisms into their accounts of John the Baptist? For if they did not, and John really believed in his own denigration and relative status, how did it come to be that followers of John did not recognize the claim of Paul and his followers that John’s message had had its time, served its purpose, and was no longer effective?
Did the church reduce John in significance simply because they “got what they wanted” from him, that is, a kind of endorsement, or was it because the existence of John and his followers constituted a very real embarrassment, or even threat, to the followers of Jesus?
We are now in a position to approach the accounts of John the Baptist in the New Testament.
Chapter Four
JOHN AS HERALD IN CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE
A FORM OF MARK’S GOSPEL is generally supposed to have been the earliest of the canonical Gospels to appear (ca. 65–80 CE). It opens with an immediate salvo of two quotes from the Jewsih scriptures; both are straightaway applied to John the Baptist. Mark launches his narrative with a slightly misquoted first part of Malachi 3:1. Note the second part of the sentence, omitted by Mark:
Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts.
Malachi proceeds to declare that this messenger will purge the “sons of Levi” (officers in the Temple and guardians of the Law) as gold and silver are purged to make a pure offering of righteousness. “But who may abide the day of his coming?” Malachi asks. “And who shall stand when he [the messenger] appeareth?” (v. 2).
Mark has the messenger preparing the way before “thee” rather than “me.” That is to say, in Mark, the Lord is addressing someone else. In the original text, “the LORD” (God) is himself the one for whom the way is prepared: a significant detail. Had Mark included the whole quote, the reader or hearer might, understandably, have identified the “messenger” as Jesus, who, according to a tradition, “suddenly” came to the Temple to purge it (John 2:14–17). Certainly, Jesus is presented in the Gospels as the messenger of a coming wrath and a call to repentance: a message attributed first by the evangelists to his relative, John.
The second well-known quote is from Isaiah 40:3. “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
Again, Mark slightly alters the verse, or his source of prophetic testimonies has altered it. Mark has, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Mark 1:3). Clearly, the original quotations from Malachi and Isaiah refer to the coming of the Lord God to his people. Mark’s understanding is that the one who is coming is Jesus; that is, in some sense, Jesus is the Lord. “Jesus is Lord” was the earliest statement of Christian faith. The question for us is, If John the Baptist used these prophecies with respect to himself, did he understand them to mean that he would have to prepare the way for Jesus, or would he have to do it for an unnamed or unknown messiah, or was the way to be made for the Lord God himself ? We should bear in mind that the doctrine of the incarnation, which identifies Jesus as the incarnation of the Lord God Jahveh, did not exist in John the Baptist’s lifetime. The Messiah was hardly expected to be Jahveh himself, but rather one anointed by the Lord. In the Gospels, John’s baptism of Jesus serves as the anointing of the “Son,” though the Baptist has no idea that this will happen.
Given this dizzying ambiguity, we may conclude that a doctrine of divine incarnation, a doctrine that in time would lead to a developed belief in the Holy Trinity, was arguably the sole doctrine capable of resolving the issue of precisely who was “messenger” and who was “coming.” It may then be argued that the incarnation doctrine itself depended in part on a struggle to place John and Jesus specifically within messianic prophecies. It is hard to avoid the fairly obvious point that to a messianic-minded Jew in the early first century, the Malachi prophecy of a messenger before the Lord would have been taken as a prophecy of the Messiah, who would be in some sense “Elijah returned.” By this token, if John was the messenger, then he was possibly the Messiah as well, since the Messiah was understood to be the one who prepared the way of the Lord. And the Lord was God.
Historically, i
t seems likely that John, if he did see himself as a herald in some way, heralded the coming either of the Lord or of a figure from the Lord. Note that the capital-lettered “LORD” in the Old Testament stands in for the holy name of God, Jahveh, or Yahweh. The use of God’s proper name was avoided by scribes wherever possible.
We must also consider the possibility that John was actually proclaiming the imminent arrival of the herald, the messenger, the one who would prepare the way for the “Yom Yahweh,” the Day of God. In that case the whole idea of John as herald would be a later assumption thrust back in time, based on the idea that if Jesus was the Lord, then an accepted messianic scenario demanded he be preceded by another. After all, the idea that John actually took these prophecies for his own credentials is questionable on account of the potential charge of impious arrogance, even blasphemy, had he done so. It seems most likely then that these prophecies were applied to John by others, before or after his death.
We see that, on examination, the “plain truth” of the Gospels is not so plain at all. John has been interpreted, both as an individual and with respect to his message.
Mark then tells us that John baptized in the wilderness (he must have been near water) and preached “the baptism of repentance.” Perhaps he went to the Brook Cherith, a wild, inaccessible gorge east of Samaria, a tributary of the Jordan’s eastern bank. That was where the prophet Elijah was sent by God during a great famine in Israel. There, Elijah was miraculously fed by ravens. There, he would raise the widow’s son from the dead (1 Kings 17; Freemasons as “sons of the widow” may note a parallel with their own “raising”).
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 8