John addressed not a material, but a spiritual famine; God would raise the stricken who turned to him.
John’s baptism is indicated by Mark as a baptism by which “remission of sins” was accomplished. The sins would presumably be symbolically “washed away” by baptism, an act of repentance, of turning back to God. The Jordan provided the symbol. Mark says that “all the land of Judea” and of Jerusalem went out to John in the wilderness where they all confessed their sins. This seems somewhat exaggerated! According to this statement, all Judea repented. Job done, one might have thought. If all Judea had repented, where was the need for a coming judgment, or even a messiah to initiate it? According to Mark, John called for repentance; repentance he got.
Mark gives us a sketch of John. He wore camel’s hair with a leather girdle about his loins. He lived on locusts and wild honey. Behind this literary doodle we get some myth and some credible history. Why the curious dress?
John’s outfitter would appear to be 2 Kings 1:8: “He was an hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins. And he said, ‘It is Elijah the Tishbite.’”
Or is it John the Baptist? Elijah looms large in the John legend. Either John chose to adopt the dress of the ninth-century BCE prophet Elijah (whose name means “Jah is God”) or else the prophetic tradition that the “messenger” was Elijah encouraged the gospel writer to visually identify John with Elijah. The logic would then be thus: if the Hebrew scripture says that this is how Elijah dressed, and Elijah is the messenger, and Elijah is John, then John dressed like this.
But why identify John with Elijah?
The identification was an automatic consequence of reliance on the prophecies of Malachi for knowledge of the “messenger.” Malachi 4:5–6 reads:
Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
The story went round early-first-century Palestine that among the many fabulous things that would attend an imminent “day of the LORD” would be the miraculous return of Elijah, last seen by his comrade Elisha heading heavenward in a whirlwind that carried a fiery chariot with horses of fire in 2 Kings 2:11. Remarkably, Elijah had not died; he was biding his time with the heavenly host. From thence he would return, presumably with fire.
I am not convinced that the historical John adopted Elijah’s costume, great image though it is. A statement attributed to Jesus to which we shall presently attend suggests a more likely kit. We may have to change our mental image of the Baptist, difficult though it may be. The chances are that John wore the fine linen of a priest, and possibly the distinctive white dress of a mystical Essene. If John was accustomed to take the Nazarite vow, he could at any particular time have been very hairy, the vow period requiring indifference to hair growth, or he could have been clean shaven, a requirement of vow completion.
As for John’s rough diet of desert survival fare, it is difficult to believe he would have resorted to the desperate extreme of protein-packed locusts when there were, reportedly, so many people in his entourage. Throughout the East it is still customary for followers of holy men to bring gifts of food to the venerable. These he will generally give to the hungry. It does not look good for a holy man to be seen eating like anyone else; it suggests the dominance of appetite, the weakness of the flesh. “Going without” is a basic mark of holiness. However, holy men must live; reasonable food would have been available to John, though he would have been selective. John was probably a vegetarian since the eating of vegetables or uncultivated food was the diet most associated with the zaddik, the righteous man consecrated to God. Even though vegetarianism was not a requirement of the famous Nazarite vow, whose stipulations in Numbers 6:1–26 give a good idea of the disciplines associated with those “separated” for God, we can nonetheless find authentic background to John’s wilderness diet in 2 Maccabees 5:27. There we read of the hero and liberator Judas Maccabeus, progenitor of the Hasmonaean priest-kings who ruled Judea until supplanted by Herod the Great. In 167 BCE, having defeated the Syrian-Greek army of Antiochus IV and secreted the Temple’s desecrated altar in the Temple Mount, Judas Maccabeus removed himself from the city, seeking purification:
But Judas Maccabeus with nine others, or thereabout, withdrew himself into the wilderness, and lived in the mountains after the manner of beasts, with his company, who fed on herbs [wild plants, vegetables] continually, lest they should be partakers of the pollution.
In John’s time, Judas was the very model of heroic holiness, that is, zeal for the Lord, and Judas’s diet gives a clue as to the inspiration behind John’s own wilderness sojourn. John was probably imitating the hero. Holiness was a political act. Holiness led to power: spiritual and political. In Judea, religion and politics were inseparable. And holiness was reinforced by dieting, by self-denial.
The reason for being in the wilderness is made clear. Judas and his company were avoiding the “pollution.” The pollution consisted of a Jerusalem desecrated by foreigners, the holy altar of Zion splashed with the blood of animals sacrificed to pagan gods. And that is precisely how the revolutionary priests saw the Herodians and their unholy dependence on the pagan Romans. From the height of their Tower of Antonia, indifferent to its God, a Roman garrison looked down on the Temple. We may conclude that John was one such revolutionary, that is, reactionary and traditionalist, priest.
According to Mark, John preached that “one mightier than I” was coming, someone so exalted that John himself, though famed for purity, was unworthy to do for him a menial, slave’s task; John refers to the undoing of a man’s shoes. In modern parlance, if you will forgive me, John was saying that he was not worthy to lick the shit off the coming one’s boots.
This is a fine and effective saying, and we should expect a pious prophet in the first century to hold such an exalted view of either the “messenger” who would prepare the way of the Lord or of the Messiah. But if the story we shall come to concerning John’s kinship with Jesus is true, one might hardly expect the real John to say this about a relative, unless, that is, he had reason to believe his relative was the expected one, or was complicit in the timing of his cousin’s appearance on the scene, that is, that John was literally “preparing” the political conditions for a successful messianic takeover. Then, perhaps, we might see John’s extravagant language about his own unworthiness as “pumping up,” building up his audience’s expectation before “laying on” the expectant multitude the real star: “If you think I’m big, just wait until you meet your King!” so to speak. “He’s coming!” Was Jesus’s arrival being “held back” in readiness for the big announcement? Much depends on how, or even whether, the historical John actually presented himself as a “herald.”
I do not know if the reader has noticed, but there seems to be confusion about just who was expected. You will have noticed that neither the Isaiah nor the Malachi quotations that open Mark’s Gospel refer directly to a “messiah.” They speak of a “day of God” or a way for God to come, and they speak of one who announces this. Isaiah may himself be the voice crying in the wilderness, or it might be a reference to Elijah who did God’s will and brought down fire from heaven and lived in the wilderness. Whoever wrote or uttered the prophecy called “Malachi,” he makes it clear, finally, that the messenger will be Elijah. But after Elijah comes the Lord.
We seem to be dealing with different strata of belief about God’s big day. The messiah figure expected by first-century CE enthusiasts entered Jewish mythology considerably later than the time of Isaiah, who lived in the eighth century BCE, though different parts of Isaiah’s text can be dated between the eighth century BCE and the sixth century BCE. While we know that a number of messianic concepts, such as “he shall be called Immanuel” (God with us) along with profound concepts of God’s servant suffering, were taken from Isaiah’s text and from other prophets
, and much later applied systematically to an apocalyptic messiah, these concepts now stood outside of their native historical context. Isaiah himself was not aware of the extravagant process-history of imminent destruction of God’s enemies combined with the end of the world that lit up the imaginations of New Covenanters, Zealots, and, later again, apocalyptic-inspired Christians. In fact, by the end of the first century CE, the simple promise of Isaiah, that first would come the messenger to prepare the way of God, then cometh God, had been staggered, as a result of aggregate text reading, into a veritable caravan of comings and goings. First the prophecy, then the messenger, then the Messiah, then the paraclete, that is, “comforter” or “Holy Spirit,” then the second coming or return of the Messiah, then, at last, the Lord God in primitive Trinitarian panoply, that is to say, with his Son, who would judge the quick and the dead. A single play had become a long-running series. Preachers still trumpet these prophecies as if they were all saying the same thing.
What this means for us is that John probably did not see himself as the personal subject of Malachi’s prophecy and, therefore, did not see Jesus as “the LORD,” that is, Jahveh. He may have shared extreme views about a messiah with other groups, we cannot be sure, but his own position on who was coming is, at this point of the investigation, uncertain.
According to Mark 1:8, John speaks in the language, that is, in the conceptual framework, of Paul. Mark’s John says, “I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.”
The background to this distinction appears to be Paul’s much later conflict with the posthumous church of John the Baptist. In Acts 19, Luke describes Paul meeting disciples of one Apollos, a learned follower of John, in Ephesus. Apollos, interestingly, came from Alexandria, a notable base for philosophically, as well as apocalyptically minded, Jews.
According to Luke’s account in Acts, John’s followers tell Paul that they have never even heard of the “Holy Ghost.” The reason, they say, is because they received John’s baptism. But according to Mark, John himself preached that he only baptized with water and that one was coming who would baptize with the Holy Ghost. John’s disciples had no reason, if Mark’s saying was authentic, to be ignorant of the Holy Ghost, or Holy Spirit.
This all raises a host of questions and possible explanations, but let us try to keep to the text. John appears to have preached that a mighty being was coming and this being could do things that neither he nor anyone else could do. John could hardly be expected to know of Paul’s later baptism, which, according to Luke, actually produced an ecstasy, an effect of “receiving the Holy Spirit,” resulting in powers of prophecy and “tongues.” When the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus at his baptism, there were, according to all accounts, no strange phenomena beyond the visionary: no ecstasy, no “tongues,” whatever that might mean, no sudden propensity for prophecy. What John would have known about was the prophecy of Joel (2:28–29). And he would have associated it with the coming of God and the final end of wickedness:
And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids [slave girls] in those days will I pour out my spirit.
This is the nice side of the prophecy. After the spirit comes, the picture changes. The moon will be turned into blood and the sun to darkness, “before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come.” Luke knew the prophecy well; he had Peter quote from it at Pentecost in Acts. It will be observed that in the prophecy, the gift of God’s spirit is not associated with baptism, not even metaphorically; it is the direct gift of God himself: “I will pour . . .” God does the pouring out. It is the work of the Lord. If John knew the prophecy, and he employed it, he knew indeed that he who would do these great things far surpassed his own ego.
Furthermore, Luke’s view that the “Holy Spirit’s” coming was the work of the postresurrection Pentecost and the Pauline view that he, Paul, was the minister of the baptism of the Holy Spirit are not only challenged by the prophetic texts themselves, but by near contemporary references known to us as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
As far as may currently be ascertained, some time in the first century BCE a number of priests (“Zadokites”), Levites, and their followers came together in the “land of Damascus” to make a new covenant of holiness and to establish a perfect rule that would make them fit people to assist God’s Messiah when a final apocalyptic war between the “Sons of Light” and the “Sons of Darkness” occurred. Camps were established for training in the “wilderness,” possibly the Judean wilderness southeast of Jerusalem, possibly further north, far enough anyway from the “pollution” of Jerusalem: the wilderness south of Damascus for example. The camps were modeled on the wilderness camps of Moses that protected the Law in “booths” or “tabernacles,” until the people were sufficiently purified for Joshua (in Greek: Iēsous or Jesus) to lead the Israelite army to victory in the Promised Land.
The New Covenanters took guidance from the example of a figure they called the “Teacher of Righteousness.” He was opposed and presumably killed by “the wicked priest,” known also as the “Spouter” (of lies), a servant of “Belial,” a kind of archdemon in human manifestation whose baleful machinations dominated the pollution. A series of conflicts between wicked priests and teachers of righteousness punctuated Jerusalem’s history in the first centuries BCE and CE, so there are a number of credible candidate pairs who could be assigned to these archetypical roles in the New Covenanters’ accounts.
The historical background to the New Covenanters’ conflict with authority undoubtedly lies in the attempts of the Maccabaean high priests, ethnarchs, and kings to maintain control of Judea, first against the Syrian-Greek armies of the Seleucids and subsequently against Roman armies.
In 64 BCE, the Roman General Pompey (106–48 BCE), former comrade of Julius Caesar, crushed the Syrian army of Antiochus XIII. Having established Syria as a Roman province, Pompey headed south via Phoenicia toward Judea. In Judea, Pompey exploited an ongoing civil war. That civil war was fought between Judas Maccabeus’s great-greatgreat nephews, High Priest and King Aristobulus II, and Aristobulus’s brother, High Priest Hyrcanus II. Pompey supported Hyrcanus II. Hyrcanus was also supported by the Pharisee faction against Aristobulus II. Aristobulus’s support came from Sadducees in Jerusalem.
The Hebrew root of the word Sadducee is the same as that of Zadokite: zedek, righteousness, particularly toward one’s fellow, with the idea of justice, that is, the Law. Josephus speaks of Sadducees as the upper-class Jewish sect who ran the Temple. Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Robert Eisenman believes the Sadducee group split during the first century BCE, broadly speaking into strict-righteousness and realist-collaborationist factions, so that one can think of the “Zadokites,” or “sons of Zadok” (the ancient high priest) referred to in the New Covenanters’ scrolls as being the strict “Sadducees” or “Zadokites” and the antimessianic Sadducees, with their hands on top power in Jerusalem, as being their enemies (servants of Belial). This idea fits the known facts and may help us to identify the Baptist’s authentic political background.
The historical circumstances that caused a definitive split among Sadducees may reasonably be sited in the traumatic conquest of Jerusalem by the Roman Pompey. Pagan Pompey entered the holy of holies of the Second Temple, thus desecrating it, while his soldiers cut down priests in the sacred precincts that soon ran with their blood offering.
Hyrcanus’s brother Aristobulus would be poisoned by Cassius and Brutus in 49 BCE. Any political gains Hyrcanus II thought he might have gained through collaborating with Pompey against his brother were, however, nullified after 44 BCE when Aristobulus’s killers assassinated Julius Caesar, which plan, we all know, backfired. The famous Mark Antony, in his attempts to shore up power in the civil war that followed Caesar’s death, made an alliance with the Idumaean king, Herod. Her
od did better from the deal than did the fated Mark Antony. Mark Antony executed Antigonus, Aristobulus II’s son, at Herod’s instigation in 37 BCE. That is how Herod became “Roman” King of Judea. Seven years later, Herod executed Hyrcanus II. He then proceeded to waste most of the surviving family of the Maccabees, including his own wife, Mariamme, and their two sons. After that, Jewish claimants to the throne were, understandably, in short supply.
This background helps us to understand why the New Covenanters, and many other patriotic Judeans, saw their country and its capital as having been polluted both by foreigners and by their countrymen who had abandoned zedek, righteousness toward one’s fellows, and hesed, piety toward God, according to the Law, and who massacred the innocent.
We cannot be sure when, or for how long, the camps established by the New Covenanters existed. The likelihood is that they, or their descendants and example so to speak, were still active at the time of the Baptist, though this is not certain. It must have been a risky business to establish an antiestablishment camp when Herod the Great was ruling, but Josephus recounts a camp of tents being established immediately after Herod’s death in 4 BCE within Herod’s new Temple by young Torah enthusiasts, the supporters of two teachers of righteousness, Matthias and Judas, who had been burnt to death by Herod for encouraging the pulling down of a Roman eagle from his Temple. The Roman eagle, a sacrilegious living form on the house of God, was just the kind of abominable pollutant that so incensed the New Covenanters and ideologically related groups.
In painstaking efforts to “keep clean” of the pollutions of life outside the Law, the camps practiced ritual bathing, or baptism. Their view of baptism corresponds well to Josephus’s account of the baptism of John. According to the New Covenanters’ “Community Rule” or Manual of Discipline, there was a correlation between the state of the inner person and their fitness for the outer rite. The Rule states clearly that the wicked “shall not enter the water . . . for they shall not be cleansed unless they turn from their wickedness” (1QS*2 v, 13–14). In the words of Dead Scrolls expert Geza Vermes, “True purification comes from the ‘spirit of holiness’ and true cleansing from the ‘humble submission’ of the soul to all God’s precepts” (The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, Penguin, p. 82). Vermes, perhaps wary of muddying his baptismal waters with religious controversy, carefully uses the term “spirit of holiness.” Eisenman, on the other hand, regards a translation of the original Hebrew phrase as “Holy Spirit” to be perfectly accurate. It is the “Holy Spirit” within the purified righteous that is sullied and hurt by unrighteous conduct. God’s holy spirit coming alive or springing into the awareness of the person who has chosen the true path of righteousness is clearly indicated in the writings of the so-called Qumran sect as a phenomenon consistent with complete legal cleanliness. It is the power of the holy spirit of the progressively cleansed that makes the person want to be righteous, which enables them to see and to desire the righteousness in adhering to the Law, and which enables them to find joy and peace in adhering to the rules of holiness. This holiness brings peace and wisdom and courage.
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 9