The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

THE REED, THE PROPHET, THE MAN IN FINE RAIMENT

  In the story of the Transfiguration, Peter, John, and James are taken up a “high mountain” where, according to Mark, Jesus’s garments “became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them” (9:3). Three chosen disciples then see what they believe to be Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus. Awestruck, Peter concludes that a booth be erected for each figure of this radiant triumvirate.

  It is clear why Mark follows this account with a discussion of John the Baptist and Elijah, and about the Son of man rising from the dead. At least it looks like it ought to be clear. But as we have seen, Luke shies right away from this discussion; Matthew tinkers with it.

  What Mark’s Gospel has to say about John and Elijah is said in terms of a shared communion of Jesus with Moses and Elijah. Mark says very little else about John. One wonders if there was once a discussion attached to the transfiguration narrative on the lines of, “What went ye up the mountain to see? A reed shaken by the wind? A man clothed in soft raiment? And a prophet?” The three descriptions might originally have stood for three men who each could be properly described as a “Son of man,” these three being Moses, the reed shaken by the wind; Jesus, dressed in soft garments; and Elijah, the prophet. Understood this way, Jesus’s three famous questions, intriguingly applied to John, work very well.

  What, you may ask, has Moses got to do with the reed shaken in the wind?

  Much.

  The “Red Sea” of Exodus through which Moses took the Children of Israel to freedom was actually the Yam Suph or Reed Sea (mistranslated in the Greek version of Exodus). And suph, the Hebrew for “reeds,” also can be punned with suphah, meaning “storm,” and soph, meaning end. The storm in the reeds was Pharaoh’s nemesis, or as Exodus 15:10 has it, “Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them [the Egyptian army]: they sank as lead in the mighty waters.” The crossing of the Reed Sea is the archetypal salvation-event of Israelite history. A “reed shaken in the wind” is, then, a superb condensation of the entire miracle, with added connotations of Moses (John?) alone in the wilderness, of his famous staff of power, and so on.

  We may even find here a double recognition of John’s spiritual nature. John is not only the culmination of the prophets (Elijah) but also of the Law (Moses). John, like Moses, is a kind of “ferryman,” seeing the Children out of bondage in sin (Egypt) to the Promised Land beyond (salvation). If we recall the reference in John (1:28) to Bethabara “beyond Jordan,” where John baptized, we may see that John, like Moses, conducts the Children of Israel through the waters via a crossing point or ford. John as Moses is also the psychopomp who leads the faithful into the “fiery” wilderness for purification and—who knows?—to the revelation of a new Law.

  If the “reed shaken in the wind” and “the prophet” (Elijah) are both in a sense John, then who is the man in “soft raiment?” In the transfiguration story, the chosen disciples envision a man in soft raiment. It was apparently Jesus, in garments whiter than no earthly fuller could bleach them. Were these the garments to be found in kings’ houses? Then the allusion may be to the holy mansions of God and the garments of angels. But again, do we not sense a link with the spiritual identity of John also? It is as though the identities of Moses, Elijah, John, and Jesus are fused in a state of heightened vision of their meta-real, transcendent being as “Son of man.”

  And the prophet? Elijah, that is, John, and John is therefore more than a prophet.

  Why is John more than a prophet? He prepares the way of the Lord: he makes the path straight.

  Now we may bring in Mark’s conclusion to the transfiguration narrative. There we find John’s true greatness: “Elias [Elijah] verily cometh first, and restoreth all things; and how it is written of the Son of man, that he must suffer many things, and be set at nought. But I say unto you, That Elias is indeed come, and they have done unto him whatsoever they listed, as it is written of him” (Mark 9:9–12).

  Elijah has indeed come! See John, see Elijah!

  John should have been easily recognizable as Elijah, for John did exactly what Elijah did. What did Elijah do? Elijah went to King Ahab and condemned the sinfulness of his marriage to Jezebel (1 Kings 18:7ff.) and condemned Ahab’s sinfulness for respecting foreign gods who had no power. This John did too, to the face of Herod Antipas, calling shame on Antipas’s marriage to Herodias. This John did, with stupendous moral courage. Even old King Ahab’s lines could have been written for Herod Antipas:

  And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel? And he [Elijah] answered, I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father’s house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the LORD, and thou hast followed Baalim [foreign gods]. (1 Kings 18:17–18)

  John troubled Israel, in all the right ways. He did what was to be expected of a Son of man.

  And what is a Son of man?

  The gospel writers are never exactly sure, to be sure. They know it is a title Jesus used. It sounds like “Son of God” and in places becomes interchangeable with it. There are not many today who can offer a clear explanation of it. Some Jewish scholars are inclined to say the Christian tradition simply makes too much of it, and that it just means “man,” as you might say: a “son of Adam,” as C. S. Lewis uses the term in his Narnia books. So when the Lord addresses the prophet Ezekiel (2:1) as “Son of man,” he just means “O man!” That may arguably have been the case as to the first usage of the term, but it is clear that by the time of John the Baptist, this term had acquired a thoroughbred pedigree of prophetic and messianic meaning:

  And he said [a voice that addresses Ezekiel] unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee. (Ezekiel 2:1)

  This exhortation comes after Ezekiel, sometime in the 550s BCE, enjoyed the privilege of witnessing the glory of the Lord. He had seen “the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it” [the divine throne in the vision]. Man is made in the image of God. And, at the blazing heart of the Glory, the image of God is seen by Ezekiel to be like a man, but like no man ever seen.

  Following this vision, Ezekiel is addressed as “Son of man,” as if initiated or rendered reborn by the vision: the son, fruit, or child of the vision of the divine Man, the image at the heart of God’s Glory: the manifest reflection of God’s limitless light. Those few vouchsafed the vision—the restoration of the being made in the image of God—constituted an elite; little wonder then that the astonished Cephas, true to his nickname, reacted to the vision by wanting to build memorials to mark a place where eternity touched time and a new spiritual exodus was born.

  Long after Ezekiel’s vision, the phrase “Son of man” became a staple of apocalyptic and revelatory writings. Four centuries later, for example, the book of Daniel, well known and much quoted from in the time of John and Jesus, used the term to mark a chosen prophet:

  Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog, and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. (Daniel 39:1)

  Apocalyptic writings impacted hugely on John and Jesus’s era, and a new brand of apocalyptic came into being during the latter half of the first century CE: Christian apocalyptic (“apocalyptic” describes writings that reveal what has formerly been hidden). Christian apocalyptic was sometimes added on to Jewish revelatory works, as in the case of the “Ethiopic” Book of Enoch, though at what date precisely is unknown. In the Christian apocalyptic “Book Two” added to Enoch (chapters 37–72) we find the “Son of man” as a complete heavenly figure in his own right.

  Confusion over the meaning of the “Son of man” engendered by Jesus’s use of the term in the Gospels seems to have led to a mistaken conflation of the title with the original image itself in the divine Glory seen by Ezekiel. That is to say, the divine image became the “Son of Man,” and the “Son of Man” was then used to stand for the Messiah in heaven, as we see here in passages from the later Ethiopic Book of
Enoch:

  And it came to pass after this that his name [Enoch’s] during his life-time was raised aloft to that Son of Man and to the Lord of Spirits from amongst those who dwell on the earth. And he was raised aloft on the chariots of the spirit and his name vanished among them. . . . And it came to pass after this that my spirit was translated. And it ascended into the heavens: And I saw the holy sons of God. They were stepping on flames of fire: their garments were white [and their raiment]. And their faces shone like snow. . . . And he [the angel] came to me and greeted me with His voice, and said unto me: “This is the Son of Man who is born unto righteousness; And righteousness abides over him, And the righteousness of the Head of Days forsakes him not.” (Book of Enoch 70:1–2; 71:1, 14)

  The original Book of Enoch was a hot writing in the first century CE, and a fairly recent one too. Several versions were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and their contents accord with Josephus’s point that the Essenes valued books of angels. These Aramaic versions do not contain “Book Two” with the “Son of Man” figure. This rather confirms the point that the “Son of Man” as a heavenly figure, at least in the Book of Enoch, is a Christian development. The Gospels then stand midway in the development of the figure.

  The Jesus of Mark 9 appears to have used the term for one who had seen the Glory and would have to suffer as a result. The “suffering” of the Son of man derives from linking the title “Son of man” to the prophet Isaiah’s idea (eighth century BCE) that the special prophet picked by God to serve him would be set at nought by the “sons of men” who would not see the special man for what he really was. In the end, however, the Son of man would be exalted:

  For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

  He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

  Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

  All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

  He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

  Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.

  Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (Isaiah 53:2–12)

  While we may be familiar with parts of this text in relation to prophecy applied to Jesus, we should realize that this text was already familiar to John and to Jesus, and if they applied it at all to their own destinies, they may certainly have applied it to each other, for all Isaiah was doing was describing the destiny of God’s chosen men for all time. It was in the interests of later commentators to set John and Jesus apart. This anxiety we have seen demonstrated very clearly over Mark’s conclusion to the transfiguration story.

  Now perhaps we can see that the three men envisioned at the “Transfiguration” constituted a holy elect. In this company, the “inner three” disciples were privileged to see the “real Jesus,” a transfigured, radiant being: the being the sons of men cannot see. Each in this elect communion was a “Son of man,” for a “Son of man” is one who has seen the Glory of the Lord. Moses had ascended the mount in Sinai to receive the commandments; he saw the Glory of the Lord (Exodus 24:17). Elijah was called to witness God’s appearance at Horeb where, through earthquake, wind, and fire, Elijah finally heard the “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). And Elijah also was taken up in a “fiery chariot” to the very mansions of the Lord.

  And Jesus, in the transfiguration story at least, is presented as the Glory of the Lord, intimately linked, I think, to the spiritual being of John.

  The late Gilles Quispel, one of the world’s leading scholars of the Gnostic Gospels, used to say that the vision of the “Divine Man,” or (in Greek), “Anthrōpos,” was the “stock vision” of the Gnostic, the one who knew, the one who had made the link that bound the essence of Man to the essence of God.

  Such speculations were as frightening a business for the religious authorities of the first century CE as they are for religious authorities today. No orthodox authority likes to confuse the established distinction between Man and God, and yet has that not been the precise theological difficulty of the history of Christianity? Is Jesus Man of Son, or Son of Man? And what is Man?

  In the key quotation from Mark 9, it is clear that Jesus knows that John, as a Son of man, is in this world destined to “suffer many things” and be “counted as nought,” that is to say, he will not be recognized for what he is, for what he is is not valued by those in control. He, the Son of man, has authority, the only authority, but he is set at nought. Therefore, God is set at nought. Therefore, there will be judgment. And in that judgment shall the Son of man, the one who has stood up, stood firm, stood straight, stood for the truth, stood like a reed in the wind of the Spirit, he, the Son of man, is raised among the dead.

  That is why, coming down from the mountain, the conversation of Jesus and the “inner three” concerns the rising, or resurrection, and its relation to the Son of man’s destiny, which they do not understand:

  And as they came down from the mountain, he [Jesus] charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen, till the Son of man were risen from the dead. And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with another, what the rising from the dead should mean. (Mark 9:9–10)

  The dialogue then proceeds to the question of Elijah’s coming, something the scribes insist on as a preamble to, presumably, a general resurrection. Jesus seems to correct this view, saying that Elijah has come indeed and “restoreth all things” and that “they have done unto him [Elijah-John-Son of man] whatsoever they listed, as it is written of him.” (v. 13) A feeling definitely lingers here that a prophetic quote has been edited out, either by Mark or a later copyist concerned that Elijah/John’s destiny suddenly appears too similar to that reserved for Jesus. The quote, which might have begun with the words “as it is written,” would almost certainly have been from Isaiah 53, as above.

  What does Jesus mean when he says that Elijah must first restore all things, as well as “suffer many things, and be set at nought?” Elijah/ John’s restoring all things refers to the trials of Elijah in chapters 18 and 19 of 1 Kings where Elijah’s zeal for restoring the Lord’s desecrated altars is linked directly to the suffering of the prophets:

  And he [Elijah] said, I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away. (1 Kings 19:10)

  For destroying her priests of Baalim, Ahab’s wife Jezebel determined to kill Elijah, as Herodias would, in Mark, set out to kill John, for revealing her shame. In 1 Kings 18:30–31
, Elijah, undeterred by thought of consequences, restores the altar of the Lord:

  And Elijah said unto all the people, Come near unto me. And all the people came near unto him. And he repaired the altar of the LORD that was broken down. And Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, unto whom the word of the LORD came, saying, Israel shall be thy name: And with the stones he built an altar in the name of the LORD.

  If we take this account as an allegory, we might be forgiven for thinking that the calling of the “twelve,” the stones for the new, restored temple of Israel, is the work not, as we usually think, of Jesus, but of Elijah/ John. But then, Elijah was a Son of man, as was John, as was Jesus, as was Moses, and what one did, so did the others.

  Behind Mark’s references, we see a Jesus who has looked at that story of Elijah restoring the altar and observed that Elijah only rebuilt the altar as a prelude to calling God to work his fire on the bullock of sacrifice, which fire then consumed the sacrificial bullock, and the water that surrounded the altar, and the stones of which the altar was built. And it would seem to me that Jesus has also thought of the image of the one who lies down on the altar, who for love of God is sacrificed. If Jesus understood the deeper meaning of the story of Elijah, its inner meaning, and how it related to the ancient prophecies of the servant who suffers and is set at nought, and of the Son of man who is granted the vision of the Glory, then we may be sure that John understood these things too, and, we may even say, showed Jesus the way. But this was not as “herald” in the orthodox sense but as master of ceremonies, brother-guide, psycho-pomp, exemplar. While we can see that this likely historical actuality was not acceptable to the post-Pauline gloss that we find in the mainstream treatment of the Gospels, it nonetheless has survived in fragments, with one of which we have been dealing. It is not the only one. Look again, for example, at Mark 11:27–33, a pericope that appears in Matthew and Luke as well: