The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  I suspect both John and Jesus knew precisely what it meant.

  Clearly the phrase “the third day” got attached very early on to the familiar (perhaps too familiar) story of the resurrection, and rightly, we are at liberty to believe, or not. But what did the phrase “the third day” originally mean? What did Jesus mean by it when he uttered it, if he uttered it? For it ought to be plain to the meanest intelligence that if there is any reality to the saying, he cannot have been referring, in his own mind, to the story of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb and the events of what we call “Easter Sunday,” named generously after the pagan goddess Eostre, linked to the radiant dawn and celebrated at a Spring Equinox festivity in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria.

  In fact, the phrase “the third day” makes perfect sense within the circle of prophecies familiar to John and his relative.

  SECRET ISRAEL

  Remember this? And the evening and the morning of the third day . . .

  The third day.

  On the third day of creation in Genesis, God made the plants to yield fruit, and the seed that carries in itself its seed:

  And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth”: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day. (Genesis 1:11–13)

  This is the work of the third day. These are the first fruits of pure creation, and they are acceptable to God; God saw that they were good, pristine. And every plant had its seed within itself, so that it might go into the heart of the Earth and rise again as its creator willed. The epiphany of life on Earth chimes right in with Isaiah’s prophecy of God’s Day of new creation, once the darkness is banished:

  In that day sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red wine. I the LORD do keep it: I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day. . . . He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit. (Isaiah 27:2, 6)

  The end of the just man is like the beginning of life. The work undone by Man’s disobedience, his fall, is remade. Creation is restored, and the just man and God are reconciled. On the third day, the fruit, the seed of Adam, shall be raised.

  The background to this interpretation becomes clearer when we recall to mind the Book of Enoch. Enoch revealed to Jesus’s generation that humankind had been corrupted by evil angels, evil “Watchers,” stellar beings, rebellious “sons of God” who came to Earth and took the daughters of men. By quitting heaven and descending to Earth, the Watchers had explicitly transgressed God’s work of the first and second days: the creation of the light and the fundamental division of the heavens from the Earth. The evil Watchers had trespassed across their ordained boundary and brought spiritual havoc to the work of creation. The work of the new third day then is the restoration of the original seed of life: wine will flow. Its symbol and requirement was the spiritual glorification and revelation of the Son of man: his “rising on the third day.”

  On this understanding, it appears that Jesus and John led a secret movement, under the skin of Israel, a spiritual underground, a hidden Israel, a true Israel, a faithful Israel, a band of perceivers, watchers, guardians, dedicated to galvanizing the eschaton, the end-time. Their task involved exorcising the world of evil powers. God would bind the powers and raise the martyrs. This was an esoteric, spiritual struggle. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and without the Spirit, neither John’s nor Jesus’s followers could understand the true dimensions of the operation. This plan to rebuild the work of creation, the “temple” built in three days, was not something for the ears of kings and Roman governors: the kingdom envisioned was not of their world; it was a spiritual mission, the work of brother builders: the Natzarim who stood awake as the world slept.

  What they were really about, and the level on which they were operating, was not such as would alert either worldly historians or journalists.

  When the Son of man stands the test of “fire,” of Spirit, the third day is reenacted, creation’s corruption by evil spiritual powers is overturned, and the New Day begins: the new Creation, the New Man raised from the alembic of Test, vindicated in the “judgment.” He stands on the original square of creation, the divine cornerstone.

  Now, what of the Son of man being three days and three nights in the heart of the Earth? This is without doubt an esoteric concept, very much in tune with the third day and the “raising.” The solution rather stares one in the face. “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10).

  That was on the third day. God made the Earth. Then, three days and three nights later:

  And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (v. 26)

  What was Adam made of? His very name was identical with it: “. . . for out of it [earth] wast thou taken: for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). The Hebrew for “Earth” is “Adama.” A Son of man is a Son of Earth. When God made Earth, the idea of Man, the seed of Man, of Adam, was there, living, buried in the “heart of the Earth” for three days and three nights.

  Today we might say that all the essential elements of the genome have existed since the creation of the Earth. Though Man did not appear at once, he was in the heart, in the mind of Earth, in potentia: Man’s coming was the fulfillment of that potential. On the third day of the end-time—please understand that this is all symbolic language—the story of the creation’s corruption is, as it were, reversed. So shall the Son of man be in the heart of the Earth for three days and three nights. The perfect Adam redeems the sons of Adam, though “buried,” that is, killed by those in the grip of the evil Watchers; his sojourn lasts only until the completion of the new creation when he emerges from the Earth, this world, as the first fruit, with seed in himself to make new sons of God.

  We have of course ample assurance that Jesus used the image of the sowing of the seed in the earth by the “Sower” (God) as his most universal and well-known parable: men are like plants. Some get burnt up, some get choked by bad company or thoughts, some yet grow to ripeness and are cut for harvest. The Messiah was called the “Branch,” born of Jesse’s “stump”: he too would have to be harvested, lest there be no Bread of Life, and the soul of the world go hungry.

  And what do we find? The third day of Passover, 16 Nisan, was the Feast of First Fruits, when the sheaf of new barley, cut, was waved by the priest over the golden altar:

  And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land, which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring a sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest unto the priest: And he shall wave the sheaf before the LORD, to be accepted for you: on the morrow after the sabbath the priest shall wave it. And ye shall offer that day when ye wave the sheaf and the lamb without blemish of the first year for a burnt offering unto the LORD. (Leviticus 23:9–12)

  The Son of man emerges pure from the Earth on the third day: a perfect offering to God, a perfect offering from God. First fruit: humanity reborn. “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid” (John 19:41).

  Paradise was restored by the new fruit of the new tree in the Garden, and Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene as a gardener (John 20:15).

  Chapter Ten

  A REED SHAKEN IN THE WIND

  NOW THAT WE HAVE GLIMPSED the mysterious heart of John and Jesus’s physical and spiritual operation, undertaken, it should be recogni
zed, in the most trying circumstances imaginable, we may ask the question, Was the operation a success? Obviously, an answer to that question depends on the point of view of the person asking it.

  What were the aims of the operation, as far as we can tell?

  Certainly, there was felt an overwhelming obligation to fulfill prophecy, not out of conceit, but from a sincere conviction and profound realization that the prophecies’ time of fulfillment had actually come: all the signs were there, and the Watchers could see them, and they acted. The purpose was, literally, to make a way for God, to galvanize the fulfillment of God’s will for Israel and humankind; knowledge of how long this would take to complete was not in the gift of the men and women who set the train in motion.

  What were arguably the most spiritually meaningful events of 37 CE passed unnoticed and unrecorded by the world at large, the world of power and pomp: the world of illusions. In retrospect, the stories of these events present us precisely with the first fruits, not the ultimate banquet. Though it may be argued that the symbolic harvest has begun, we are far from any historic feast. The spiritual and physical rebirth of creation, and the revelation of Man in his actualized fullness, we may suppose to be a project of practically inconceivable scope, from the perspective of the human earthly lifespan, and from the time process in general. A very long-term project indeed! Some might call it evolution, of a kind, but with a purpose, a spiritual evolution unlike the purely naturalistic or materialist evolution that dominates much of contemporary thought.

  In the short term, and in spite of all the odds, we can, with hindsight, see that the principal target-aims of John and Jesus’s operation were achieved, and spectacularly so. By the end of the century, the Herodian family had ceased to exist. Herod the Great’s temple was obliterated in 70 CE. The Sadducees were “history.” The bickering and rioting in the Temple was over. The old Temple priestly organization was gone, and an esoteric form of Judaism was well on its way to exploding its fruits, madness, wisdom, anarchy, and glory into the non-Jewish world where, after extreme compromise to exoteric practice, power, and politics, it appeared to conquer the spiritual life of the larger part of the empire, and even to outlive “the greatest power on Earth” beyond all expectation. It was called “Christianity”: a religion that claims to follow Jesus, and whose members succeed in avoiding that uncomfortable path as much as possible.

  For all the catalogue of catastrophes that may be laid at the door of the dominant Christian Churches, the inner “door” to authentic spiritual transformation, the call to the highest, the gospel of forgiveness and love, the faith in justice and truth, the cultivation of esoteric knowledge, the ancient call to the good, the true, and the beautiful, the vision of spiritual liberty, all have somehow survived, if only just, and thoroughly battered, the attacks of their enemies, among whom we must frequently include those who have claimed the mantle of “Christian authority.” From the social and political perspective, then, and from the point of view of the realist, the operation has been a tremendous, if qualified, “success.”

  However, while we have seen the shoots, we are very far indeed from seeing the actualization of the flower, or anything like it. Visions have abounded, of course, but visions planted in this world are like the dreams of holidays to come; they seldom match up. Christian triumphalism is misplaced. The purpose of Christianity, for example, cannot be “Christianity.” John the Baptist was not a Christian, nor was Jesus. However, if we understand the “end” of the world properly to mean the purpose and intended fulfillment of the fruitful part of the world, we can look forward to many divine “days” yet before the potential released to a hostile world in the first century actually cooks, not a bread merely good enough to eat in the event of hunger, but the bread of life itself.

  In terms of the supracosmic operation, the permanent defeat of the “evil angels,” one is inclined to wonder if Enoch did not sleep too long at Dan before making his proclamation of judgment on Azazel and his rebel legions! On closer inspection, though, we find that the Enochian prophecy looked to the binding of the wicked on Earth to the rebellious powers, not the annihilation of spiritual powers in toto, however deviant. The promise is that for those who are prepared to endure and follow in the path made straight by John, then the ongoing test of judgment will be bearable, and the powers of evil will no longer dominate the soul; nothing less than transfiguration would count as ultimate success on this road, and we see little sign of it, but perhaps we seek in the wrong place. In this sense, the rebellious powers’ kingdom is under check; notice has been served, as it were, and those who embrace its servitude find themselves brought to book in due course, one way or another. The “thousand-year reich” lasted a little over a decade, and though it saw the ruin of all it inherited, the cost was great.

  Since the time of John the Baptist’s call, a great part of the world has been aware of living in the “last times,” but when we consider the “three days and three nights” it took to bring forth Adam from the heart of the earth in the divine scheme, and the many billions of years it took to constitute the optimistically named Homo sapiens in the human and terrestrial scale, we might realize that there is a long, long way to go! If we confine our assessment to the world of time, we are really far closer to John and his wilderness than we might think. Those expecting the Son of man to appear on the “clouds of power” in the foreseeable future obviously have never seen the Son of man. Such persons are like people standing at an imaginary bus stop, waiting for a bus that is not going to come. They could really use their precious time in this world doing something more wholesome and practically useful than manipulating dates, numbers, and calendars. They think they carry comfort to the “saved,” but they simply distract and slow down the march of the “great army of God.” Salvation may be urgent, but the world’s end is not. That is the view of the best spiritual minds I have found on the subject, and I daresay, it is one that will annoy those who have not looked deeply enough into the question. Sometimes the world is like a dull or painful play; we can hardly wait for it to end.

  For those who demand “signs,” the Natzarim offer the “sign of Jonah.” If you had truly repented, you would have been waiting not for the end, but the beginning.

  PROBLEM PAUL

  As we have been discussing, the churches have been their own worst enemies all too frequently, standing in their own way. This is regrettable but seems inevitable. How else otherwise could we account for the fact that the source of the greatest denigration to the person and reputation of John the Baptist has been the very person who punctured the Judaic skin of the message of the Natzarim and threw it headfirst into the marketplace of the Gentiles whose spiritual governors, Jews believed, were fallen angels? Saul, the pursuer of the Nazoraeans, became Paul the converter of the Gentiles: a fantastic irony that almost has the whiff of some paradoxical providence about it.

  However one looks at it, Paul opposed the baptism of John. The time has come to examine whether his reasons for doing so do honor or disservice to the man Jesus, whom Paul claimed had been “revealed in him,” described as unsurpassed by the greatest men ever born of woman, a statement that must certainly be taken to mean that Saul, their younger contemporary, for all his genius, was probably inferior to the man whose baptism he denigrated. For make no mistake about it, the chief problem the gospel writers had when writing about the magisterial figure of John was the widespread view abroad in Christian churches by the last quarter of the first century that John was somehow deficient, a man whose role had to be “decreased” so that Jesus’s glory might be “increased.”

  The circumstances of Paul’s run-in with the church of John are related, in tantalizingly fragmentary form, by Paul’s disciple Luke in the eighteenth and nineteenth chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, a very late work (ca. 90–110 CE):

  After these things Paul departed from Athens, and came to Corinth; And found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy with his wife Priscilla (
because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome), and came unto them. And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers. (18:1–3)

  Paul stayed a “good while” in Corinth making tents and preaching before taking Aquila and Priscilla with him to Syria, thence to Ephesus, where he left them:

  And a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man, and mighty in the scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man was instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in the spirit, he spake and taught diligently the things of the Lord, knowing only the baptism of John. (18:24–25)

  Apollos spoke boldly in Ephesus’s synagogue. Hearing him, Aquila and Priscilla took Apollos aside and, as Acts puts it, “expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly.” From this account, Apollos appears to have been fully co-opted into the Pauline camp, for when Apollos decides to go preaching in Achaia, in the northwest of the Greek Peloponnese peninsula, the Corinthian brethren endorse Apollos’s mission by requesting that the “disciples” there receive him. A mighty preacher in Achaia, Apollos “convinced the Jews and that publicly, shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ” (18:28). According to Acts, Paul returned to Ephesus some time later while Apollos was at work in Corinth:

  And it came to pass, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul having passed through the upper coasts came to Ephesus: and finding certain disciples, He said unto them, Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed? And they said unto him, “We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. And he said unto them, Unto what then were ye baptized?” And they said, “Unto John’s baptism.” Then said Paul, “John verily baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people, that they should believe on him, which should come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus.” When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Ghost came on them; and they spake with tongues, and prophesied. And all the men were about twelve. (19:1–7)