The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  You will have observed how in this account Paul’s insistence that John told his followers to believe “on him, which should come after him,” is followed by Paul’s explaining who that “him” was: “Christ Jesus.”

  Close comparison of Luke’s late account with Paul’s contemporary deliberations in his first letter to Corinthian converts shows a more nuanced, more troubled picture of Paul’s relations with John’s church and with “John’s baptism.” Luke has oversimplified what must have been a complex and fascinating encounter. Sadly, we are not privy to what, if anything, passed between Apollos, the Alexandrian Jew with the golden tongue who knew the “way of the Lord,” and Paul, apostle of “Christ Jesus” to the Gentiles.

  Luke’s picture consists of Paul, with Aquila and Priscilla’s help, easily waiving aside John’s baptism in favor of Paul’s baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire. Aquila and Priscilla put Apollos straight on the issue, and Paul straightens out what appear to have been Apollos’s Ephesian converts to the “way of the Lord,” while Apollos himself is away in Corinth, preaching.

  Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians presents a different picture; Paul is in a jam over a question of his authority. Written from Ephesus, on the west coast of modern Turkey, some hundred and eighty miles from Corinth by sea, the letter is dated to ca. 53–57 CE. If we take into account Luke’s reference to Aquila and Priscilla’s “late” expulsion from Rome, the low end of that date spectrum is to be preferred since the Emperor Claudius died in 54 CE. Roman historian Suetonius’s Life of Claudius (25.4), records, “As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.” Messianic ructions of some kind may be assumed. Jewish communities were plainly in a state of anticipatory excitement. Paul and Apollos doubtless capitalized on this, even if they were not themselves among the causes of it.

  First Corinthians weaves a delicate dance around the issue of Apollos. Paul does not go out of his way to offend but wants it understood that his is the point of view to observe: he speaks not for himself, he insists, but for the highest interest, God. Once that is accepted, Paul is magnanimous; he even asserts that baptism was not what he was called to do. It is not really his “thing,” as if leaving that function generously to his opponents. He has higher things to impart. From this high point, Paul sets himself to appear frankly astonished that anyone should be so mundane as to talk of the “baptism of Apollos” or “the baptism of Paul”—or even of Cephas or Christ, for that matter.

  It should be borne in mind that Paul, in the first four chapters of his letter, is fighting on several fronts, not against John’s baptism alone, but also against the Gentiles-should-be-circumcised-to-be-saved Jewish messianic interest from which his synagogue opposition comes. This “interest community” appears to have proclaimed a blend of uncompromising New Covenanter-style beliefs (as we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls “Community Rule” and Damascus Document) with the slightly more conciliatory Jesus-oriented, mercy, righteousness, and good works stance of James, the brother of the Lord. Paul hopes everyone called to the Messiah will find harmonious reconciliation through his, Paul’s, meek presence; otherwise the conflicting Corinthians can expect “the rod” (4:21).

  Paul’s disciple Chloe has warned him of conflict and acrimony in Corinth. Some say, “I am of Paul”; others, “I of Apollos,” others, “I of Cephas” or “I of Christ” (1:12). Paul then jokes that none were baptized in his (Paul’s) name; they were baptized in Jesus’s name (presumably), so why the division? “I thank God that I baptized none of you, but Crispus and Gaius; Lest any should say that I had baptized in mine own name. And I baptized also the household of Stephanas: besides, I know not whether I baptized any other” (vv. 14–16). Paul then says he is not really responsible for baptism: “For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel” (v. 17). And what Paul has to preach to the worthy is the ancient mystery, “the hidden wisdom,” the (Nazoraean) mystery of the means by which the “princes of this world” are confounded. Paul is almost certainly referring by inference to the evil angels who have dominated the nations and corrupted the world, whose work has been undone by the suffering and death of the Son of man: “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (2:7–8).

  Crucifying the Lord of Glory was the evil Watchers biggest mistake (theirs, not the Romans, apparently). Those who thought they were “doing it” did not, as Luke’s Jesus asserts, “know what they were doing”; Jesus forgave them (Luke 23:34). The wicked Watchers—whom Paul calls the “princes of this world”—were really pulling the strings, but while they had stolen much divine knowledge, they were not privy to God’s ultimate plan to save his creation, to redeem it from its fall. Paul, by declaring openly the defeat of the dark powers to the Gentiles, over whom those fallen angels had exercised invisible control throughout history, the grip of the Watchers over the converted Gentile soul was broken; they experienced the Holy Spirit and could stand the Test. These Gentiles were the children of God’s ancient covenants with Noah, and with Abraham; they were not party to the covenant with Moses and so did not, Paul insisted, stand under condemnation of Moses’s law, but under the revived, essential law: love God; love one another.

  According to Paul, his manifest opposition was simply a gaggle of men puffed up with their own knowledge. Their knowledge, he declares, must be earthly since Paul’s is heavenly, and if it were recognized as such, there would be no contention among men over baptisms or anything else: “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (2:14). Paul then apologizes for only acquainting the brethren with a form of the mystery, one appropriate for their carnal, natural, and, frankly, superficial Gentile minds. Should they doubt their carnality, their unfitness for the “meat” of spiritual instruction, they should think about their behavior: “For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?” (3:3–5).

  Paul now demonstrates himself well up on New Covenanter-style language concerning the plantation of righteousness that is the council of God’s Law, as well as being a creative adept with Nazoraean vineyard, building, and temple imagery. He employs a cunning pun that both praises and undermines Apollos simultaneously with all the skill of a Mark Antony coming not to praise Caesar but to bury him:

  I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are laborers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.

  According to the grace of God, which is given unto me, as a wise master builder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. (3:6–11)

  Professor Robert Eisenman has suggested in his pioneering, controversial book James the Brother of Jesus that Paul was responding to the goad of the New Covenanters’ “Community Rule.” That Rule declared the “Council of the Community” (a council of twelve, note, with three priests) “shall be an Everlasting Plantation, a House of Holiness for Israel. . . . It shall be that tried wall, that precious cornerstone, whose foundations shall neither rock nor sway in their place [Isaiah 28:26], It shall be a Most Holy Dwelling for Aaron . . . a House of Perfection and Truth in Israel. . . .” Full members of the “Community in Israel . . . shall separate from the habit
ation of unjust men and shall go into the wilderness to prepare there the way of Him; as it is written, Prepare in the wilderness the way of [the Lord], make straight in the desert a path for our God [Isaiah. 40:3]. This path is the study of the Law, which he commanded by the hand of Moses . . . and as the prophets have revealed by His Holy Spirit.” Those who follow the rule are “the men of perfect holiness.”

  Paul says the foundation of the everlasting house or spiritual temple is the Christ, Jesus. The New Covenanters maintained it was the council of men of perfect holiness. Paul wanted a doctrine for the Gentiles; the New Covenanters a doctrine for a select Israel.

  Paul vehemently opposed the strictly legal interpretation of these symbolic images, while being at pains to display his knowledge of them, by cleverly reinterpreting and thus recreating them. In his second letter to the Corinthians, for example, Paul interprets the “everlasting building” metaphor as an image for the spiritual body of the holy, that body that transcends and will survive the body of Earth. In doing so he alludes to the supernatural stone “cut without hands” in Daniel 2:34:

  For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house, which is from heaven. . . . (2 Cornithians 5:1–2)

  Ironically, Mason Brother Robert Samber, commenting on the St. John the Baptist Feast, which took place on June 24, 1723, in London, compared its gluttonous excess—demolishing a “mountain of venison”—unfavorably to what he asserted was the primary ancient commission of Free Masons, namely, to build the perfected house of the spirit, made “without hands.”

  Nearly seventeen hundred years before Brother Samber’s poignant observation, Paul employed both masons’ and allied agricultural images to demolish dependence on what he considered the merely human ministry of Apollos and the watery baptism of John. Paul, the self-proclaimed wise “master-mason,” the architect, had not stumbled on the Stone, like his enemies who failed to discern correctly its character; he, Paul, had picked it up and built with it, or planted it in the earth, on the correct foundation or “plantation”: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.” Apollos’s “watering” is obviously a euphemism for John’s baptism, and Paul is saying, well, it is useful, so long as we bear in mind who did the planting, and who is responsible for the increase or fruitfulness: God.

  Note the word increase here, for it seems to belong to the same family of ideas that would make the Gospel of John’s John declare that he would have to decrease so that Jesus could increase. Indeed, the line may have come from reflecting on Paul’s words; they clearly head from, and in, this direction.

  Feeling himself on top of the argument, Paul is now in a conciliatory mood. In fact, he says kindly, the planter and waterer are really worth about the same in God’s scheme, and they can expect comparable wages, performance-related, that is. By denigrating himself, he denigrates Apollos to laborer status. This is Paul’s habitual rhetorical method; he will be as the “filth of the world” if it gets the message across, and he does not mind very much who he brings down there with him. Their lowliness is their exaltation, for the things of God are despised in the world. So it is all right that “another” has built on the foundation he made, since the real foundation is Jesus Christ, whoever had a hand, or did not have a hand, in it. Men as mere men are not that important; their world of values is going to end soon anyway:

  Therefore let no man glory in men. For all things are yours; Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s. (3:21–23)

  Nevertheless, Paul remains adamant that the Corinthians still see him, Paul, as more important than any “mere instructor” in God’s mysteries. He is their father:

  For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel. Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me. (4:15–16)

  Furthermore, as their “father,” Paul is in touch with the great high mysteries of God that, as far as everybody else is concerned, shall be brought to light from darkness only at the time “the Lord come” (4:5). In the meantime, he has “in a figure [that is, he has ‘adapted’ them; metaschēmatizō = I change the appearance, or transfer by a fiction] transferred to myself and to Apollos for your sakes; that ye might learn in us not to think of men above that which is written, that no one of you be puffed up for one against another” (4:6). Here Paul almost posits himself and Apollos as an apostolic pair, but he is attributing any wisdom Apollos might display not only to God through him, but that, if I read this correctly, Apollos does not know the mysteries as they are eternally, only a form of them suited to his capacities and those of the Corinthians. It is a difficult passage; one almost feels Paul is claiming a relationship to Apollos that really is not there, for otherwise, why would he not just say, “Apollos and I have spoken and agreed”? Paul is gainsaying, and he is doing it in a series of veiled threats already referred to in chapter 3 of the letter. The coming judgment is going to reveal the true mysteries, in the light of the fire that will bring life for some, destruction for others. The Corinthians had better watch out!

  This idea of coming judgment, of fire, allows Paul to reach for what he is sure is his killer argument against the “baptism of John” and those who claim to be “of Apollos.” There is a subtle shift in emphasis, but it is powerful.

  “What is builded,” says Paul, “no matter who may claim to have built it, will be tried in the fire” (my italics). Paul claims the “baptism of fire” he administers is a critical step beyond John’s—and Apollos’s—“watering.” This cross-symbolic link of fire and of water, which the holy building—or plantation—must withstand is very revealing, not only of Paul’s thinking and argumentative method, but of the precise mechanism through which we can see whether Paul has, or has not, misunderstood or deliberately distorted the authentic position of John the Baptist.

  First, Paul uses almost exactly the framework of coming harvest fire closely associated, in the Gospels (viz: Matthew 3:10), with John the Baptist:

  Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide, which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. (1 Corinthians 3:12–15)

  The fire will not, however, annihilate the “temple of God”: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defiles the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are” (3:16–17). One can almost hear the heavy sighs of relief from Paul’s, doubtless shaken, audience. That heartening passage of blessed relief from the imminent Trial is, of course, predicated on having received the Holy Spirit: the baptism of fire that sustains the soul through the fire of judgment. Paul seems to be saying, Forget who administered it. Is your baptism good enough? Is it up to the task? Your instructor won’t be able to help you when the time comes. Are you making the right decision? Do you want love, or the rod?

  Even though Paul’s chief claim in his “first” letter to the Corinthians is that he is not a baptizer, but the preacher of the hidden mysteries and wisdom of God, in a form appropriate to “children,” he is nonetheless the one who works in the Spirit of the Son who can awaken even the Gentiles to God’s holy spirit. He, Paul, had the baptism of “fire”; this, evidently, was not a water baptism. According to Luke’s account it involved the laying on of hands. The fire or holy spirit “baptism” was both destroyer of chaff and quickener of righteous spirit: a kind of winnowing.

&n
bsp; THE PILLARS OF ENOCH

  I hope to demonstrate that Paul’s subtle, condescending, but highly effective polemic against John’s baptism is based on an ancient Hebrew tradition, the tradition of two judgments, and on an ancient Hebrew legend concerning what could be built to stand the tremor of the two judgments. This tradition, at some unknown time, became embedded into the ancient lore of freemasons, that is, master masons of freestone. Given Paul’s borrowed and inherited usage of Hebrew masons’ lore we should not be altogether surprised. Prophets, priests, and masons were bound together in the codex of Jewish history: after all, much of the prophetic voice was expended on matters pertaining to “heathen pillars,” the Temple, and the state-sponsored “bulwarks” that would, or would not, make Israel secure. The psalms, along with Hebrew wisdom literature, echo with grand thoughts of the divine architect who built the universe with wisdom.

  Paul’s contemporary, Josephus, was well aware of the legend. He related it in his first book of Antiquities of the Jews (2:3):

  Now Adam, who was the first man, and made out of the earth, (for our discourse must now be about him,) after Abel was slain, and Cain fled away, on account of his murder, was solicitous for posterity, and had a vehement desire of children, he being two hundred and thirty years old; after which time he lived other seven hundred, and then died. He had indeed many other children, but Seth in particular. As for the rest, it would be tedious to name them; I will therefore only endeavor to give an account of those that proceeded from Seth. Now this Seth, when he was brought up, and came to those years in which he could discern what was good, became a virtuous man; and as he was himself of an excellent character, so did he leave children behind him who imitated his virtues. All these proved to be of good dispositions. They also inhabited the same country without dissensions, and in a happy condition, without any misfortunes falling upon them, till they died.