The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom, which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And that their inventions might not be lost before they were sufficiently known, upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water, they made two pillars, the one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries on them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of Siriad to this day.

  This legend of the twin pillars, erected for the judgments of water and of fire is, I believe, at the root of Paul’s critique of John’s baptism. Paul’s statements about what you can build on the foundation he has laid make it plain. Paul is sarcastic about raising fancy things, gold and silver and precious jewels, on the foundations. This refers to Daniel’s prophecy of the smashed Babylonian image, obliterated and transformed by the stone cut “without hands.” Paul adds “stubble” and “hay” and “wood” to that built with “feet of clay.” Stubble is burnt by fire at the harvest. Stubble was also sought for the making of bricks by the Hebrews in Egypt; from it they gathered straw to reinforce the clay (Exodus 5:4–12). Paul’s reference to “hay” is even more sarcastic, since hay is even less substantial than straw! The judgment of water on such watery substances (clay, stubble, hay, etc.) would make short work of it. If you want to withstand fire, however, you need stone. Paul is making a subtle comparison of himself with Apollos. Who do you trust? What pillar are you going to lean on or cling to “when the chips are down”?

  Paul was well aware of the idea of the leaders of the church being called “pillars,” supports, and flanks to the door of holiness and salvation. It may be recalled that the Dead Sea Scrolls “Community Rule” called for a council of twelve ruled by three priests. Together they would stand as the House of Holiness for Israel. According to Acts, those John-followers on whom Paul laid his hands at Ephesus were numbered “about twelve.” Had Apollos set up a “holy council” there?

  Paul is, as ever, vitriolic about church leadership that does not include him. In his letter to the Galatians (2:9), he describes his troubled negotiations with the Jerusalem leadership over his contention that he, Paul, preach to the uncircumcised: “And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me . . .” That sarcastic phrase “seemed to be pillars” is absolutely loaded, and could be translated as “those so-called pillars.” Paul was “underwhelmed” by the men chosen by Jesus.

  Paul has an idea of two stages of judgment, and of salvation. First the water, the child’s diet of “milk,” then the “meat” that can stand a thorough roasting; that is what he has to offer: the higher diet, the real bread. Paul can see no point telling the Greeks of Corinth about Jewish legends of Sethian pillars; those that knew, would know.

  Perhaps Paul had visited the pillars referred to by Josephus in Syria. Josephus himself was about sixteen at the time Paul, according to Acts, took Aquila and Priscilla to Syria, before leaving them at Ephesus. In fact, the Greek historian Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE) wrote about the pillars of Egyptian King Sesostris in Syria, and this may explain how Josephus knew that Seth’s pillars still stood in Syria, his having mistaken Sesostris for Seth. Herodotus had seen the pillars: “The pillars, which Sesostris king of Egypt set up in the various countries, are for the most part no longer to be seen extant; but in Syria Palestine I myself saw them existing with the inscription upon them, which I have mentioned and the emblem” (History, 106).

  It is possible that the building trade was the source for Paul’s knowledge of the two pillars that would survive judgments of water and of fire. At the time of John, according to Josephus, eighteen thousand masons and allied trades were employed in Jerusalem after the burning of temple precincts that took place shortly after Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE. Herod’s sons erected a number of classically constructed cities across Syria-Palestine. There were masons all over the place. Galilee did not look like Arizona: more like a building site. Jesus called Simon “son of John,” “a stone,” and his brother James was known as the “bulwark” (a defensive wall). And we note that these two men had, by the time Paul encountered them, become known to the Nazoraean assembly as the “pillars,” along with one called John.

  The Sethian pillars were not simply designed to withstand fire and water; they also encoded the secrets of science discovered by Adam’s brainchild, Seth. Paul obviously saw himself privy to the higher knowledge that came not from men, but from God and his Son. Had he not seen what Seth had seen? Paul’s mythological background was almost what we would recognize as something like “science fiction.”

  The legend of the Sethian pillars lies, I think, behind both Paul’s criticism of the John tradition and James the brother of the Lord’s convictions about the necessity of the Jewish Law. Can the pillars’ building withstand the final test? Paul asks. Maybe of water, but can they match Paul’s baptism of fire, of Holy Spirit, that has made converts of Gentiles where the Law had repelled them? “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase,” declares Paul.

  It is perhaps odd how these images coincide with Luke’s account of Paul’s dealings with the Jew Aquila of Pontus and his wife, Priscilla, kicked out of Italy by the Emperor Claudius. Luke’s account of Paul’s meeting the couple records how their relationship was cemented in the coincidence that both Paul and Aquila were “of the same craft” (Greek: homotechnon). They were tentmakers. One wonders if Paul and Aquila got some of their ideas from craft legends, perhaps even a craft society of free . . . tentmakers? Not as strange an idea as you might think, for according to the late medieval freemasons’ “Charges,” now known as the Cooke Manuscript (ca. 1420 CE), Enoch’s descendant Jabal was the “father” not only of tentmaking (Genesis 4:20), but father of masonry as well, for it is written, “The elder son, Jabal, he was the first man that also found geometry and Masonry, and he made houses. . . .” Jabal was the “father of men dwelling in tents, that is, dwelling houses. And he was Cain’s master mason and governor of all his works, when he made the city of Enoch. . . .”

  This Cooke Manuscript, incidentally, was presented to the Grand Lodge of London by Grand Master George Payne on St. John the Baptist’s Day 1721, and its contents, you could say, were . . . absorbed. Two years later, in 1723, Anderson’s Constitutions demonstrates knowledge of the “pillars of Seth” referred to by Josephus, while making the point that the “old masons” always called them the Pillars of Enoch. According to Genesis, Enoch, Seth’s great-great-great-grandson (Genesis 5:18), was not only the name of the first city ever built (4:17), but Enoch himself never died. Like Elijah, he was assumed to heaven (5:24). If you were building a heavenly city, you would want Enoch on your side.

  Enoch was the name by which “Thrice Great” Hermes was sometimes known to medieval Muslim scholars, working from Sabian writings. There may be a reason for the old masons’ discretion. For while, according to the Cooke Manuscript, it was Jabal who made the two pillars, one of latera (brick) and one of marble to withstand water and fire judgments, to preserve the knowledge of the ancient masters, the Sloane Manuscript of 1646 (British Library No. 3848) tells us that it was Hermenes son of Cush who discovered the two pillars.

  Hermenes, we are told, was afterward called “Hermes, the father of wise men.” Thrice Great Hermes is of course an ancient patron of medieval freemasonry, as well as of that gnostic “Hermetic philosophy” dear to Sabian writers, the Florentine Neoplatonic Renaissance, and midwife to modern science’s birth. Hermes was the “psychopomp,” or soul’s guide, of science. In Hermetic Tractate No. 4 we find the story of the “herald” who brought a mixing bowl of divine mind (nous) from heaven to which humanity was called to be baptized.

  It was the pillars of Seth or E
noch, not those of Jachin and Boaz at the porch of Solomon’s destroyed temple that held the significance for the old freemasons who emerged in history with written “Charges” in the late Middle Ages.

  If Paul grasped the significance of the antediluvian pillars of Seth, there is no reason why John and Jesus, whose father was apparently a technician, may not also have been inspired to think of what kind of structure, what kind of man, could survive the coming fire. Then we might see the symbolism of the water baptism as the first stage of preparation for the coming fire, the preliminary “judgment” if you will. Josephus tells us that John’s baptism was for the washing of the body after repentance.

  As we shall see in chapter 11, the last surviving, authentic, and original baptizing sect, the Mandaeans of Iraq, who took, and to this day take, John the Baptist as their great prophet, not only baptize the living, but also wash the dead ritually, in preparation for translation through a purgatorial journey of the soul. It can hardly be insignificant for this discussion that, according to the Mandaeans, the body of John the Baptist could not be burnt by fire.

  It becomes clear that in his eagerness to establish his own vision of salvation, Paul mixed his metaphors to suit himself. In doing so, he denigrated the baptism of John from his day to ours. Wanting the “fire” to stand both for the judgment and the holy spirit “hand baptism,” he effectively turned the hand baptism into the coming of the Holy Spirit—that which would come “after” John’s baptism. He turned John against himself. Mixing the fire metaphors, Paul confused his laying on of hands with the primary image embodying the final judgment itself, while he simultaneously asserted that only his passing on of the “Holy Spirit” could protect the soul from the conflagration to come. Paul did this to establish his own apostolate as the supreme authority of salvation. Anyone who differed was to be “accursed,” rejected, held as unclean, utterly condemned, damned:

  But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, “If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.” (Galatians 1:8–9)

  On this basis, John was cursed already, since John did not preach Paul’s Gospel. Paul completely misrepresented John. John did not mix his “fire” metaphors. John saw the fire as taking care of the chaff that had been separated by the winnowing action of the Son of man. The holy spirit of righteousness and piety, that was what made the man stand in the wilderness. The one built on such a firm foundation would stand upright, square, we might say, a pillar able to survive the coming harvest conflagration.

  Long before Paul’s dramatic conversion, if that is what it was, it was John who had declared the coming of the fire. John was fully aware of the prophecies concerning the pious, righteous one, the one who could stand the coming of the Lord God. And how can we doubt that John was aware and awake to the idea that standing was symbolically equivalent to building upward with divine stones: a building that would, in Daniel’s prophecy (2:31–35), stand the presence of the smiting stone that struck the Babylonian image with feet of clay, and of iron, and “became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors”? This, I dare say, is the primitive essence of symbolic Freemasonry, though the Craft has long forgotten it.

  John’s “winnowing” is both the judgment and the spiritual salvation; only the chaff is burnt thereafter. It is clear to us now that John and Jesus saw clearly that the holy building was the righteous man in whom the spirit of the divine law had become heart and will, as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel prophesied, and who could therefore withstand not only the judgment as God poured his spirit on him, but also the threats and murderousness of the unrighteous.

  Paul’s tone in general, though often wise, always clever, displays, I think, what we should now call a marked neurotic insecurity, hardly surprising in one who had judged so many, and so many to death, yet who forbade any to judge him (1 Corinthians 2:15; 4:3–4). Paul’s famous “thorn in the flesh” may have derived from complicity in the executions of either or both John and Jesus; such would explain much.

  Wilier than a serpent, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians piles on argument after argument, line after line, to say the simplest thing, always keeping himself in the central picture, save that if you move Paul out for a second, or he moves out for our benefit, you are compelled by his will to see Christ or God behind him. Resistance, he wants you to believe, is useless. Reject me; reject all. This kind of anxious insecurity is, I think, the abiding psychological mark of Paul’s writings and is detectable, in my experience, in many of those who have immersed themselves in the Pauline worldview: a scriptural quote for every occasion, defensive, quick to anger, judgmental, utterly convinced in the face of contradiction, threatening, haunted by the world’s end, never letting a point drop, overbearing, obsessed with defending the meanest grain of precious “truth,” materialistic, profoundly intolerant of those that disagree, suppressed-aggressive, perpetually nervous at God’s imminent displeasure: all that and much else too, and never simply holy, never simply good, seldom kind without scriptural backup and justification, and seldom, if ever, sensitive to, or respectful of, spiritual beauty. The thoroughly Pauline type knows everything there is to know about salvation. They come, as it were, to the gates of heaven with their own guidebook. Many have fallen under Paul’s brand of the “fear of God,” so impersonal, so intense, so demeaning, so self-righteous. Accept all Paul or reject him, and reject all. He wanted to be, and was convinced he was, Jesus’s No. 1, and for many, he succeeded. For many, Paul’s interpretation is Christianity; arguably, he invented it. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches are built on Paul. The man was a genius.

  Paul’s critique of John’s baptism, his supplanting of the Nazoraean vision, his consigning of John to the past, his speaking for Jesus, have not only seeped unchecked into the landscape of Christian scripture, but have led to innumerable problems for Christians over the meaning and application of key doctrines and practices. How often have we heard about a distinction between “real” versus “nominal” Christians? How long the debate between “sprinkling” of water at infant baptism and the claims of the scripture-laden “born-again” for full hydroimmersion? The confusion stems from Paul. The results of Paul’s confusion of meaning concerning what is actually meant by “holy spirit,” “judgment,” “baptism,” and “rebirth” are to be found wherever Christianity is preached. Innumerable sects differ over just these very things, and the children inherit the disorder, the pain, the confusion.

  Paul introduced the conflict over what is meant by a “spiritual gift” because he confused the fruits of the final judgment with his laying-on of hands. Strange phenomena became the proof of “rebirth”; for some, psychic ecstasies of babbling “prophecy” and “speaking in tongues” became signs of having been already “resurrected.” Spiritual benefits such as a refined sense of justice and peace and mercy and a sober and reasonable hope seemed dull compared to strange, mostly temporary, phenomena. Others went further, claiming, like Paul, they had penetrated the veil of matter altogether and had become equal to the angels; they were the “pneumatics,” the “spirituals,” superior to everyone. So-called “charismatics” (the “gifted”) claim superiority to the merely “nominal” faith of quiet and pious persons living their own holy life without thumping, clapping, twanging, and wailing as if the entire world should be a gospel choir and salvation the prize for one moral decision made under the duress of threat of imminent judgment and the insidious accusation of personal responsibility for the crucifixion.

  I dare say Paul tried to rein in the extremists, but it was he who had let the cat out of the bag, against the better judgment of the “seeming pillars” for whom he had so little respect.

  Paul is a problem, no doubt, and his first victim, perhaps literally as well as figuratively, was John the Baptist, a greater man than he, if Jesus’s testimony is to be believed.

  And y
et . . . one cannot help but admire him.

  Chapter Eleven

  ST. JOHN’S MEN TODAY

  THERE ARE IN THE WORLD two principal groups of people for whom John the Baptist has significant spiritual meaning, though in the case of Freemasons, I should say a group for whom John ought to have spiritual meaning; Masons have mostly forgotten why they were once “St. John’s men.” The second group is more remarkable: the Mandaeans. Known as “Sabians” among Iraqi and Iranian Muslims, the Mandaeans trace their history back through Israel to Egypt, and beyond to Adam, their first great prophet. John the Baptist is revered as their last great prophet. Mandaeans build tributaries called “Jordans” off the Tigris where they conduct baptismal initiation rites to this day. You can see them on the Internet.

  The word Mandaean means “Knower” or “Gnostic.” When first encountered by Jesuit missionaries in 1559, the Jesuits called them “John Christians,” but Mandaeans have a very different story to tell of the significance of John the Baptist. They have a book titled The Book of John the Baptizer. They say John received his wisdom from the divine “Life” and from “Primal MAN” who is “LIGHT.” In other words, they understand John, like Enoch, is a “Son of man”—one whose eyes have beheld the Light and looked within it.

  Of John the Baptist, the Mandaeans say, “Fire cannot burn him.” Whether or not Mandaeans had any contact with medieval masons working in Syria for the knightly orders that flourished in the Crusades is unknown. As we discussed earlier in this book, John was the patron saint of many religious institutions, including, notably, the Knights Hospitaller. John’s significance as the Lord of Midsummer, the fruit, if you will, of harvest sacrifice, must explain his main attraction to mason guilds, religious confraternities, and the common people. John was linked to life and life eternal.