The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  However, even internal gospel evidence, if “evidence” is the right word, appeals against this simplistic scenario, that is, the “he [Jesus] must increase and I [John] must decrease” narrative (John 3:30). Both Matthew (11:2–6) and Luke (7:18–23) relate an intriguing story wherein John’s disciples come to Jesus to ask him, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” In Matthew, John’s disciples receive their instructions from a John who is actually in custody at the time. Luke has nothing to say about this; Luke never treads into the John-imprisonment stories. The real function of these pericopes, or story and saying fragments about John’s enquiries concerning Jesus, remains unclear. The Gospels begin more or less with John announcing the coming one and baptizing Jesus; why should he then order his disciples to undertake a fact-finding mission? John has, allegedly, already declared Jesus to be the Lamb of God (the Messiah). Are the story fragments intended to “rub it in” or are they based on historic fact? Much depends on how they are read. Given the custodial setting for John, for example, I should be inclined to take the enquiries as being, in their historical context, rather indignant: Who do you think you are? Are you now saying you are the one we’ve been watching out for? Just what are you, Jesus? The moment I’m arrested I hear you’re doing all these things—baptizing and leading the crowds. Should my followers now follow you? Even if John was not in prison when enquiries might have been made, there is still the unmistakable impression of a rival program, or of someone trying, unexpectedly, to assert himself in the absence of the “leader.” Besides, if John was “out” (as Luke’s account might suggest), why send disciples at all; why not just ask Jesus directly?

  Luke and Matthew simply take the setting as the opportunity to make it plain as day to all comers that Jesus is the Messiah. Indeed, Jesus’s answer to John’s question is simply to demonstrate messiah-ship. In Luke, Jesus actually cures diseases, removes plagues, exorcises evil spirits, and restores sight to the blind “in that hour.” Amazing. He then asks the messengers to add this display of wonders to his already staggering aggregate of cleansing of lepers, making the deaf hear, preaching good news to the poor, and raising up the dead. That should convince John! Jesus adds at the end, “And blessed is he who takes no offense at me.” Surely, Jesus seems to imply, surely the great John is not thinking of joining those who find this revelation threatening. Surely he, John, would not take offense. It would appear that Jesus thinks offense has been taken—by John!

  The gospel texts suggest John and his disciples have been on the “watch,” looking out for the signs of the coming kingdom, and for the Messiah in particular. That would explain the part about, Are you the coming one? Or should we look somewhere else? Jesus speaks through his acts: Cease looking, I’m here. Yes, it’s me. Rest assured. The idea seems to be very similar to Luke’s account of Simeon in the Temple, waiting for the Lord (2:25ff.). Having seen the child Jesus, Simeon can now “depart in peace,” for his eyes have seen his salvation. The same message seems to be going out to John: It’s all right; you can go now.

  Why would John be convinced by Jesus’s sixty-minute demonstration?

  Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated by Geza Vermes to the very early first century CE, is a Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521). This text actually lists the signs of the messianic kingdom, signs to be perceived by the righteous. The signs are: the recognition of the pious, the calling of the righteous by name, the renewal of the Lord’s poor and faithful by his spirit, the glorification of the pious on “the throne of the eternal kingdom,” the liberation of captives, the restoration of sight to the blind, the straightening of the bent, the doing of glorious things never seen before, the healing of the wounded, the leading of the uprooted, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of good news to the poor, and, take note, the revival of the dead, when “the Life-giver will raise the dead of his people.” Jesus’s operation, as demonstrated to John’s followers, ticks practically every box. Why then, one might ask, would Jesus not release the captive John? Again, we can hardly be unmoved at the coincidence of Dead Sea Scroll New Covenanter-cherished material with the historical background to accounts of John the Baptist.

  Disturbingly, the accounts of John’s messengers’ visit to Jesus in Matthew and Luke are concluded by what appears to be a somewhat premature obituary for John: glowing, all-glowing, no doubt, but with caveats. Having demonstrated his own status, Jesus now generously sums up John’s career while setting him in his place, albeit rather confusingly. If there is any historical actuality behind the words, they would seem to be more appropriate for reflection after John’s death:

  And as they departed, Jesus began to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?

  But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.

  But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

  And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye will receive it, this is Elias [Elijah], which was for to come. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

  But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented. For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children. (Matthew 11:7–19)

  This summing up of John is a very mixed bag of sources, and its meaning is not clear. John as “a reed shaken with the wind” appears very poetic; we shall examine the idea in due course. The business about the man in a soft garment is far from obvious. John Fenton, the late English commentator on Matthew and one of my tutors at Oxford, believed Jesus was making a kind of exaggerated joke, on the lines of, “Did you think you were going to see someone fancily dressed, an important person, an aristocrat?” This idea seems to come out of Luke who, I think, misunderstands Matthew completely and adds the following to the note about those wearing soft raiment being in kings’ houses: “Behold,” Luke’s Jesus says, “those who are gorgeously apparelled and live in luxury are in kings’ courts” (Luke 7:25). Luke seems to think John would be the last person to wear a “soft garment” (the Greek word for “soft” even has the hint of femininity about it). But a soft garment does not necessarily equate with gorgeous apparel; Luke has missed the point here, I think. Furthermore, the parallel rhetorical idea—of the multitude’s expectations being “wrong” on this and two other counts—does not hold in Jesus’s three questions to them. The multitude’s thoughts about John are not wrong, just inadequate: John is a reed shaken by the wind; he is a prophet; he did, I am sure, wear a soft garment. (Camel hair and leather would not be seen as “soft,” but rough, by the way.)

  Taken within the Gospels’ context of Jesus talking about John to the multitude, Jesus is talking about John’s dignity. John stands in the desert. He is a prophet and more than a prophet. He is Elijah, and that, together with everything else, makes him the greatest man who was ever born of woman (Jesus was also born of woman).

  John is the messenger sent to prepare the way for the Lord. So, he wore a soft garment. Those in soft garments are found in kings’ houses. There is a multiple implication here, played out on a pun. The play is on the words kings and houses. Those wearing soft garments in kings’ houses are the king’s servants; make no mistake. The “ki
ng” here is the Lord, and John is his servant, and is therefore dressed as a servant: dress fit for a king and fit for the glory of the King’s House. Second, the house of the king (the Lord) is the Temple. John then is wearing the clothing of the Lord’s servant in the Temple (the Temple that has become a wilderness, for the “ husbandmen” of the Temple/Vineyard have failed—see Mark 12:1–9). This “soft garment” would then equate with the white linen of a priest. John is a prophet and a priest.

  It should be borne in mind here that when the Gospels appeared, the Judean temple system had been destroyed. Who would want to know that Jesus and his associates were associated with the priesthood of the actual Temple that, Gentiles believed, God had condemned? Paul had said that the body of the baptized Christian was the temple of the Lord. The idea of priesthood is underplayed in the Gospels except, notably, where issues of birth and background come into play.

  My tutor also missed this point and wrote in his commentary that John could not have been the kind of rich, aristocratic type, attending regal courts. He was in prison. Nothing “soft” about that! Well, Macherus might appear from gospel narratives to be a prison, and it may well have had something like a dungeon, but it was not a prison; it was a palace, as modern archaeology has adequately shown. It was a “home from home” for Phasaelis, remember: a resort. In short, it was a king’s house, and if there is any historical actuality behind these sayings attributed to Jesus, they simply tell the truth. John is in soft raiment in a king’s house. Macherus is a king’s house, so the implied pun exists to pose a subsidiary question: which Lord does John serve? He is of course the “guest” of Antipas’s political will, but John is not the king’s servant; he is God’s.

  We then get some confused passages. The first is on the lines of “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first” motif. Those who are present for the revealing of the true messiah, the “first fruits of repentance,” are first in line, compared to those who in the past prophesied the coming one. Primacy is apparently for those who receive the Spirit at the end-time. He who is the smallest in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he (John). Why? This sounds like a late theological afterthought, lest anyone think John is more important than, well, Jesus. Jesus tells all who have ears to hear that John now belongs to the era of the “the prophets and the law.” Now Jesus has come, that era is apparently over, “fulfilled”; it’s an all-new show from now on. John is the greatest prophet but he is apparently missing something. He is not today’s man. This sounds a trifle triumphalistic, like Paul on the alleged inadequacy of John’s baptism again.

  The time-sense of the passage now goes haywire. Suddenly, John the Baptist is past history: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” This might be applied to the arrest of John, though we do not know if John was taken by force. The feeling and sense seem to refer to the time of, and after, Jesus’s crucifixion, when his followers were pursued unto death.

  John is now declared to be Elijah, but the force of this is dramatically lessened, since the time of the prophets is already done, we are told. He has prepared the way; now, let that be an end of it. The script is writing John out altogether. By verse 19, John is definitively past history: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He hath a devil.” Who says John has a demon? We have not heard that one; that’s supposed to be what Jesus’s enemies say of him. Anyhow, the force of the parallel between John and the “Son of man” who came “eating and drinking” to be condemned for impure company is simply to pump up Jesus. John lived according to the laws of righteousness, and he is a “demon,” I live in the new freedom of the Holy Spirit (Paul’s idea of it anyway), and I’m condemned also. The force is simple: if you had believed the prophets (including John, the last of them), you would have believed me. But you (who is “Jesus” supposed to be addressing here?) did not believe them either; you (the Jews) rejected them. On this count, John is already dead. And as far as the Gospels are concerned, he is. John’s death goes without saying, you might say.

  Somewhere under all this must be some real history.

  Now perhaps you see more clearly why I asked the question at the beginning of this chapter: What would have happened if John had been freed by Antipas and had reentered circulation? Today it appears that John had to die to make way for Jesus. His demise was simply a fait accompli. But is this a misinterpretation? Have the demands of a Christocentric theology overtaken completely the history of John’s true relations with Jesus?

  What says the evidence?

  Well, the evidence of course has long been cooked up to present the narrative we have been examining. One would hardly expect it to testify against itself. But it does. The Gospels are full of curious details that rather give away the intentions of the writers. The Gospels, note, were not composed so that they could be placed next to one another in a bigger book we call the Bible. They were individual treatises, and subject to editing from copyists. It was a long time before believers had the benefit of seeing them “all” together. That was not how they were intended to be seen, or heard. So the composers and compilers of the writings did not think their painstaking needlework would be unpicked by scholars or anyone else. We may expect that they expected their labors to be gratefully received, not analyzed.

  In many respects the writers appear to have been eager not to write propaganda as such, but to tell as much as could be woven together of what was available to them. They tried to find a place for their sources and doctrinal priorities in a fairly well-established narrative framework, though many caveats might be attached to that process. We have seen how essential historical and political contexts are “missing,” and we may doubt if they were ever “there” in the first place. There was no point looking backward. The only thing that really mattered before the message was preached to the Gentiles was Jesus: the rest was, well, history, and that only mattered insofar as the story of how Jesus came to be called the Lord required it.

  We may suspect that part of the confusion evinced in the previous account of John the Baptist had something to do with what was probably a source for it, except that the source would not do, as it were, what it was “supposed” to do. That is, the source in question did not relegate John the Baptist sufficiently. It did not follow company policy. Not only that, it suggested a far more profound link between John and Jesus than Matthew and Luke might have liked.

  JOHN AS SON OF MAN

  The source in question is Mark 9:9–13. It is a passage that Luke is not interested in; he thinks he has dealt with John the Baptist sufficiently in the previous account. Matthew alters it to pull it more into line with his narrative. Hear Mark:

  And as they [Peter, James, and John] 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. And they asked him, saying, “Why say the scribes that Elias [Elijah] must first come?” And he answered and told them, “Elias 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.”

  And when he came to his disciples, he saw a great multitude about them, and the scribes questioning with them.

  Mark clearly includes John/Elijah under the destiny allotted to the “Son of man”: that he must suffer and be set at nought. Matthew (17:9–13) has noticed the inference that Jesus speaks of John in terms of the suffering of the “Son of man” and is upset by it, as far as we can tell, for he changes the text to distinguish between Jesus and John. “Likewise also shall the Son of man suffer of them”:

  But I say unto you, “That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoev
er they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them.” Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist.

  Luke wants nothing to do with this saying: it is far too ambiguous for his narrative. However, and most tellingly, he includes the “set at nought” destiny in his unique account of Herod Antipas’s interrogation of Jesus in 23:11: “And Herod with his men of war set him at nought.” They set Jesus at nought, but Luke appears to have got his idea of setting the “Son of man” at nought from Mark, where it is plainly John/ Elijah/Son of man who has been set at nought.

  What is even more interesting is that Luke goes along with the narrative that precedes these sayings of Jesus, but cuts away from the concluding sayings, which we have above. And what is the preceding narrative? It is the story of the Transfiguration. Now, there is a curious relationship between the story of the Transfiguration and the earlier summing up about John that followed the story of John’s disciples coming to ask whether Jesus was the one expected. That account, as we noted, was in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. The nearest thing to that discussion in Mark is the pericope above that concludes the transfiguration story.

  One might be forgiven for suspecting that the discussion, apparently about John, where Jesus asks “the multitude” what they went into the wilderness to see, a reed in the wind, a prophet, and one in soft raiment, originally appeared in the context of the Transfiguration.