The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  And they come again to Jerusalem: and as he was walking in the temple, there come to him the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders, And say unto him, By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things?

  And Jesus answered and said unto them, “I will also ask of you one question, and answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things.

  “The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men? answer me.”

  And they reasoned with themselves, saying, “If we shall say, ‘From heaven’; he will say, ‘Why then did ye not believe him?’ But if we shall say, ‘Of men’ they feared the people: for all men counted John, that he was a prophet indeed.”

  And they answered and said unto Jesus, “We cannot tell.” And Jesus answering saith unto them, “Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.

  John’s baptism was “from heaven.” From heaven, mark you, not just “of [earthly] water”! According to this story, John’s authority was Jesus’s authority.

  Now perhaps we can see that John and Jesus were not originally, or in their own minds even, “before and after,” but were united, comrades in a higher prophetic and secret visionary struggle to save Israel—and the world—from spiritual catastrophe.

  JOHN AND JESUS

  How could we have missed it?

  It was because we were not asking the right questions. We have never been encouraged to.

  Most of Luke’s first chapter’s eighty verses are devoted to a colorful account of John the Baptist’s birth and of his relations with Jesus and with Jesus’s parents. We never obtain anything like this level of information about any other figure’s birth in the whole of Christian scripture, save Jesus himself. Luke gives us an intricate divine plan unfolded with six-month staggered births and angelic visitations to all parents concerned. The obvious intertwining of the two boys’ destinies was not lost on the great Renaissance artists inspired by Jesus’s and John’s infancy. The saintly toddlers are seen playing together; their mothers are friends. Angels watch over them.

  At the end of Luke’s account of John’s birth, Zacharias sings a great song about his new son. The son’s ordained purpose is nothing less than to “give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (1:79). Then, after all that, John’s next thirty-six years or so are summed up in a few words: “And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel.”

  After all the stories of John’s birth, we might have expected more. Could it be that Luke’s source was utterly ignorant of John’s education and maturity, or might it have been that what John was or was not doing “in the deserts” or elsewhere was either not consistent with, or was not of service to the rest of Luke’s account? Certainly the next time John appears in Luke’s text, during the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, he is a fully fledged master of his destiny. Given that John was probably born in 7 BCE, he would have been about thirty-six years old when in 29 CE, if Luke’s information is reliable in this instance, John received his call to preach repentance.

  As we have noticed before, Luke’s account of Jesus’s baptism is curiously removed from the person of John. Luke mentions John was imprisoned for confronting Herod with the evil of his deeds, and then says that “when all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also being baptized . . .” (3:21). There is no conversation between John and Jesus, no declaration by John that Jesus is, well, anything; there is silence, as though John was not there. There is no direct recognition of Jesus by John, as we find in the other Gospels. If it were not for the testimony of the other Gospels, we should think at this point that John was in prison, and that Jesus was perhaps baptized by one or some of John’s followers in John’s absence. It is odd. And it goes even further than the other three Gospels’ unlikely suggestion that John, apparently never having seen Jesus before in his life, was suddenly confronted by the very one he had allegedly prophesied would come “after.” In Luke, John and Jesus do not even communicate. The reason may be, as discussed earlier, that Luke, being a “Paul man,” does not want the coming of the Holy Spirit on Jesus to be linked to John’s baptismal agency. Nevertheless, the impression seems to be that Luke feels uncomfortable with the idea that John and Jesus had any real personal connection in adulthood at all. Luke simply removes the possibility by two literary devices. He piles in a big chunk of stories between his account of the birth of John and his appearance as a Baptist, and he intercuts his account of John’s baptizing and Jesus’s being baptized with a pericope about John’s imprisonment. Clearly, an uncomfortable fact is being obscured.

  How, even if there is only the merest granule of historical fact in Luke’s elaborate John and Jesus birth stories, could the two men not have known one another, or recognized each other, after thirty-six years in the same country, sharing, as far as we can tell, practically identical interests? And, what is more, why does Jesus himself only appear as a man at the time John is baptizing, that is, when John appears—not after John appears, note, but when John appears? Jesus almost comes out from behind John’s back.

  Two of Jesus’s disciples are John’s, the Gospel of John tells us, and one of them, Andrew, recruits his brother Simon (renamed “stone” in Aramaic: Cephas = Greek Petros), who is described in John 1:42 as “the son of John,” which the King James version of the Bible shortens to “Jona,” indicating discomfort at what the translators must otherwise have felt would provide cause for confusion (or undesirable enlightenment). Notwithstanding, John’s Gospel says that Cephas was the son of John, which could mean much or nothing, since John was a common enough name. It was not uncommon in the ancient world for a master to call a close disciple “my son,” since the master took a paternal role over the one under instruction.

  Whatever all this might mean, common sense strongly mitigates against the gospel picture of John up and running with a complete operation of repentance-baptism-preaching activities, backed by a devoted following, if Josephus is to be credited, and Jesus just turning up, getting baptized, then poaching a few of John’s closest followers, and then, apparently, dropping them for a while until emerging from the wilderness “temptation,” or, better, initiation.

  This picture does not add up, historically speaking. It is theological propaganda.

  Let us return to our original question. What would have happened if Antipas had released John? Since the removal of John is clearly, in the gospel presentation, the point at which a Jesus-led operation commences, then we must suppose that Jesus would have found it difficult, to say the least, to run a rival or “continuity” operation. Jesus’s first message was, “Repent ye for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This was John’s message, and if John had been there to provide it, what would Jesus have had to do? The entire conundrum dissolves, however, the moment we accept that Jesus and John were entwined in the same fundamental operation, an operation whose progress was suddenly and severely interrupted by John’s arrest, so adding urgency and a heightened sense of danger and destiny to Jesus’s activities. If the dating we discussed in chapter 6 is accurate, Jesus’s own fuse was also short. Sooner or later, the authorities were either going to be toppled, or they would catch up with him.

  Is Luke’s account of John’s and Jesus’s birth historical? Evidence supporting Luke’s narrative is fragmentary, but what exists supports the reasonable conclusion that Jesus’s family milieu was, like John’s, of the priestly class. Luke 1:3–25 describes John’s father, Zechariah (Zacharias in Greek), as a priest “of the division of Abijah.” John’s mother, Elizabeth, was “of the daughters of Aaron.” This means her father was a priest. Aaron’s male descendants inherited priestly authority and could supervise temple sacrifices.

  Zechariah and Elizabeth lived, according to Luke, in a city of Judea “in the hill country.” We may think in terms of priestly dachas in the country, and we may also
think of priests being associated with “wilderness camps” such as are described in the Dead Sea Scrolls “Community Rule” and Damascus Document.

  Luke 1:36 says that Mary, Jesus’s mother, was a “kinswoman” (Greek syngenis) of Elizabeth; she is also called a “handmaid to the Lord.” “Handmaid” is a translation of the Greek doulē. It means a female slave, one sold into the service of God; the temple owned her. It was not unusual for virgin daughters of pious parents with temple links to be “dedicated” to temple service. Temple priests could find their wives from the ranks of the dedicated Temple slave girls. Note the ordinances for priests in Ezekiel 44:22:

  Neither shall they [priests in the Temple] take for their wives a widow, nor her that is put away: but they shall take virgins of the seed of the house of Israel, or a widow that had a priest before.

  Once the girls had “known” a man, their freedom from slavery to the temple organization would be redeemed; they would then be rededicated to their husbands.

  Temple services were dominated by twenty-four groups of priests. Each group served twice a year for a week at a time. As there were so many priests, lots were drawn for morning and evening sacrifices. The most coveted lot permitted the winner to burn incense in the Temple. The rising fumes signified the people’s prayers rising to God. It was supposed to be performed but once in a priest’s lifetime. Since many never got the opportunity, the story Luke tells of Zechariah’s special day packs punch. This was the height of Zechariah’s life as a priest, and he could look forward to crowning it by making a special blessing for the people. But according to Luke, when Zechariah emerged, he found himself struck dumb. He had witnessed God’s messenger, Gabriel.

  Luke had some authentic knowledge of temple management. Zechariah’s belonging to the priestly “division of Abijah” is based on fact. Abijah means “my father is Yahweh.” Fragmentary manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls dated some time in the late first century BCE include details of the six-year rotation of priestly courses, all of the divisions under the biblical names given in 1 Chronicles 24:10. These were written within decades of the time when Luke’s account of a priest of the Abijah division should be set.

  Luke’s source-knowledge of the temple system may even extend to a hidden riddle. According to the account in Chronicles, composed about 300 BCE, Abijah was descended from Eleazar, the son of Aaron, a chief of one of the twenty-four orders into which the priesthood was divided by David. Abijah received the eighth lot. The ninth lot went to Jeshuah. Jeshuah is of course the name we know better as Jesus, meaning “God is salvation.” So, the choice of Abijah in Luke’s text may have involved the idea that a new, spectacular course of priesthood was about to follow: that of Jesus, the next child born in Luke. That is to say, a cataclysmically new priestly order was about to happen.

  A priestly background to John’s and Jesus’s families makes a great deal of historical sense. It seems likely that John was separated for priesthood, not at the end but the beginning of his spiritual career. The same may be said of Jesus. Jesus’s days of youth are absent from the Gospels, but for Luke’s accounts of Jesus being brought to the Temple: first, to offer sacrifices attendant on his mother’s purification and second, a “caravan” trip to the Temple for his bar mitzvah (ca. 6 CE). We then have the charming story of Jesus astounding the wise men in the Temple. If they had been truly amazed, they would doubtless have marked him out for priestly training.

  Support for the shared priestly background of Jesus’s and John’s families comes from two second-century CE sources: first, the Protoevangelium of James (ca. 140–175 CE), and second, the account of Jewish Christian historian Hegesippus (ca. 165–175 CE), extracts from which Eusebius included in his Ecclesiastical History (ca. 300 CE). These sources and the historical background to Jesus’s family are dealt with thoroughly in my book The Missing Family of Jesus.

  The Protoevangelium of James is an account of the birth, family, and marriage of the Virgin Mary. It presents Mary’s mother, sometimes called Hannah, as being married to a priest, Joachim or Yonakhir (depending on which version of the text one reads); they die when Mary is twelve, whereafter she joins seven other virgins entrusted to the care of an elderly priest called Zadok and his wife, Sham’i. Sham’i, Mary’s stepmother, dies when Mary is fourteen.

  The Protoevangelium presents Zacharias, father of John the Baptist, as the high priest. Zacharias is advised to seek the Lord’s guidance regarding Mary’s getting married now that her stepmother has died and she is an adolescent. He enters the holy of holies. According to the Syriac version of the Gospel, an angel bids him assemble a meeting of men belonging to the royal house of David. One of them is Joseph. A temple dove alights on Joseph’s rod, then his head. Joseph is considered right in any case, for he and Mary were “each the child of the other’s uncle.” Joseph objects because he is old, and his wife is already the mother of sons and daughters. His wife’s name is given as Mary; her sons were Jacob (James) and Jose (Joseph). In the Syriac, this other Mary seems to be alive, but in the Greek he is a widower, while his second son is Samuel, sometimes corrected to Joses or to Simon. This apocryphal gospel does not say that Joseph was himself a priest, but he is bound up with the society that surrounds and serves the Temple, and Mary’s father is shown to be a priest. Joseph lives in Bethlehem, and both he and his wife-to-be, Mary, are descendants of King David, from which tree the Messiah was prophesied to be born.

  Hegesippus’s account of James, the brother of the Lord, who was murdered in 62 CE by connivance of the High Priest Ananus, makes it clear that Jesus’s brother was certainly a priest and wore the linen of a priest and served in the Temple, being one of the poorer priests, who throughout the period were dominated and bullied by the pro-Herodian Sadducee party:

  James, the Lord’s brother, succeeded to the government of the Church, with the apostles. He has been called the Just by all men, from the days of the Lord down to the present time. For many bore the name of James; but this one was holy from his mother’s womb. He drank no wine or other intoxicating liquor, nor did he eat flesh; no razor came upon his head; he did not anoint himself with oil, nor make use of the bath. He alone was permitted to enter the sanctuary: for he did not wear any woollen garment, but fine linen only. And alone he used to go into the temple: and he used to be found kneeling and praying, begging forgiveness for the people, so that the skin of his knees became horny like that of a camel’s, by reason of his constantly bending the knee in adoration to God, and begging forgiveness for the people. Therefore, in consequence of his pre-eminent justice, he was called the Just, and Oblias, which signifies in Greek “Rampart of the people and righteousness,” as the prophets declare concerning him. (ca. 170 CE, Hegesippus, Commentaries on the Acts of the Church, Book 5; paraphrased in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book II, 23)

  The picture of two men, John and Jesus, growing up with intimate knowledge of the life of the Temple in Jerusalem lacks nothing in plausibility. The awful circumstances that surrounded the Temple after Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE would have been sufficient, one would have thought, to turn any learned and sensitive young person into profound opposition to the ruling elite, an elite that was mashing up the spiritual traditions of the Jewish people in an effort to gain more power and remain on the right side of Roman government.

  When Archelaus (Antipas’s brother) became Ethnarch of Judea after his father Herod’s death, a conflict with the priests and Torah scholars of the Temple led to a conflagration that darkened the Temple’s precincts with charred wood and the blood of Jews slaughtered by foreign troops. The young men had erected tents in the temple courts and had demonstrated for righteousness and the restoration of ancient religious customs, customs such as not having the high priesthood imposed by foreigners, as the Herodians were perceived to be. Under the Herodians, the temple system became a byword for corruption. Young Mary the slave girl would have known all about it, intimately.

  According to Matthew, when Joseph brought his famil
y back from exile in Egypt after persecution by Archelaus’s father, he had hoped to return to his Judean homeland, but on hearing that Archelaus had attained ascendancy due to a late change in Herod’s will, Joseph opted to remove his family to Galilee. He must have had a better appreciation of Herod Antipas’s capacity to respect the traditions of a righteous people. This, after all, was long before Antipas met Herodias and embarked on a course that would see him exiled to Gaul for trying to please his wife. Joseph was also, we may suppose, trying to protect the remains of the Davidic dynasty. Herod had had all the genealogical records of the Jewish aristocracy destroyed, that is, where they were housed in places he could get at them, so that none could challenge his right to rule on genealogical grounds. Herod had married into the once-ruling Hasmonaean dynasty and that was deemed sufficient claim. Who would dare challenge it?

  Joseph doubtless kept his genealogy secret. Where did he go to in Galilee? The Gospels think a city called “Nazareth,” but as we shall see in the next chapter, this is probably an error. Joseph is described in Mark as a tektōn, an architect or builder. Priests built the Temple. Joseph may have made an enclave for his family, or it is possible that he and his family joined one. “Natseret” can mean a consecrated place, or “Keeper-land” or “Watcher-land.” He may have established his own “Nazareth,” a place set apart: a holy place.

  In such an enterprise, he and his family may have drawn on the experiences and literature of descendants of the New Covenanters who had made a covenant in the wilderness region of Damascus, northeast from Galilee. They had established a severe rule of messianic-inspired righteousness, directly opposed to the corruption and religious division that preceded Pompey’s conquest of Jerusalem and possibly the corruption of the system that followed Herod the Great’s accession to the throne of Judea in 37 BCE.

  Ideas we have found associated with John, at least, suggest something of a revival, if not continuity, of many aspects of the fervor for spiritual righteousness to be found in the sectarian documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is impossible to ignore such ideas as can be found in the following extract from the “Community Rule,” discovered at Qumran and since translated by Scrolls expert Geza Vermes. Here we find, from an authentic first-century-BCE source, key priorities that makes sense of Jesus’s and Johns’s consistent interest, first, in the wilderness, and second, in the making of a new, holy community, to prepare the path for the coming of God’s salvation: