The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  In the Council of the Community there shall be twelve men and three Priests, perfectly versed in all that is revealed of the Law, whose works shall be truth, righteousness, justice, loving-kindness, and humility. They shall preserve the faith in the Land with steadfastness and meekness and shall atone for sin by the practice of justice and by suffering the sorrows of affliction. They shall walk with all men according to the standard of truth and the rule of the time.

  When these are in Israel, the Council of the Community shall be established in truth. It shall be an Everlasting plantation, a house of holiness for Israel, an Assembly of Supreme Holiness for Aaron. They shall be witnesses to the truth at the Judgment, and shall be the elect of Goodwill who shall atone for the Land and pay to the wicked their reward. It shall be that tried wall, that precious cornerstone, whose foundations shall neither rock nor sway in their place [Isaiah 28:16]. It shall be a Most Holy Dwelling for Aaron, with everlasting knowledge of the Covenant of justice, and shall offer up sweet fragrance. It shall be a House of Perfection and Truth in Israel that they may establish a Covenant according to the everlasting precepts. And they shall be an agreeable offering, atoning for the land and determining the judgment of wickedness and there shall be no more iniquity. When they have been confirmed for two years in perfection of way in the Foundation of the Community, they shall be set apart as holy within the Council of the men of the Community. And the Interpreter shall not conceal from them, out of fear of the spirit of apostasy, any of those things hidden from Israel, which have been discovered by him.

  And when these become members of the Community in Israel according to all these rules they shall separate from the habitation 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 . . . 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, that they may do according to all that has been revealed from age to age, and as the prophets have revealed by His Holy Spirit. (The “Community Rule” VIII:1–15; The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, p. 109; italics added)

  Most notable here are of course the references to a council of twelve men and three priests (Jesus, John [the Baptist?], and James?) and, startlingly, the “Community Rule” interpretation of the key prophecy of Isaiah 40:3 used to announce John the Baptist’s part in the Gospels. Here, the way of God is prepared by members going into the wilderness and studying the Law. Certainly we have very vivid accounts of John and Jesus at some time going into the wilderness as part of their training, but here a group or community activity is definitely asserted. Our understanding of John’s and Jesus’s wilderness sojourns are presented to us primarily as solo excursions, though this may be a conception subject to interpretation. John, after all, is said to have been joined by multitudes, and Jesus, when he enters the wilderness after baptism and walks straight into a personal crisis of great magnitude (the “Temptations”) around the time of John’s arrest, is ministered to by “angels,” which might originally have meant simply purified members of a religious community.

  Trying to compare “Christian doctrines,” as may be found in the Gospels, with the strict legalism of the New Covenanters is a fairly fruitless task in some respects. It has led Robert Eisenman to create a powerful, but unproven hypothesis of a swords-drawn division between New Covenanter proto-“Jewish-Christians” (represented by the “Zadokite” James the “brother of the Lord”—where “Lord” is understood not as a person but a concept of salvation) and the “Herodian” Paul with a salvation based on release from the Law and the embrace of spiritual universalism protected by Roman order as God’s instrument.

  Jesus and John did not have to belong to the so-called Qumran sect! And in the absence of evidence that they did, we may content ourselves with the thought that as young men they would have had the opportunity to explore a number of clamoring alternatives to the corrupt life of the urban priesthood in Jerusalem. There can be no doubt that John and Jesus shared with the New Covenanters a profound critique of the temple system of their day, finding themselves in difficulties with both religious and civil powers as a consequence: difficulties that cost them their lives. That they were opposed by some aspects of conservative religious interest is well known. It is also highly likely that they were opposed by more radical interests over questions of interpretation of the specific demands of righteousness, and of the men’s role in establishing righteousness. There were doubtless conflicting variants in the world of Jewish messianic expectation in the early first century that could, if needs be, rub along in a common crisis. The Gospels give us at least one named Zealot in Jesus’s “twelve,” but the picture as we have it is a mixed and in many ways an indefinite one.

  Where we can get on to firmer ground is in examining the ideas that may be associated directly with Jesus and John, based on the fragmentary evidence available.

  It is time to examine the great prophecies that so powerfully motivated the two men. There, I think, we shall find a distinct viewpoint to be found neither in the Dead Sea Scrolls, nor anywhere else: a secret plan.

  Chapter Eight

  THE GREAT PROPHECIES

  But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work today in my vineyard. He answered and said, “I will not”: but afterward he repented, and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, “I go, sir”: and went not.

  Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They [the chief priests and elders of the Temple] say unto him, “The first.” Jesus saith unto them, “Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him.”

  (MATTHEW 21:28–32)

  A JUDGMENT can be a good thing or a bad thing. Outside of a court, after a long trial, we are accustomed to see tears, bitterness, pain, and recrimination, or else joy, vindication of hope, even ecstasy and decorum’s abandonment at the verdict. The verdict is the same for good or ill.

  The fundamental message preserved of John is repentance and imminent judgment. Judgment would divide the sheep from the goats. Judgment would reveal the reality: who was open to God and who was not. For some this judgment would be a glorious message of salvation, freedom, hope, and triumph; for those who failed to repent of their injustices and hypocrisies, who put faith in their own “securities,” it was something to be feared. Fear engenders two primary responses: ridicule and violence. John and Jesus would incur both: they would be set at nought and killed, their followers likewise.

  John’s voice of judgment was aimed at everyone, but, as far as we can tell, it was particularly focused on the leading parties of the temple hierarchy, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They were the bad shepherds who led the people into dangers, whose blind warring among themselves had opened Holy Israel up to foreign invasion, desecration, shame, and poverty. These groups, said John, constituted a “generation of vipers.” They bruised all Israel’s heel with their biting. They crippled her, preventing her from walking the straight path. The chief priests and elders put their hope in their past, their faith in their position, but “now also the axe is laid into the root of the trees” (Matthew 3:10). The whole rotten tree was being uprooted. They were chaff; they were heading for the fire. One is coming, cried John, “Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (3:12).

  John declares the harvest open: a mighty joy for some, a hell for others.

  Note the reference to the “purging of the floor,” and recall how the first Temple was built on the site of an ancient threshing floor. The background to John’s prophecy is of course the “messenger prophecy” from Malachi: “The Lord
whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts. But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap” (Malachi 3:1–2).

  We shall see that the idea of “standing,” remaining upright in the face of the coming blaze of fire and water, wind and quake, will open up another dimension, a spiritual dimension, to all the imagery of crackling flame and stormy, elemental destruction.

  We should be clear in our minds that it was not all doom and gloom. John would hardly be remembered if he was simply another depressing prophet harping on about the end of the world. There is another dimension to these supervivid images of harrowing and harvest. For example, Matthew uses the Greek word ptuon for the winnowing fan that will rend the grain from the chaff. This word can mean the large basket from which the threshed corn was raised into the air for the wind (breath, or spirit?) to separate the good from the waste, or it could mean a simple wooden pitchfork (the origin of the demonic trident used to prong sinners into the fires of hell in medieval pictures, by the way). Be that as it may, the winnowing fan played a highly significant role in religious festivals of harvest, of both wheat and wine, in the Near East. The fan was a sacred object in its own right.

  The sacred liknon, or winnowing fan, the noun of the verb likmaō (“I winnow”), was the word employed for the winnowing fan sacred to Dionysus, the Roman Bacchus. It was carried on the head in procession and filled, note, with first fruits and sacrificial utensils. Dionysian ceremonies linked the idea of fruits and of sacrifice. Analogous ideas were expressed in the Temple ceremony at the Feast of Weeks, though, unsurprisingly, without the Bacchic revels, liberties, excess of wine, and ecstasies familiar to pagan celebrants of the god’s mysteries.

  The winnowing fan was also the “cradle” for the birth of Bacchus; Greek poets used the word liknon to denote a “cradle.” We note the ideas of birth and rebirth central to the harvest. We may also note the parallel idea of the famous dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans, his subsequent rebirth, with the beheading of the Baptist: the initiator whose sacrifice is given powerful meaning within the appointed destiny of the Son of man. Leonardo da Vinci’s visual linkage of John the Baptist and Bacchus was not without mythological root.

  The judgment initiated by John carried a promise, a promise of new wine:

  And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the LORD, and shall water the valley of Shittim [acacia trees; possibly Abel-Shittim in Perea]. (Joel 3:18)

  We saw in the last chapter how the New Covenanters interpreted unto themselves Isaiah’s famous prophecy of the precious cornerstone laid in Zion that initiates purification:

  Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place. (Isaiah 28:16–17)

  The New Covenanters’ “Community Rule” took this prophecy to refer to their “Council of the Community,” which would be “an Everlasting plantation, a house of holiness for Israel, an Assembly of Supreme Holiness for Aaron.” Their Assembly would witness “to the truth at the Judgment,” executing judgment on the wicked according to the exact measure of righteousness: “It shall be that tried wall, that precious cornerstone, whose foundations shall neither rock nor sway in their place.” The Covenanters were inspired by the rigidity of the stone, its solemn, legal, calibrated perfection: a stone of the righteous, if not the self-righteous.

  According to Matthew (21:42–44), Jesus, addressing the chief priests and elders in the Temple, looked into the prehistory, as it were, of this “precious cornerstone.” He found it in Psalm 118:22–23. There it transpires that the “precious cornerstone” had first been rejected—by the builders! (Remember Jesus is put in the Temple with the chief priests when he says this: the new temple built by priests and masons under Herod the Great’s orders.)

  Jesus saith unto them, “Did ye never read in the scriptures? The stone, which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes?” [Psalm 1:18]. “Therefore say I unto you, the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, he shall be winnowed.”

  Now, who is it that has been rejected?

  The parable preceding this saying in Matthew refers to servants (prophets) being sent by “a certain householder” (the LORD) to collect the first fruits of the harvest from his vineyard (the Temple) with its Tower (the Antonia Tower used by Roman soldiers). The servants are rejected, stoned, beaten up, and killed by the husbandmen (chief priests and elders). Finally, the “householder” who has planted the vineyard, sends his son and heir to collect the fruits. The husbandmen “caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him.” Jesus then asks what the lord of the vineyard should do when he comes back to his plantation. The priests admit he will “miserably destroy” the wicked husbandmen and let it out to other husbandmen happy to pay the first fruits. Then Jesus brings in the quote from Psalm 118 about the rejected stone.

  Naturally, Christian exegesis takes the “rejected one” who has become the cornerstone as being the “son” (Son of God) of the preceding parable. However, while we know the gospel story that the priests will very soon be plotting to destroy Jesus (the “son”), such an idea was not obvious at the time. At the time, if indeed the dialogue ever took place, or wherever it took place, the figure who would have been uppermost in the men’s minds would have been John the Baptist, and they would have seen the attack on the “wicked husbandmen” as straight revenge, or righteous justice, for a killing, which Josephus informs us was regarded by the people as what caused the defeat of Herod Antipas’s army by the Nabataeans. Jesus seems to know that John’s death was not all the doing of the king, but that John had offended the temple management too. This would certainly be consistent with John’s speech recorded in Matthew from Malachi, which speaks of the purging of the Temple, so that it may offer first fruits acceptable to God.

  We may then note the charming and amusing saying that rounds off the disquisition, where Jesus appears to link the “rejected stone” idea with the mighty stone “cut without hands” that brought down a veritable empire in Daniel 2:34ff. Jesus says that he who trips on the stone, that is to say, he who does not see it, or is indifferent to it, or even attacks (falls on) the stone will be smashed to smithereens by it, whereas he on whom the mysterious stone falls will be winnowed (likmēsei). “Ground to powder” is a weak translation. The verb’s root is the same as that of the sacred liknon, the sacred winnowing fan. One would naturally expect the stone that falls (from heaven) to break the unfortunate’s head to pieces. Expect the unexpected, implies Jesus.

  When the stone comes from above, it winnows he on whom it falls. That is to say, the stone “judges,” it divides, or, better, refines, purifies, and purges he on whom it falls. It is, in a sense, the true “philosopher’s stone”: it brings the gold forth from the massa confusa, the darkness.

  Lesson: do not ignore the rejected stone. Do not reject the rejected.

  Certainly, with hindsight, the saying may refer to Jesus, but it really refers to the rejected “Son of man” in general, the one who is always coming with the winnowing fan. In the context of Jesus’s dispute with the chief priests and elders, it refers to John. John is the rejected stone who now stands at the foundation of the new Temple: a “marvelous thing” in the eyes of those who see it. The stone from heaven is also the sparking stone tha
t sets the process of purification into action. The fire comes from the stone. So the stone is also the Holy Spirit that comes from heaven, the breath, or wind, of God that shakes the reeds. It is the stone cast out of the Temple, without which the Temple must fall. It is the stone of he who has never sinned.

  On this message, on this stone, Jesus and John stood together.

  THE NAZARENES

  During the 40s and 50s, according to Acts, Jesus’s followers were known as the “sect of the Nazarenes” by enemies in Jerusalem (Acts 24:5). The name has never been adequately explained. It is either taken to mean followers of “Jesus of Nazareth” or to be in some way linked to the Nazarite vow taken by pious Jews. What is striking, for our purposes, is that to this day, the Mandaeans, an Iraqi baptizing sect of great antiquity who hold John the Baptist in very high esteem, call their priests “Nasuraiah,” Arabic for “Nazarenes,” while one Mandaean text, as we shall see, dismisses Jesus as “Christ the Roman.” If, as seems likely, the name “Nazarene” links followers of both John and Jesus, we had better explore what “Nazarene” means.

  First, we can dispense with the idea that “Nazarene” refers to a “city” in Galilee, as Matthew refers to Nazareth (2:23). There is no substantial archaeology in modern Nazareth from before the second century CE. There may have been a rough wooden settlement or camp, devoid of stone foundations (certainly no “city”), but anyhow, the place-name “Nazareth” is unknown both to Josephus, who knew Gaililee intimately, and to Jewish scripture, making it likely that Jesus was linked to Nazareth either because of a mistaken understanding of what “Jesus the Nazarene” originally meant, or due to ignorance of what “Nazareth” or “a Nazareth” may originally have meant. Moreover, Matthew’s reference to a “city” of Nazareth (2:23) is, on examination, introduced to show only the fulfillment of an unknown prophecy: “He shall be called a Nazarene [Nazōraios],” which, whatever else it might indicate, definitely does not indicate a place.