John the Baptist 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, March 19, 1999
Thursday, 15 June 2006
Abstract
Baptism
First what of baptism? It was a popular religious rite in the whole known world. It was the way the initiates of mystery religions, as Tertullian notes in On Baptism, entered into the worship of Isis, Mithras and the Eleusinian mysteries. Clement of Alexandria in Stromateis says lustrations were the main one of the mystery ceremonies, and Livy explains that “the pure washing”, was what the Orphics, worshippers of Dionysos, experienced in their adoption into the religion. When Apuleius in The Golden Ass describes his own initiation, the hierophant brought him to the baths, asked pardon of the gods, and purified his body by washing him. To note all this is not to suggest that John the Baptist was copying them, though Palestine had been part of the Greek world for almost 400 years, for baptism was important to Jews too.
If anyone wanted to convert to Judaism—one might say, be initiated into it, in parallel with the terminology of the other religions of the Hellenistic world—the proselyte had to be circumcised, be baptised and had to offer a sacrifice. Of these baptism was the most important for Rabbi Joshua argued that it alone was sufficient, although Rabbi Eliezer disagreed. William Barclay of Glasgow University explained the details of proselyte baptism (The Mind of Jesus). The initiate or proselyte into Judaism had his hair and nails cut, was stripped, was fully immersed in water, and, on emerging, had the law was read to him. He was then warned of the difficulties, dangers and potential for persecution ahead. He confessed his sins to three witnesses, known as “the fathers of baptism”, effectively godfathers, and, after further blessings and exhortations, he was declared a Jew. The three witnesses would have been members of the Sanhedrin, if the conversion was in Jerusalem.
The ritual left the proselyte “a little child just born”, or “a child of one day”. They were no longer who they were before, so that they could notionally, some said, even marry their own sister or mother. John must have been aware of the initiation baptism of the proselyte for rabbis Hillel and Shammai had disputed about it not long before. The issue had been whether the proselyte baptized on the eve of the Passover could participate in the seder. Hillel thought not.
Having become a Jew, the proselyte then had to undertake the full gamut of lustrations and immersions required by the laws of ritual cleanliness in Leviticus 15:5,8,13,16; 16:26,28). Jewish law prescribes both total and partial ritual washings of the body. The statement of Leviticus 15:16, “he shall bathe his flesh in water” required total immersion (tevilah) of the body in flowing river water or a ritual bath (mikveh). Mikveh is a gathering of waters (Gen 1:10), but came to mean a bath for the ritual immersion of people or utensils that had been polluted and required ritual purification. The mikveh was so important to Jews that building a mikveh took priority over building a synagogue. Indeed, a synagogue could be sold to raise money to build a mikveh.
The body has be totally immersed at one time. It was a religious act specifically undertaken to achieve the ritual purity required for participation in religious ceremonials. Ritual immersion alone gets rid of ritual impurity, and the immersion is purely ritual. The symbolic and ritual significance of regeneration and purification through immersion in natural water is distinct from hygienic washing. Indeed, the body must already be scrupulously clean before immersion, so that nothing may pollute the water or interpose between flesh and water.
The original source of the water in a mikveh must be a natural spring, rain, or water obtained from the melting of natural ice. It could not be drawn by a vessel and remain pure, but water could be added once the mikveh had been originally filled. The habit came from the Persian religion when the Jewish temple state was set up at the end of the fifth century BC. The Mishnah attributes to Ezra a decree that each male should immerse himself before reciting the morning prayer or studying. For Persians unclean things had been made by the Evil Spirit, and had to be purified through washing in flowing water—water itself being a sacred agent of the Good God for Persians—but total immersion was not necessary. In the original Persian religion, the nails and hair were unclean and had to be trimmed before a washing, and still, in Judaism, the nails are pared before a ritual bath.
The Jewish High Priest would immerse himself before conducting the service on the Day of Atonement, and each priest participating in the temple service also had to be immersed, beside washing his hands and feet from the laver. Pious Jewish men had to immerse themselves before festivals. Matutinal ritual immersion was practiced by the Hemerobaptists (Greek “daily bathers”), a Jewish sect, mentioned by the Church Fathers, probably the tovelei shaharit (“dawn bathers”) mentioned in the Talmud—most likely Essenes—and by pious ascetics, mystics, and Hasidim, and some Jews still practice immersion daily before the morning prayer, perhaps showing that the Hemerobaptists were not unusually peculiar.
When the hands were thought to have been polluted but not the whole body then a partial abution was needed:
- washing the hands and feet as prescribed by the bible for priests ministering in the temple
- washing hands for occasions such as before eating bread, after leaving a privy, and having just woken up.
It is sufficient to pour water over them alone. Vessels which have contracted certain types of ritual uncleanness, or which were made or bought from a non-Jew also had to be immersed before use.
John the Baptist
The founder of the Mandaeans, John the Baptist, is a historic character, who practised ritual immersion and appears in Josephus, the Antiquities:
Some of the Jews thought that Herod's army had been destroyed, and indeed by the very just vengeance of God, in return for John the Baptizer. For in fact Herod put the latter to death, a good man, nay even one who bade the Jews cultivate virtue and, by the practice of righteousness in their dealings with one another and of piety to God, gather together for baptism. For thus in sooth the dipping (in water) would seem acceptable to him, not if they used it as a begging-off in respect to certain sins, but for purity of body, in as much as indeed the soul had already been purified by righteousness.
Now since the others were gathering themselves together—for indeed they were delighted beyond measure at the hearing of his sayings (logoi), Herod, fearing that his extraordinary power of persuading men might lead to a revolt, for they seemed likely in all things to act according to his advice, judged it better, before anything of a revolutionary nature should eventuate from him, to arrest him first and make away with him, rather than when the change came, he should regret being faced with it. Accordingly, on Herod's suspicion, he was sent in bonds to Machærus, the above-mentioned fortress, and put to death there. The Jews, however, believed that destruction befell the army to avenge him, God willing to afflict Herod.
Dr Robert Eisler carefully studied John the Baptist and published his findings in scholarly journals (1909-14). From these extracts from Josephus, John the Baptist was a revolutionary, or potentiallly so, with such a considerable following that Herod Antipas, scared he would start a rebellion, and put him to death. He called the Jews, like the prophets before him, to righteousness. They had to deal fairly with each other and be pious towards God, or love their neighbour and love God, as his successor put it. Baptism could only follow a cleansing of the soul through adopting these duties to neighbour and to God. Baptism was not a magic rite that washed away sins, and nor was it a daily practice as it was for Essenes, but a final symbolic act of repentence before the expected imminent coming of the kingdom.
John appeared baptizing crowds of people in the Jordan but otherwise the gospels says nothing about him. How did he come by his message of repentence? What signs told him? Why was baptism so important, and what was its origin? If he had a revelation, then surely it was an important one, and God would have wanted it known. Some people, in fact, worshipped John the Baptist and not Jesus, so more must have been known about him. It looks like censorship. But are there any clues?
Mark, knowing nothing of miraculous births, begins his gospel by introducing John the Baptist baptizing in the wilderness. A Jewish sect called the Essenes had their principal community at Qumran, in the wilderness where John evidently lived. It is the rocky desert between Qumran, the monastery of the Essenes by the Dead Sea, and Jerusalem. John had many similarities with the Essenes.
- The word of God came to him, Luke confirms, in the desolate wilderness between Qumran and Jerusalem.
- His ministry was in all the regions around Jordan, in other words not far from Qumran.
- He baptised those who repented. People had to repent urgently and be baptised by John to be ritually pure because a ”greater one” than he would come to baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
- He advocated communism, saying: “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise”. The Essene monks had to give all their goods to the Community, as did the Nazarenes in the Acts of the Apostles.
- He expected a Messiah, quoting Deutero-Isaiah (Isa 40:3-4): “…the voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” The Qumran community justified their withdrawal to the wilderness with the same quotation.
The obvious difference was that John seems to be a solitary ascetic not a member of a community. Plainly though, this is not true. John the Baptist had disciples as all four gospels (Mk 1:5; Jn 1:35) tell us and Acts further explains that his disciples had spread far and wide. Christian baptism was rivalled by the baptism of John (Acts 19:3).
A connexion of John the Baptist with the Essenes is no new idea. We read about the Essenes in the works of a contemporary Jewish historian:
Marriage they disdain, but they adopt other men's children, while yet pliable and docile, and regard them as their kin, and mould them in accordance with their principles.Josephus, Wars of the Jews 2:8:2
W Barclay, a Christian theologian, reasoning that John’s parents were old when he was born (Luke 1:7) seems happy to accept that perhaps the Essene community adopted John while he was still a child. Suggest that Jesus was similarly adopted by them and Christians turn puce. Yet, if one is willing to suspend enforced belief for a moment and consider a plausible explanation of Luke's birth narrative, Jesus seems to have been the illigitimate child of an underage girl, an equally good candidate for adoption by the Essenes.
Controversy surrounds the locusts eaten by John. John lived on wild honey and on locusts—possibly the insects, which Essenes were allowed to eat as long as they had been treated by fire or water, but probably the carob bean, the food of repentance of rabbinic tradition. A proverb apparently based on a rabbinic midrash on Isaiah reads:
Israel needs carob pods to make him repent.Jewish proverb
It seems John chose the carob or locust-tree, which was considered the food of repentance. John’s asceticism in clothing and food signified repentance, according to the scriptures. John is calling for repentance in readiness for the day of the Lord, and many people respond. Not literally everybody could have done, as the gospels state, but the Nazarenes, the branch of the Essenes to whom John and Jesus belonged, hoped everybody would respond—literally—since they believed their duty was to secure all Israel for the coming kingdom. (See The Call to All Israel in the Last Days.)
Because Mark is writing for gentiles, he rarely uses Old Testament quotations which would have meant nothing to early gentile converts to Christianity, but in his passage on John he quotes scripture to establish John the Baptist as merely the forerunner of Jesus and nothing more. When Mark was writing his gospel, some people—mainly diaspora Jews—believed it was John the Baptist who was the messiah. Mark wants to show plainly that they were wrong, by John’s own admission.
In Mark, the designation “Lord” refers to Jesus, matching gentile Christian usage. The Septuagint expression “Lord” (kyrios) renders the Hebrew tetragrammaton and so means God. By calling Jesus “Lord” the Christians already declared him to be God.
The first Old Testament quotation is from Malachi 3:1:
Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and 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.
The quotation is subtly changed however. In the scriptures, God said, before me, meaning that the messenger preceded God’s visitation on the day of judgement. Mark wanted the messenger to precede the messiah, Jesus, who in turn preceded Judgement Day, and writes:
As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.
Such changes are characteristic of Essene methods of exegesis which had obviously influenced Mark. If the scriptures did not say quite what suited them for interpretation Essenes seemed to have no qualms about changing them—the Habakkuk Commentary contains many examples. It is the least form of pious lie and one which has identifiable origins, proving that the first Christians had no problems with lying when it suited them.
The context of the quotation in Malachi is that the messenger is the messiah himself sent to purify the world like a refiner’s fire, the metaphor John himself uses when he is describing him that cometh. In the final verses of Malachi (4:5) God promises to send Elijah, the prophet, before the great and terrible day of the Lord and so Mark identifies John with Elijah, whence the description of the leather girdle about his loins in Mark 1:6 which parallels Elijah’s leather girdle in 2 Kings 1:8, and the camel hair of John which makes him hairy like Elijah. Evidently, the last verse does not give a true description of John but a description of Elijah to make the prophetic point, though John would have had long hair because he was a Nazarite. In the fourth gospel, John the Baptist denies that he is Elijah, a recognition by the church that Jesus had not heralded the Judgement Day—it had still not arrived after almost a century—and therefore that John the Baptist could not have heralded it either. The Judgement Day now was not due until Jesus returned—his parousia. Comment.
The second Old Testament quotation is from Isaiah 40:3, the prophet whose name means God’s Saviour, as does Jesus, and who is especially revered by the Essenes.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
The Community Rule uses exactly the same quotation from Isaiah:
They shall be separated from the midst of the gatherings of the men of wrongs to go to the wilderness to prepare there the way of the Lord, as it is written: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a high way for God.
Unlike the gospels however, which pretend that the Mosaic law has been revoked by Jesus, the Community Rule unmistakably identifies the straight high way as the law:
This is the study of the law, as he commanded them through Moses to do all that has been revealed from age to age, and, by his holy spirit, as the prophets revealed.
Note that, like Christians, the Essenes were fond of invoking the holy spirit, or the Spirit of Holiness as scroll scholars often translate it to make it sound different.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, prepare ye the way
is a deliberate mistranslation. It puts the voice in the wilderness when the correct meaning is,
The voice of one crying: in the wilderness prepare ye the way.
This is how the Essenes read it and this is what they attempted to do, setting up their monastery at Qumran, and preparing the way for the Nasi. When the clergy had control of book production they repunctuated the expression even in the Septuagint because for them the way was no longer to be prepared in the wilderness but anywhere that Christians happened to be.
The two quotations are run together in a way characteristic of the Essenes. Mark gives John the role of the messenger of God prophesied in Malachi and in Isaiah but not the role of messiah. Mark knew that John the Baptist was a significant man in his own right and could have said more about him here (he does later) and his followers were offering a rival to Jesus, but here he deliberately plays him down, treating him solely as the forerunner of Jesus.
Moses and Exodus
