Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, March 19, 1999
Thursday, 15 June 2006

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:

1. washing the hands and feet as prescribed by the bible for priests ministering in the temple
2. 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.

A Baptism of Repentance

John is preaching a baptism of repentance as did the Essenes. Baptism was a special rite to the Jews, a ritual purification for a soldier before going to battle in which, of course, he might die. It was an oath of allegiance, a sacramentum, and is still so called by the church. The Essene Community Rule prescribed washing in water for those who had repented:

They shall not enter the water to partake of the pure meal of the saints, for they shall not be cleansed unless they turn from their wickedness

for all who transgress his word are unclean. Everyone—all Israel—had transgressed, in allowing the foreigner to rule. Even a potential messiah, to the Jews a man—with supernatural powers maybe—but not a god, had to be washed clean of this sin by baptism.

For the elect of the Qumran community, it was a cleansing of the body, the soul having already been purified by righteousness. In the Community Rule the sectaries were rendered pure by sincere repentance and acceptance of the precepts of God. Without them, no amount of physical cleansing would work; with them, the initiate was cleansed by the holy spirit enabling him to accept the sprinkling of purifying water and the cleansing of sanctified water which prepared him to walk perfectly in the ways of God in the covenant of the everlasting community.

Purification had to be done in clean water and sufficient of it to completely cover a man as the Community Rule makes clear. It could not be effected by washing from a vessel, Essenes believed in total immersion but the implication of the sprinkling of holy water is that a priest, in this case John, would have conducted some appropriate ceremony to accompany the ritual cleansing. Ezekiel 9:4 describes the procedure when, in his vision, the righteous of Israel were spared from the wrath of God’s six avenging angels—they had been marked with water on their foreheads. Clergymen to this day use exactly the same ritual—the sign of the cross is made in water on the forehead. We can deduce with some confidence that the Essenes and the Nazarenes, before Christianity was invented, baptized converts with the mark of the cross.

John announces that a mightier one, who would baptize not with water but with the holy spirit, is to follow him. Paul’s letters show that “baptism in the holy spirit” was adopted as the Christian initiatory rite early in the church’s development: “for in one spirit you were all immersed into one body… and you all drank one spirit” (1 Cor 12:13). Since Paul preceded the writing of the gospels, Mark’s readers were likely to have known the term.

Matthew 3:11 adds “and with fire” referring back to the refiner’s fire of Malachi 3:2. Judgement would be a pleasant experience only for the righteous (Mal 4:1-3) just as it was in the Persian religion:

When the day cometh it burneth as a furnace, and all the proud and all that work wickedness shall be stubble, and the day that cometh shall burn them up… but ye that fear my name shall gambol as calves of the stall and ye shall tread down the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the souls of your feet.

The “I indeed… but…” construction common to both Matthew and Luke shows they are using a different source from Mark, who does not use this construction and uses a different tense in describing his action of baptizing. It is the source “Q.” Q might be the earliest written stratum of Christian tradition (indeed be pre-Christian), and must have contained its own account of the Baptist’s preaching, independent of Mark’s because Matthew and Luke know more than Mark. Thus it adds:

Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

Mt 3:11-12; Lk 3:16-17

So the reference to fire absent in Mark seems to be from Q. Did the entire phrase “holy spirit and fire” appear in Q? Or did Q only refer to fire, and Matthew and Luke took the reference to the holy spirit from Mark? If Q was early or even pre-Christian, it is most likely that Q mentioned only the fire, matching Malachi, and that the “Holy Ghost” was added when the expectation of an apocalypse receded. The tongues of fire of the Pentecostal Holy spirit were introduced to explain the original fire of judgement that had never appeared, but which the Essenes emphatically expected as the Hymn Scroll makes clear.

Remnants of John’s preaching preserved especially in Q shows that John had a complete message of repentance that did not depend on another, namely Jesus, coming, or speak of the Holy Ghost.

O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance: And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Mt 3:7-10

O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Lk 3:7-9

Although Matthew addresses this speech to Pharisees and Sadducees, Luke addresses it to the Jews of the multitude. John’s message was that the day of judgement was due and all of Israel should prepare for it. It was up to every Jew who was not righteous to look to his own salvation by repentance and baptism, lest he be baptized with fire. Note that John the Baptist, like Jesus, spoke in parables. He illustrated his meaning with analogies or allegories that would not have been meaningful to a gentile unfamiliar with messianism.

Nor was John specifying any particular person as the messiah, the mightier one—he was not specifically referring to Jesus Christ as Christians believe—but simply teaching Jewish received wisdom that a messiah would arrive to precede the fiery judgement of God. When the crowd ask John what they had to do for salvation, Luke has John replying that they should behave as Essenes by sharing their possessions.

Note also the Q expression, “O generation of vipers”, which appears three times in Matthew and also in Luke, though sometimes “generation” is rendered “offspring”. Though serpents are often mentioned in the scriptures, vipers occur quite rarely. The word appears in Matthew and Luke as often as it appears in the whole of the Old Testament. The metaphor seems to relate to tongues, particularly lying tongues, and the poison which they metaphorically administer. In the Epistle of James 3:8 the tongue is described as a restless evil full of deadly poison.

One of the smaller scroll fragments is very reminiscent of James’s epistle in form and content. It uses the imagery of tongues and vipers to attack lying adversaries just as James and the Damascus Rule do and calls for restraint and patience. The origin is one of the four scriptural citations of vipers in Job 20:16, where it is said of the wicked:

The viper’s tongue shall slay him.

The Damascus Rule rails against the Pharisees, saying: “They open their mouth with a blaspheming tongue against the laws of the covenant of God” and, quoting in an altered form, typically Essene, another of the four scriptural references to vipers—Isaiah 59:5, “their eggs are vipers’ eggs”. Those who are born of vipers’ eggs are the generation or offspring of vipers. “O generation of vipers” looks like an Essene phrase. It is used by both John the Baptist (Mt 3:7; Lk 3:7) and Jesus (Mt 12:34; 23:33) showing it was a cult expression.

Matthew 3:9 and Luke 3:8 also have here a telling reference to God being able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. John seems to be warning the multitude not to take refuge in the fact that they are of the old covenant of God with Abraham, being his seed. If they have not remained righteous, God has dissolved the old covenant—a covenant is a contract binding on both parties. If God merely wanted the seed of Abraham, he could make them out of stones.

We have a play on words. The word banim means children or, if male, sons and abanim means stones. The Rabbinic writings use stones to represent the Children and twelve stones to stand for the twelve tribes. Moreover, the Essenes were called Banaim! Comment John’s play on words might have been that God could raise up stones as Children to Abraham through the work of his agents, the Essenes, or Banaim. The Essenes considered themselves the true Israel, and Israel were derived from Abraham who was the rock from which they were hewn (Isa 51:1). But in Deuteronomy (Dt 32:15) the Children had come to disregard their origins in the rock of Abraham. This is a clear implication that Jews were becoming apostates and had to be called back to their origins.

Josephus in his autobiography tells us of one Banus, an Essene who lived in the desert rather like the John the Baptist of the gospels. If Banus read his name as the son and he was a disciple of John the Baptist who called himself Enosh, meaning man, then he, like Jesus, was a Son of man! Banus must have been a successor of Jesus as Nasi of the Essenes. Interestingly, Jesus nicknames his disciple, Simon as Cephas (in Greek, Peter) which means a stone or a rock. All of this punning is a reflexion of the word Banaim applied to Essenes.

Luke 3:1-18 adds more information to suggest that John was an Essene. In Luke 3:11, John the Baptist urges people to hold everything in common like the Essenes, 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. Yet he indicates that he is willing to accept repentance from publicans and soldiers, both of whom served the interests of the oppressors. Though this latter seems to be contrary to an Essene position, it takes the position of the Nazarenes—Essenes who, on the eve of the day of judgement, are willing to accept sincere repentance from any Jew on the grounds that they are all God’s chosen and must be given the chance to be saved at the judgement and to fight in God’s army against the forces of evil.

This idea appears in the Rule of the Congregation which is for the many of Israel in the last days when they shall join the community. The Essene scribes used the word Israel both to mean themselves, the pure Israel, and to mean the nation at large, all Israel. But if Israel is joining the community then the Israel referred to is all Israel because the community is the Essene community—that of the pure Israel. Essenes believed that all Israel should be given the chance to join the perfect of Israel in the last days. That is exactly what John the Baptist and Jesus after him were doing. They were offering all Jews the chance to repent and rejoin the chosen of God—those who would be saved in the coming holocaust. In Luke 3:12,14, publicans and soldiers come to John asking him what they should do to be saved. The answer is the same for all Jews—sincerely repent and receive baptism—but the trivial answers in Luke are nonsensical, the work of the gentile church when the return on a cloud had receded.

Note that John was baptizing on the river Jordan at a place called Bethabara, according to John’s gospel, or later at a place called Aenon near Salim. Though both are boldly marked on maps of the Holy Land, both are unknown places though Bethabara appears to be across the Jordan in Peraea about five miles from the Dead Sea. Yet according to Mark and Matthew, John was in the wilderness of Judaea. Luke avoids the problem by saying he was in all the country about Jordan, thus covering all possibilities. Actually, there is a traditional baptizing site at the mouth of a wadi not far from the Essene centre at Qumran. Moreover, thre was a scriptural town of Betharabah (Josh 18:22) that must have been close to Qumran (not that this ancient town necessarily still existed, but that the Essenes might well have used ancient names for their own camps). Later, however, John was captured by Herod Antipas so he must have been in Peraea. None of these places are more than about twenty miles from Qumran, and indeed most can be seen to the north of the elevated promontory on which Qumran is sited.

John the Baptist has too many similarities with the Essenes to be coincidence. Yet Scholars, particularly Christian ones, have tried to argue that the idea of John the Baptist and Jesus being Essenes is mistaken. They say that Josephus, though he considered being an Essene and introduced other people as Essenes, didn’t say John the Baptist was one. They take this as proof that John was not one. This mode of arguing is one that Christians are fond of decrying when used by others against Christianity.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,

they then smugly chorus. So, why do they use the absence of evidence as a conclusive argument here? Josephus was a Roman captive who had been a Jewish military commander. His position was insecure. He probably had not told the Romans all that he knew and had to remain cagey when writing his books. The evidence is that Josephus was protecting the Essenes because he depicts them as peaceful when we now know they were not. He will have had many Essene friends who might still have been rounded up by the Romans.

Quite apart from this, he does not devote much space to John, even though it is much more than he seemed to devote to Jesus. And, as always with Josephus, there is the possibility of Christian “improvements”. If Christian editors wanted to dissassociate the characters of the gospels from the militant Essenes, they will have struck out references to them.

The Year of John’s Appearance

Note that Matthew’s Gospel associates John’s initial appearance with the return of Joseph and Mary from Egypt (”in those days”). Since the holy family had fled from Herod and returned when he died, those days must have been soon after 4 BC. The apocryphal Gospel of the Twelve Apostles says that John came baptizing in the days of Herod, king of Judaea. Herod, king of Judaea must have meant Herod Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, who ruled Judaea from 4 BC until 6 AD as a minor king, an ethnarch. Mandaean tradition is similar. John had been baptising in the Jordan for 42 years when Jesus appeared, so he must have started during Herod the Great’s reign. Thus John was at least 60 years old and more likely nearer 70 when he was murdered.

Luke seriously contradicts these, apparently giving the date when the word of God came to John extremely precisely, writing (Lk 3:1-2):

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

Naming all of these rulers, secular and religious, seems to make the dating extremely precise but really it is spurious. The only measure of time given is in relation to the reign of Tiberius. No time is given in relation to the reigns of the others, and all we can be sure of, if the whole passage is not bogus, is that all of these people were in power at the time referred to—except Annas.

Tiberius succeeded Augustus on 19 August in 14 AD and so Luke is giving the year as 28 or 29 AD depending upon whether the remainder of 14 AD counted as year one of Tiberius. The Romans usually counted as a year part years within a calendar year, so that 14 AD probably was year one of Tiberius. Indeed Tiberius was a joint regent with Augustus from 11 AD and the regency year might have been included as years of Tiberius, in which case Luke is giving the year 25 AD as the start of John’s mission. Theologians put the start of Jesus’s ministry in 28/29 AD and its end in 29 AD, if it lasted one year as the synoptics suggest or 33 AD, if it lasted three or four as the fourth gospel suggests. Note that, in Luke, John the Baptist was jailed by Herod Antipas almost as soon as he started his ministry which seems unlikely.

Control of Judaea was vested by the Emperor of Rome in prefects and later procurators who he appointed to govern the province on his behalf. They had to report to him all significant events that occurred. Imperial policy centred on raising revenue through taxation and, to do so effectively, maintaining peace, the Pax Romana. So a governor’s duties included keeping law and order and raising taxes. Since they were unpaid, governors had to obtain their own income out of local revenue. By milking the province to get rich they created another source of unrest. They had a small garrison of about 3000 soldiers based at Caesarea on the coast but some were deployed in Jerusalem especially when it was crowded with pilgrims at the Passover.

The first three prefects served a tour of duty of three years each (four years in ancient reckoning because they counted inclusively—they counted the part year at the beginning and end of a period of office as a year). The Emperor was Augustus. The next prefect, Gratus, according to extant works of Josephus, served for eleven years and then Pilate served for ten. The Emperor these two served under was Tiberius.

Annas was a powerful figure, the High Priest under the first three prefects. He was deposed as High Priest in 15 AD when Gratus, the prefect preceding Pilate, introduced regular changes of High Priest, but he remained influential. Gratus introduced the practice of replacing the High Priest annually to limit his power.

Josephus tells us he immediately replaced Annas, and successively appointed Ismael, Eleazar, Simon and finally Joseph Caiaphas. Caiaphas was, of course, the villain of the gospel stories and we know from Josephus that he served as High Priest for the entire time of Pilate’s prefecture. Curiously, the fourth gospel specifies Caiaphas as being High Priest that same year (Jn 11:49), implying that when he was appointed the tenure was only for a year. That would fit in with what Josephus told us about the system introduced by Gratus. If Gratus changed the High Priest annually and he appointed four in all, then he served a three year tour like his three predecessors. Caiaphas had been appointed just as Gratus left and was therefore the incumbent when Pilate arrived. Pilate found he could work with Caiaphas, reverted to the procedure which preceded Gratus and left Caiaphas in post.

If Annas was the High Priest, Luke is giving a date before 15 AD but then Pilate cannot have been prefect—Josephus gives 26 AD as the year of Pilate’s appointment. Possibly Luke was fooled, by Pilate being the prefect at the time of the crucifixion, into thinking that he was there all along when really Gratus was prefect at the start.

If this reasoning is correct, Caiaphas was appointed in 18 AD and Pilate later the same year. Pilate was withdrawn in the year before Tiberius died, 36 AD, so that he served 18 years. Why, you might ask did Pilate get such a long tour of duty? The answer is that Tiberius knew that governors bled their provinces to get rich, but he had the express philosophy that a bloated fly fell off the corpse. Tiberius let his governors have long tours of duty so that the people of the provinces would get some peace once the governor had made his fortune. When he became Emperor he inherited Augustus’s system of short tours of duty and so Gratus served his allotted three years. Once Tiberius had formulated his bloated fly philosophy, the governor was in post for an indefinite period.

So, Tiberius appointed Valerius Gratus in 15 AD, at a time when it was custom and practice for the prefects to serve three year terms of duty. Gratus was scheduled to end his in 18, but, in Josephus, he continued in office for another eight years until he was replaced by Pilate, considered an appointee of Sejanus, Tiberius’s Viceroy when the emperor retired to Capri in 26 AD. In 17 AD, the leading Jews appealed to the emperor against their heavy taxes. Supposedly on the fly theory, Tiberius left Gratus in office for eleven years, even though after a mere two years Jews were complaining about their heavy taxation. Then Pilate was left in office for another ten years. Yet, oddly enough, Tiberius is also cited as saying:

A good shepherd is one who fleeces the sheep without taking the skin off their backs.

Professor Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars

This was in reply to a request by an official to put up taxation. Tiberius was also most interested in keeping the Pax Romana, and it seems unlikely that he would have tolerated officials who were blatantly provocative in their policies particularly in sensitive border provinces like Judaea. It seems more likely that Tiberius replaced Gratus at his appointed time, in view of the Jewish complaints, even if he had been willing to let him stay on. Not to have responded to the Jewish appeal would have provoked more anger breaking the peace.

Pilate then would have had instructions not to tax the Jews excessively, and avoid unnecessary provocations while maintaining the Roman Peace firmly. That is what he seemed to have done. Pilate has a bad reputation, but some modern historians dispute it was as bad as Jews and Christians have made out. He chose to use the immense private wealth of the Temple rather than raise money for civil projects by taxation. The Jewish priests and other nobles would have been incensed by this, no doubt, but the poor would have been grateful they were not being taxed, and so even those poor people who were pious would have had mixed feelings. And the project, the aquaduct, must have been a boon. Moreover, Pilate seemed ready to yield to pressure, rather belying his reputation for being deliberately antagonistic. His provocations might often have been crass rather than intended. Thus the incident of raising the Roman standards in the temple area, always considered a deliberate provocation, was perhaps meant to be a demonstration of power to uphold the Pax Romana. The priests and the Sanhedrin objected, and he seems to have stood down quickly enough and without further incident.

If Pilate was appointed in 18 AD in the fifth year of Tiberius and that is the time to which Luke refers, all of these rulers were already in post—accepting Annas as an eminence gris behind Caiaphas—including the mysterious Lysanius who received the tetrachy of Abilene in 14 AD. The exact specification of the year of Tiberius in Luke has either been copied in error or deliberately changed. Where we now see in the Greek pentakaidekato ,meaning fifteenth, originally it read pempto meaning fifth. Easier still, early manuscripts will have used Greek numbers rather than written ordinals for brevity of copying, in which case the change was simply from the letters “LE” to the letters “LIE”. The changes in the numbers and in the name of the prefect were made because changes were made to Josephus to take the year of the crucifixion away from the year 21 AD which is when the Acts of Pilate put it. Pilate’s period of rule was altered from “IH” (eighteen years ) to “IA” (eleven years), and Gratus’s period of rule was altered from “D” (four years) to “IA” (eleven). Clergymen could therefore claim that the Acta Pilati were forgeries. Comment

But these changes do not bring us into the reign of any Herod of Judaea. The reason is that Luke is telling us the year that Jesus was baptized not the year that John began his ministry. In that year “the word of God”—meaning Jesus (he is called “the word” explicitly in John 1:1,14)—“came unto John in the wilderness”. Luke must mean this because he makes no further reference to Jesus being baptized—in Luke 3:21 Jesus is already baptized. When Jesus came to be baptized, John the Baptist must have been baptizing for many years, as the other sources maintain—and he must have been at least 60 years old and more likely nearer 70 when he was murdered. The earlier story in Luke that Jesus and John were the same age, like most of the birth narratives, was an invention, or perhaps a misunderstanding—they were both baptized at the same age, 30 (but a generation apart).

In the gospels, Jesus has the highest praise for John but the authors render it as faint praise, praising him merely as the forerunner of the messiah. Great though they say he is, the gospels play John the Baptist down to a compere for the main act. Nonetheless they admit that John heralded not just the messiah but a whole period of violence:

In the days of the Baptist and until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the men of violence take it by force.

The first gospel written, Mark, does not tell us that John the Baptist recognises Jesus as the Messiah. Matthew introduces it and it is strengthened in Luke. But when John baptised Barabbas he simultaneously crowned him a king or a High Priest because a voice acknowledges him as a Son of God.

Zacharias

Luke 1:5-80 tells us more about the background of John the Baptist, but the story of John’s infancy in Luke seems to be based on the birth stories of Isaac, Samson and Samuel in the Jewish scriptures. Miriam and Elisheba, the two women in Luke, are the names of the sister and wife of Aaron, the first priest, suggesting John was of priestly descent like the Essenes. And indeed, Zacharias is an elderly priest whose wife Elisabeth is childless. While offering incense in the temple, an angel appears to him telling him:

Thy prayer is heard.

Prayer is singular so the old man had prayed there and then—clergymen tell us for a child. It is a bit hard to believe that angels will interrupt solemn temple rituals ordered by God to tell an old man some cheerful marital news. But Luke 1:6 adds the details that Zacharias and his wife are both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord, blameless—they were Essenes! We can be sure that Zacharias’s humility before God was such that he would not have prayed for personal benefit—a son—which would have been selfish. He prayed for a deliverer for Israel—a Son of God. That would be a sensible reason for God to reply via an angel.

The further detail that Zacharias is burning incense not offering a sacrifice confirms that the old man was an Essene. According to the Community Rule, the Essene was to forgo the flesh of holocausts and the fat of sacrifice because a prayer was the acceptable savour of the righteous, and perfection the proper offering to God. Earlier in the same book of rules we are told that the council of the community with everlasting knowledge of the covenant of the just, shall be a most holy dwelling for Aaron—in short a temple—and shall offer up a sweet savour. The conclusion from these passages is that the Essenes preferred incense and prayer to animal sacrifice. Evidently the council of the community would meet and offer up fragrance and prayer to God as a living temple of perfection. That the first Christians had the same beliefs is confirmed in Revelation 8:3-4 which speaks of an angel with a golden censer and much incense:

That he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God.

Offering prayers and a sweet savour instead of sacrifices is purely Essene. The angel (Lk 1:15) commands Zacharias to call his son John which means, the mercy of God, and that:

He shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink, and he shall be filled with the holy ghost even from his mother’s womb.

He is telling Zacharias that John must be consecrated to God from birth. Such men, like Samson and Samuel, were Nazarites—all Essenes were Nazarites. The angel also promises (Lk 1:17) that John shall:

turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord,

a passage that declares John to be a Nazarene, an Essene dedicated to converting the impious Jews to righteousness. “The just” is code for the Essenes—it is the same word as “righteous”.

In Luke 1:18-20, Zacharias doesn’t believe the messenger and is told that he would remain dumb until the prophecy was fulfilled. The angel expressly says he would be struck dumb, “because thou believest not my words”. This is an instance proving that afflictions are meant to signify doubts, disbelief, poor faith, opposition and apostasy. Once the words had been fulfilled Zacharias would have no choice but to believe, and then his dumbness would be cured.

At this point, Luke 1:31-35 sends an angel to announce the birth of Jesus to Mary, which he does in purely Essenic messianic language, as we noted above, declaring that Jesus would be a son of David, and a son of God, meaning a king. The messiah described in it was to have the throne of his father, David, and, as sons meant descendents and even just followers, there is no statement here that the messiah was a prince in the royal line of primogentiture of David. He was to have the throne of David, but did not have to be royal. All Jews, except proselytes, must have had David somewhere in their ancestry after a thousand years, had David been a historical king. Lineage was not necessarily implied. The House of David meant the kingdom of David as well as the dynasty of David. The former is clearly intended.

The use of the phrase “house of Jacob” as the name of the everlasting kingdom in the poetic part of Gabriel’s announcement suggests that this tradition was genuine, old and probably Essene, such a name plainly excluding gentiles. It expresses the hope of Jews for a conquering messiah to unite and lead the twelve tribes of Israel. When it was added to the Marcan tradition in Luke, it was already a false desire, Jesus having already died on the cross, and the Jews having lost the Roman war that ensued a few decades later. Here is evidence of an Essene fixed tradition being known to early Christians and incorporated into the gospel at a later date for a new purpose. What was written down in such a fixed form most likely was an account of an Essene ritual or hymn.

For all that Luke recounts the virgin birth, in verse 1:28 he unequivocally states that the angel came in unto her which means he had sex with her. As a consequence Mary was troubled, as she would have had cause to be. However the Quran, which seems to preserve elements of the tradition of the original Jerusalem Church, confirms the annunciation of Mary described in Luke but calls Mary a siddiqah (5:17), a zaddik, one of the righteous, and the elect of God amongst women (3:42). She is a female Essene. Like the Essenes, the Quran refers to Abraham and Joseph as being of the righteous. The Quran adds that Mary was, like John, a Nazarite vowed before birth to the service of God (3:33-37) who Zacharias sponsored to enter the temple. The Protevangelium of the second century says the same. And, in Luke 1:36, Mary and Elizabeth are cousins so that Mary, like Elizabeth, was a Levite which the Quran also confirms. The inference from this is that Mary held a ritual position in the birth of Jesus—she was a ritualized mother for the rebirth of the Nasi and the annunciation by the angel was exactly that—an announcement of the ceremonial conception. The angel’s intercourse with Mary when he came in unto her was a ritual formality merely describing his announcement.

Then Mary goes to meet Elisabeth and sings, or in some old manuscripts Elisabeth sings (Lk 1:46-55), the Magnificat—an Essene song of praise to God similar to many in the sectarian scrolls.

My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden:
For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath done to me great things;
And holy is his name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
He hath shewed strength with his arm;
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats,
And exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things;
And the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.

This song has God doing all the things the Essenes expected Him and His messiah to do for Israel—put down the mighty, exalt those of low degree, feed the hungry and send the rich away empty. This is obviously a song of the poor, the Ebionim—the Essenes. Elisabeth then gives birth and they name the son John whereupon Zacharias is relieved of his dumbness—his disbelief—the prophecy has come true so he must now believe it.

Another song, the Benedictus, by Zacharias follows (Lk 1:68-79).

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel;
For he hath visited and redeemed his people,
And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;
As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets,
Which have been since the world began:
That we should be saved from our enemies,
And from the hand of all that hate us;
To perform the mercy promised to our fathers,
And to remember his holy covenant;
The oath which he sware to our father Abraham,
That he would grant unto us,
That we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear,
In holiness and righteousness before him,
All the days of our life.
And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest:
For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;
To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,
Through the tender mercy of our God;
Whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,
To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
To guide our feet into the way of peace.

It is an extract of Essene liturgy, apparently part of the ceremony of ordination of the Nasi described in the baptism of Jesus. Many Essene words appear: visitation, redemption or deliverance or salvation from enemies, covenant, righteousness, preparing His ways, remission of sins, light and darkness, and death meaning everlasting death—those in darkness, the sinners, are in the shadow of death because they will not enter God’s everlasting kingdom.

If further proof is needed it is the use of the word which in the Septuagint translates “branch”, but here is rendered “dayspring”. The word is “semah” which, in the messianic sense in which it is used here, is synonymous with “neser”, and it appears as such in Zechariah 6:12 which describes another part of the coronation ceremony. “Nasi” and “neser” are both understood in the word Nazarene. Looked at this way, it can be seen that the Magnificat must have been the Nasi’s response upon being crowned or ordained.

The word “child” has probably been added to chime with Luke’s context, but “children” in the gospels is commonly used to mean God’s chosen people. It also seems that the Essenes as “the righteous” believed that they had been present at the creation. Certainly God’s prophets were righteous ones and the reference to “the holy prophets, which have been since the world began” must mean the Essenes themselves, there being no other Jewish or Christian tradition that the prophets were present at the creation. Peter uses the same expression in Acts 3:21 when he begins to persuade people that Jesus was the messiah and was to come again. Revelation, an essentially Essene work, brackets saints and prophets several times. Perhaps Essenes regarded themselves as prophets, hardly surprisingly in view of their belief that they understood the secrets of God’s appointed times.

Various thanksgiving hymns in the scrolls contain phrases remarkably similar to those in the Magnificat and the Benedictus. Since the gospels are translations from Aramaic oral tradition into Greek thence into English, the originals could well have been the same. Compare the following with those in the Lucan songs above.

Blessed be the God of Israel who storeth mercy for those of His Covenant, And keepeth the appointed times of His salvation for the people he hath redeemed.

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,

Thou hast raised the fallen by Thy strength, but hast cut down the great in height.

He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

Blessed art thou, O Lord, for it is Thou who hast done these things.

For he that is mighty hath done to me great things;

Illumined with perfect light forever, with no more Darkness, for unending seasons of joy and unnumbered ages of peace.

To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Blessed be thy name, O God of mercies, who has kept the Covenant with our fathers.

To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant;

He has lifted up in judgement the fearful of heart and has opened the mouth of the dumb that they might praise the great works of God.

Amazingly here the mouths of the dumb are being opened to praise the great works of God, precisely as Zacharias does, but not in the song—in Luke’s narrative! Luke has dramatized a verse of an Essene hymn. Perhaps it has happened elsewhere in the gospels. Those who praise the works of God are not stricken but those who deny the works of God are dumb. Again we have confirmation that physical afflictions for Essenes represent states of disbelief.

The truth in Luke’s story of Zacharias and John is that Zacharias was the predecessor of John as Nasi. Zacharias ordains John and later John ordains Jesus. Luke indicates this by the exact parallel between the birth stories of John and Jesus. He is saying they both were appointed in the same way—because they both had the same job. John would have uttered the same words at the baptism of Jesus that Zacharias said at his. Zacharias would have announced, “Thou art my beloved son”, at the coronation ceremony.

Certainly many of Jesus’ teachings reflects those of John and before him the Essenes, notably the communism of both sects and these two teachers. Matthew 5:40 has Jesus saying:

If any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

It is an exaggeration of John’s:

He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none.

Both are characteristic of the Essenes. In Acts 2:45, the Nazarenes:

sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.

Josephus tells us the Essenes did the same. The followers of Jesus (Mt 10:10) and the Essenes had no need of provisions while travelling. The were the Poor. They placed no value on individual material wealth, so held everything in common.

In verse 76, Luke has changed the original “Son of the Highest” to “prophet of the highest” because theologians had reserved the title “Son” for Jesus, and indeed Luke’s angel had announced in 1:32 that Jesus would be the “Son of the Highest”. In the original litany it was used of each Nasi, and so both of them were Sons of the Highest in succession. John was the ritual son not the natural son of Zacharias, which explains why an old man with an elderly wife could have a child. Zacharias is just a Greek form of Zechariah, the prophet Jesus deliberately fulfils when he enters Jerusalem on an ass, approaching the climax of the story.

From Luke 1:5, we know John the Baptist came from a priestly family. In the Hebrew and Arabic versions of Josephus, John the Baptist is called the High Priest. Since he could not have been the High Priest of the Jerusalem temple a position reserved at that time for a few aristocratic priestly families, the opponents of the regime must have had an alternative hierarchy with their leaders paralleling those in Jerusalem. The centre of the alternative organization was Qumran and John must have been a High Priest of the alternative priesthood.

Essene practice spelled out in the Damascus Document was that senior positions had to be given up at 60 years of age because God ordained in the Book of Jubilees that a man’s understanding would depart even before his days are completed. The Master had to retire at 50 and could not be appointed until he was thirty, explaining the two ages mentioned in connection with Jesus. Jesus might have been crowned as successor to John when the latter was nearing 50, and John succeeded Zacharias when he was 50. The most senior position in the Essene order, though largely a titular position, seems not to have been the Master but the High Priest who called the annual festival of the renewal of the covenant. After the baptism of Jesus as Nasi, John the Baptist might have become the High Priest, which would explain why he was able to question Jesus’s progress in Matthew 11:2-3.

Luke concludes this section:

And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his shewing unto Israel.

Lk 1:80

What is meant by, “the child… was in the deserts”, other than that he was brought up at Qumran. His parents vowed him to God as a Nazirite from his birth, suggesting they gave him over to the safekeeping of the Essenes who kept up their numbers by taking waifs, strays and orphans according to the classical writers. Zacharias was a priest and he and his wife were both elderly according to the New Testament. One of the thanksgiving hymns in the Hymn Scroll appears to confirm this having:

Thou wilt care for me; for my father knew me not and my mother abandoned me to thee.

Thus, Elisabeth is a pious invention to humour the women of the early church who were 80 to 90 per cent of its gentile congregations. Elisabeth is modelled on Abraham’s wife Sarah. She appears with John in a non-canonical work, The Protevangelion of James, where she and her son are saved by an angel while they were escaping to Egypt to escape the murder of the innocents by Herod. The angel takes the pair into a mountain which divided to acommodate them. People are accommodated into mountains in caves and the Qumran community regarded themselves as angels.

And John the Baptist was in the deserts “until the day of his shewing unto Israel”. The expression implies a deliberate coming out or debut in some important role that he had been prepared for. The role was the Nasi and the preparation was by the Essenes.

The Death of John the Baptist

Having said that John was dead, Mark decides to explain how it happened. The story about Herodias, Herod’s wife plotting to have the Baptist killed contrary to Herod’s wishes has characteristically Essene features. The scrolls show that the Essenes disagreed with the lax marital practices of the Herodians. Antipas had married his half-brother Philip’s divorced wife, Herodias, who was their niece and already had four children. Philip was not the tetrarch of Iturea who married Herodias’s daughter, Salome, but a brother who lived in Rome as a private citizen. Marrying a sister-in-law was illegal according to Leviticus 18:16 unless the woman had had no children when it was obliged (Dt 25:5). However John would also have objected to Herod marrying his niece. Jewish law allowed this but not the Essenes.

The story is romanticized here using scriptural precedents. There are echoes of Jezebel from 1 Kings and the fairy-tale formula of Esther 5:3 is used by Herod in verse 23. Incidentally, this latter tends to show this passage is not genuine Nazarene tradition because it seems the Essenes did not regard Esther as being canonical, no copies being found in their library, though possibly the copies they had have all decayed. The fairy-tale elements are added as a distraction from the truth that, far from respecting him as a saint, Herod feared John as a rebel. After all, John the Baptist had apparently done nothing worse than baptize a few multitudes in the Jordan river. Why should that worry a potentate like Herod Antipas to the extent of having him beheaded? Of course it could not but the Baptist was a dangerous barjona recruiting people to join the army of God, just like Jesus. Josephus is more honest in Antiquities of the Jews (18:5:2):

John, that was called the Baptist… was a good man, and commanded the Jews to practise virtue, both as righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism. For the washing would be acceptable to him if they made use of it not for the remission of some sins but for the purification of the body, supposing still that the soul had been thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness. Now when others came to crowd about him, for they were greatly pleased at hearing his words, Herod who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for they seemed ready to do any thing he should advise), thought it best, by poutting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it should be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod’s suspicious temper, to Machaerus, the castle I before mentioned, and was there put to death. Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of this army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God’s displeasure against him.

So, John is “a disturber of the people, who seemed ready to do anything he should advise”. Mark cannot allow this to be known and so the original Essene complaint against the Herodians was expanded to cover up the truth.

The reason why the story appears at all is to mark the death of John the Baptist and the succession of Jesus. In Matthew 14:13, the connection is explicit. The aim was to show to followers of the Baptist that they should have transferred their allegiance to Jesus on his death. Hitherto Jesus had been the crown prince but now he had become the mebaqqer of the Nazarenes. But all of Mark 6:14 to 6:29 interrupts the dispatching of the disciples on their mission and their return, serving only as a literary device to signify the passage of time. Indeed, it could have been omitted and no one would have noticed, except that the disciples would have seemed to have returned immediately. The passage is a Christian elaboration, for Jesus became the leader in practice when John was captured not when John was murdered—though he was not the titular leader. The gospels succeed in suggesting the passage of time between John’s capture and death, and Matthew gives just the right flavour when John sends a message from prison to Jesus in verses 11:2-3. Almost half way through the gospel, John the Baptist is still alive in jail, and able to get messages to the outside! Only half way through Matthew in 14:2 are we told indirectly that John is dead. Gospel truth is a powerful concept and because the gospels tell us that John died first we all believe it even though Josephus contradicts it. Jesus must have died first.

Antipas’s previous wife was the daughter of Aretas (Harith) IV, the Arabian king of Nabataea, who Josephus tells us began a war with Herod when he divorced his daughter. Herod rapidly lost a large army against the Arabs and according to rumour the Jews believed it was his punishment for murdering the Baptist. That the rumour should have been important enough for Josephus to record shows that John left a deep impression in Palestine at that time. The war did not begin until 36 AD whereas on gospel dating Jesus died not later than 33 AD and possibly a decade earlier.

Now Antipas married Herodias about the time that Tiberius succeeded Augustus to the Imperial Throne in 14 AD. If John really complained about Herod’s marital affairs then he must have complained immediately and Herod must have had to put up with John’s criticism. John must have been an important person in Judaea when Tiberius came to the throne. John the Baptist’s long career has been compressed in the gospels to make it seem insignificant compared with Jesus’s. In fact John started long before Jesus and was not murdered until some time after Jesus was. The early church had to counter the impression that John was the more important person, so they compressed his life, made him acknowledge Jesus as the messiah, gave him the role of compere and made him die first so that Jesus became the message—not John as many thought at the time—not the messenger.

Why then did it take Harith so long to avenge his daughter? The reason probably was that Harith was scared of the consequences—scared of Rome—because Antipas was well considered by the imperial court. He had to bide his time. Tiberius began as a vigorous Emperor, a good administrator, an active soldier supporting effective military campaigns and a successful statesman annexing Commagene and Cappadocia. Harith thought it too risky to take on a Roman favourite. Later Tiberius became morose and reclusive, eventually retiring to Capri where he ruled by diktat. From 32 AD until his death in 37 AD he did not budge from his island home. Plainly the lack of vigour of the Emperor, combined with Harith’s awareness that time was no longer on his side, for he too was an old man, and a border dispute with Antipas, impelled him to strike. Thus it was that it took him twenty years to avenge his daughter’s dishonour. In fact his judgement was pretty shrewd, because Tiberius was enraged by the attack on Antipas and ordered Vitellius, legate of Syria, to march with a large army to punish him, but Tiberius died before the command could be carried through.

John was active in the south by the Jordan and Josephus tells us that he was put to death in the fortress of Machaerus to the east of the Dead Sea, a place that can be seen across the lake from Qumran. If there were any truth in the gospel story it all occurred at Machaerus, where Herod had his southern palace, but his capital was at Tiberias where it seems more likely that he would celebrate a birthday. John must have been murdered during the hostilities—which would have been in the south where Nabataea and Peraea adjoined—because Herod feared the Nazarenes as potential fifth columnists. That explains why Josephus associates John’s death and Herod’s defeat which must have followed soon afterwards.

Comment

From Brad

Very informative information on John the Baptist on this page. I find it very interesting that John the Baptist, who apparently was standing in for a preoccupied Elijah, was supposed to have been trying to reconcile families as stipulated in Malachi 4:5-6. Yet, there is not one reference to John the Baptist ever attempting to perform that required function.

According to the gospel of John, John the Baptist denied being Elijah so the whole concocted effort of some of the New Testament writers to retrofit John the Baptist into the role of Elijah falls apart. To make matters worse, Jesus claimed in Luke 12:49-53 that his mission was to divide families.

So we have John the Baptist portrayed as Elijah by the New Testament writers who is supposed to have a mission to reconcile families and Jesus having a mission to divide them. A more absurd set of mission parameters for two men living at the same time, allegedly directed by the same God, I can’t imagine.

This is the type of nonsense that occurs when writers attempt to concoct and retrofit an agenda or storyline into an existing prophecy as the New Testament authors did. God said he would send Elijah himself and not some facsimile who wouldn’t even admit he was the genuine article.

Amazingly, this blatant example of theological self contradiction is almost completely ignored. If ever there was evidence as to how concocted some of the New Testament storyline is, this issue is it.

From Vincent Cook

I read with great interest your explanation of how Pilate’s rule of Judea may have extended as far back as 18 AD, and that the crucifixion dates to 21 AD. In doing some further research on this subject, I came across some interesting numismatic evidence that is consistent with this theory.

I would call your attention to:
Pilate Coins and Coin Varieties
for a detailed look at Pilate’s Judean coinage. In keeping with the standard chronology, coins from years 16, 17, and 18 of Tiberius’s reign are commonly recognized as Pilate types, and are shown on the first page.

The second page shows variants of these coins, supposedly caused by incompetent diesmiths who did a poor job copying the letters that represent the dates, etc. These are easily identified by the fact that the letter combinations are not consistent with the dating system used on Hellenistic coins. However, one variant stands out as corresponding to a real date, namely year 8 of Tiberius’s reign—21 AD!

Now, it is possible that this coin really was produced in year 18, and that an incompetent diesmith failed to copy the letter representing ten years (engraving “LH” instead of “LIH” on the die). But what if this coin is exactly what it appears to be—a coin produced in year 8 that matches the design of coins produced in years 17 and 18?

To analyze this possibility, it’s also necessary to compare them to the coinages commonly recognized as Gratus types
http://ancient-coin-forum.com/Biblical/Valerius_Gratus.html
Coins from years 2, 3, 4, 5, and 11 of Tiberius’s reign fall into this category. There is also a Gratus-type coin that might date to year 14, but the letter combination for 14 hard to distinguish from the combination for 11. Gratus-type designs use traditional agricultural imagery, some of which can be found also on pre-Roman Herodian coinages and on coins issued during the later Jewish uprisings.

The year 16 Pilate-type coin is also rather traditional in design, but Pilate-type coins from the years 17 and 18, and the year 8 variant, have an unusual image on the obverse—they show a “lituus”, a kind of crook that symbolizes the Augurs, a Roman priesthood.

Whether this “lituus” design was first introduced in year 8 or year 17 of Tiberius’s reign, it must have caused an uproar among the Jews, notwithstanding the irony that the Christians later appropriated the religious symbolism of the crook for themselves. Imagine how they would react to an idolatrous image on Judean coins being used in their temple!

Maybe there is more to all those references about the evils of money and of the temple’s moneychangers in the Christian scriptures than meets the eye—maybe the coin design itself helped provoke an uprising, reviving the idols-in-the-temple problem that plagued Pilate from the beginning of his praetorship. 21 AD and 30 AD would be the two most likely dates for such an event, with 21 AD being the crucial date if you assume that the year 8 dating is not a diesmith’s error and that the Christians tampered with the dates in Josephus.

The 21 AD theory would require that one account for Pilate’s use of older coin designs, especially the Gratus-type issued in 24 AD, but it is not hard imagining a temporary reversion to an older coin design in the wake of a revolt sparked by a new coin design. The real question then is why Pilate would then tempt fate and reissue the controversial new coin design in 30 AD and again in 31 AD.

At any rate, the numismatic evidence is intriguing; I thought you might appreciate it.

Comment from Dave M

Can you tell me your source for the information that the Essenes called themselves “banaim”? Is there some historical reference for this?

Although I say somewhere on the website that I do not provide detailed references because I am not writing works of scholarship for scholars, but simply reportage for the general reader, I get enquiries like yours that force me to try to find the source of something I might have written long ago. So it was with your question on the source of the description “banaim” applied to the Essenes. Whereas I might feel entitled to make my own suggestions as to the whys of history, the facts of it are not mine to change, so, when I have written something like this, I know, and I trust my readers will know, there was a source. It gets harder too because I have to rid myself of surplus books, so some of them that I might have used as a source I no longer have. Then some sources are on the internet such as the various articles in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Any way, I took me some time to track this one down to J B Lightfoot who himself cites someone called Frankel. My guess is that I got to this from following up something in Peake’s Commentary.

Now, I suspect your question is really meant as a rebuke because you already know the source, and Lightfoot thought Frankel’s deduction was speculative, and that might indeed be right, but on the page it is cited simply because it does fit in with the Essene interest in punning on words, and here they pun on stones, sons, builders, teaching and so on. And I suspect that they were initially friendly with Herod because he used them in building his temple as they were priests. Anyway, I’ll take your question as a rebuke and will look at some way of being more tentative in using the reference.

It was hardly a rebuke. Far from it. I am currently doing research for a book I am considering about how and why Jesus faked his death on the cross in order to “resurrect”. My question about “banaim” relates specifically to Jesus as an Essene. The Greek “tekton” referring to both Joseph and Jesus has been consistently translated as “carpenter”, but since it could also mean several other trades I believe that it refers to them properly as “builders”. Thus, the gospels in fact tell us that they were Essenes; the Greek “builders” actually refers to Essene “banaim”. That is why a reference for this comment would be helpful.

Your website is awesome, though it has thrown some of my theories out of wack. I have learned a great deal. Thanks! Right now, I am trying to resolve your idea that Jesus died BEFORE John and what that does to my overall theory. Hope you don’t mind if I bother you from time to time with more questions. If so, don’t hesitate to let me know. Thanks for responding, I’d almost given up hope of hearing from you. Take care and thanks again.

OK, no rebuke, though a rebuke was in order, perhaps. Anyway, your point about “tekton” reminded me of a place on my website where this is mentioned and in the context you speak of. It is in:

http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0330Healing.php#The%20Withered%20Hand

Under the sub-heading “Withered Hand”, you will find:

Jerome gives an additional detail about this incident. He quotes from the gospel which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use. The man with the withered hand pleaded:

“I was a mason seeking a livelihood with my hands. I pray thee, Jesu, to restore mine health that I may not beg meanly for my food.”

The mason is Israel which had lost the power of its right hand and was reduced to begging from the foreigner. If the people repented, God would restore their power through the poor and they would be able to build a new house for the Lord. One of the Talmudic names used for the Essenes was the “banaim”, a word derived from the Hebrew for stones (abanim) and which means “masons”. “Banim” means “sons” or “children”—both coming from a word meaning “to build”. So “banim” was a pun on “banaim” and explains the gospel use of the word “children” to mean “the saved”—the “banaim” seek to save the “banim”. In Mark 6:3, Jesus is described as a carpenter and, in Matthew 13:55, his father is so described. S Campbell gives an interesting gloss on the Greek word used in these passages and usually rendered “a carpenter”. The word is “tekton” and is found nowhere else in the New Testament. Yet in modern Greek “tekton” means a “mason”!

In case you do not have the book by Steuart Campbell, this is what he wrote (scanned verbatim, The Rise and Fall of Jesus, Steuart Campbell, Explicit Books, Edinburgh, 1996, pp 57-58):

Jesus' trade

According to English versions of the Gospels (Matt. 13:55; Mark 6:3)
both Jesus and his father Joseph were carpenters (and a similar term
appears in other modern language editions). Klausner (1925) accepted
this as a fact and Guignebert (1935) claimed that' everyone today
knows that Joseph was a carpenter...'. More cautious was Goguel
(1933), who suggested that there is no evidence that Jesus followed
the trade of his father and that he was known as the' son of the
carpenter'. Conversely Murry considered that the report that Jesus'
father was a carpenter may be deduced from the fact (sic) that Jesus
had been one.
 Some have challenged the traditional belief. For example Mackinnon
called Jesus 'a builder accustomed to handling heavy material', and
Stauffer wrote that Joseph was in the building trade and a
carpenter.
 Case suggested that Jesus worked in the building trade.
 In the Greek text, the word translated as 'carpenter' is tekton.
These are the only two occurrences of this Greek word in the whole
New Testament. However it does occur several times in the Septuagint
(II Kings 12:11, 22:6; II Chr. 34:11; Zech. 1:20), where it is
associated with the building trade. The word appears to be related
to the noun techne (art, craft) and the derived noun technites
(craftsman, builder). The exact meaning of tekton seems to be
'artificer', but we should take note of the meaning of archi-tekton
(I Cor. 3:10), which means 'master-builder'.
 Daniel-Rops claimed that tekton means 'both carpenter and joiner
and in a general sense the builder of houses', while Craveri noted
that tekton means 'builder of houses', i.e. a worker in both wood
and stone. We must therefore take the meaning of tekton to be 'a
builder', in the general sense. Indeed, in modern Greek, a tekton is
a mason, and an altogether different word is used for a carpenter.
 Wilson made the mistake of believing that tekton attempts to render
the Aramaic naggar, which he claimed means either a craftsman or a
scholar (in fact it means' carpenter'). Consequently he believed
that Jesus was a scholar (1992:83). In fact, in the Septuagint,
tekton translates the Hebrew charash (craftsman). Salibi considered
the possibility that 'Carpenter' was Jesus' surname, i.e. 'Ben
Nagara', and therefore that he was not actually a carpenter
(1988:39).
 In Palestine in the time of Jesus, ordinary dwellings were
constructed of sun-dried bricks of mud or clay on a stone
foundation. Rough timbers may have been built into the walls to
prevent warping during the drying out of the building after
construction. Roofs were constructed of timber beams covered with
lathing and plaster, usually flat. The foundation consisted of very
rough stones, except for the foundation corner-stone, which was hewn
square. In important public buildings, the whole corner of a wall
would be built of stone and only temples and palaces were
constructed entirely of stone. Thus a Palestinian builder was a
craftsman who handled various materials: stone, bricks, timber and
plaster, and he needed to be both a mason and a carpenter. There was
no division of trades as in the modern Western construction
industry.

 It appears therefore that Jesus was not a carpenter in the modern
sense, certainly not a joiner or a carver or wooden objects. He was
a builder. This trade is revealed in his sayings and parables. 'For
which of you', he asks, 'wishing to build a tower does not first sit
down and count the cost, to see whether he has enough money for
completion? In case, when he has laid the foundation he is not able
to finish and onlookers mock him.' (Luke 14:28-29). He also told
parables about a tower built in a vineyard (Matt. 21:33) and about
two houses, one built upon sand and one built on rock (Matt. 7:24-
26). Jesus declared that he would build his assembly upon a rock
(Matt. 16:18) and that 'the stone which the builders rejected became
the chief corner-stone' (Matt. 21:42).
 Jesus' injunction about motes and beams (Matt. 7:3-5) derives from
the building trade. Builders often carried large beams through the
streets on their shoulders. Those passers-by who did not keep a
careful watch, perhaps because they were blinded by a speck of dust
(mote), might receive the end of a beam in their eye. Powell thought
the metaphor 'physically impractical' and that the 'beam' and
'splinter' (sic) were used hyperbolically dealing with Jewish/
Gentile relations. Kersten & Gruber (1995:128) assumed that the
aphorism is derived from a Buddhist text which urges recognition of
one's own faults, rather than those of others (but in which there is
no mention of motes, splinters, beams or eyes).
 Ferguson claimed that metaphors and similes from carpentry' came
readily' to Jesus, but there is no evidence for this. Jesus' sayings
betray no knowledge of carpentry; they do betray a knowledge of the
building trade. Wilson believed that, because Jesus could speak of a
beam 'sticking out' of the eye (this is not true), he had no
practical knowledge of what it was like to work in a carpenter's
shop and that he was not a practical man. This is a fundamental
misunderstanding.
 How is it then that the AV describes Joseph and Jesus as
carpenters?
 The explanation lies in the nature of domestic construction methods
in seventeenth century England (where the translation was made). At
that time in that country, nearly all houses were framed in timber
and were constructed by carpenters. Since the timber frame was so
fundamental, and since so little of a house was undertaken by other
trades (separate trades did exist in seventeenth century England),
the carpenter was the de facto builder. Almost certainly, the
seventeenth century translators of the Bible knew that tekton meant
a builder. Therefore they translated it into their own equivalent,
'a carpenter' ('one who builds houses'). Unfortunately this word
misleads modern readers who do not appreciate the socio-economic
milieu which prevailed at the time the 'translation was made and/ or
do not understand the original meaning of tekton. Modem translations
which derive from the A V (instead of from the Greek text) may also
carry this error.

This might be of more use to you than my previous reply.

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