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John the Baptist 2

Baptism
John the Baptist
A Baptism of Repentance

Abstract

Essenes believed that all Israel should be given the chance to join the perfect of Israel in the last days. The Rule of the Congregation speaks of “the many of Israel in the last days when they shall join the community”. John the Baptist and Jesus were therefore offering all Jews the chance to repent and rejoin the chosen of God, those who would be saved in the coming holocaust. So, publicans and soldiers came to John asking him what they should do to be saved. The answer was the same for all Jews—sincerely repent and receive baptism. The Essene High Priest, who called the annual festival of the renewal of the covenant, rather than the Master, seems to have been their titular head. If, after the baptism of Jesus as Nasi, John the Baptist became the High Priest, it would explain why he was able to question Jesus’s progress in Matthew.

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.