Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

Edmund Burke

John the Baptist 3

The Year of John’s Appearance
Zacharias

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.

The Year of John’s Appearance

The Prefecture of Pontius Pilate dates the Gospel events

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.