In Acts of the Apostles 1:15-26, the disciples had to choose a replacement for Judas. Peter lays out the qualifications: “one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us” (vv. 21-22a). Indeed, all four gospels start the public ministry of Jesus with John baptizing in the wilderness. But in so doing, they expose an awkward fact: John baptized Jesus.
Damage Control
In being baptized by John, Jesus assumed an inferior position as a disciple of John. This was an embarrassment to the early Church, particularly in its dealings with the followers of John the Baptist during the spread of the ministry. Jesus accepting John’s baptism for the repentance of sins also raised awkward questions about the sinlessness of Jesus. This inconvenient truth of Jesus being baptized by John required some “damage control” on the part of the evangelists.
Mark (1:9-11) gets the baptism of Jesus out of the way as quickly as possible and uses the occasion to reveal Jesus’ vision of God declaring, “You are my Son…I am well pleased.” Matthew (3:13-17) presents John humbling himself before Jesus, saying, “I need to be baptized by you.” In true Matthean style, Jesus intones that John must baptize him “to fulfill all righteousness.” The Gospel of John (1:29-34) avoids the subject altogether. In the Fourth Gospel, the evangelist has the Baptist recount how he saw the Spirit descend upon Jesus like a dove – the same language used in the synoptic accounts of Jesus’ baptism – but the evangelist avoids saying this occurred at the moment of Jesus’ baptism.
Luke (3:21-22) has one of the oddest approaches to the story. He doesn’t deny that Jesus was baptized, but he does avoid stating that John did the baptizing. Like Matthew, he recounts some of John’s preaching and adds some ethical teaching, but then he ushers John off the stage with his arrest by Herod Antipas. In the gospels of Mark and Matthew, John’s imprisonment is announced right after Jesus’ baptism, but Luke contorts the chronology (and logic of the story) by placing the baptism of Jesus after John is out of the picture. It’s not a goof because in several speeches in Acts of the Apostles, the speaker (like in the example above) recalls how the gospel story began with John’s baptism of repentance, but in every case Luke avoids mentioning that Jesus was also baptized by John.
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“The Baptism of Christ” (1515) by Joachim
Patinir
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The Historical John the Baptist
What do we really know about John the Baptist? Just as with Jesus, the gospels provide most of the information we have of the Baptist, but the Jewish historian Josephus also mentioned John in Antiquities (18.5.2). Josephus’ description of John’s ministry of baptism, his popularity and his execution by Herod Antipas is consistent with what the gospels tell us.
Both the synoptic gospels and the Fourth Gospel cite Isaiah 40:3 as the rallying cry of the Baptist: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” The Qumran community – from whose library we got the Dead Sea Scrolls – also used this quote from Isaiah to explain why they formed their community in the desert.
Mark provides only a small sample of John’s preaching (Mk 1:7-8) describing “a mightier one” who is coming after him, one whose sandals John is not fit to untie (the role of a slave was to untie the master’s sandals and wash his feet). John’s water baptism is a promise of the baptism in the Holy Spirit that will come with his successor. This saying is repeated in Matthew and Luke who both used Mark as their source material, but also in the Fourth Gospel (John 1:26-27), suggesting that this tradition is very old.
Both Matthew and Luke have more to say about John’s preaching, using almost the same words. Biblical scholars hypothesize that the two evangelists used a lost collection of sayings – dubbed Q, from the German word Quelle (“source”) – that Mark did not know about. Two “Baptist blocks” of material from Q related to John can be found in Mt 3:7-12 (which matches Lk 3:7-9 and Lk 3:15-18) and Mt 11:2-19 (which matches Lk 7:18-35).
The First Baptist Block of Sayings
The beginning of the first Baptist block portrays John as a fiery preacher of the imminent wrath of God: “The axe is laid to the root of the trees and every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Lk 3:9). The second half of the first Baptist block continues the fiery theme with the “mightier one” clearing out the threshing floor, gathering the wheat into the granary and burning the chaff. The implication is that to avoid the coming judgment one needs to repent and bear the fruit of repentance; simply being a “child of Abraham” will not save you.
Luke interrupts the first Baptist block of material from Q with vv. 10-14, verses which have no parallel in Matthew. In Luke, John offers ethical advice on how one can act to show repentance. He tailors his advice to reflect his audience. For the multitudes, share your coat or food. For the tax collectors, collect no more than is required. For soldiers, no extortion or intimidations; be content with your pay. This ethical advice has an echo in Josephus who wrote that the Baptist preached “cultivating virtue and practicing justice toward one another and piety toward God.”
Josephus provides a political reason for Herod’s arrest and execution of the Baptist: “Herod began to fear that John’s powerful ability to persuade people might lead to some sort of revolt.” Herod considered it wiser to arrest John before the situation got out of control and imprisoned him in the mountain fortress of Machaerus on the east side of the Dead Sea. Mark (6:17-29) and Matthew (14:3-12) provide more details on the reasons behind the imprisonment and death of the Baptist, but Luke is satisfied in only the briefest note (3:19-20).
The Second Baptist Block of Sayings
The second “Baptist block” can be divided into three units. In the first unit (Lk 7:18-23), the imprisoned John sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he is “the one to come.” Jesus tells them to report what they see – the blind see, the lame walk, etc.
The second unit (Lk 7:24-28) is a carefully crafted composition consisting of Jesus’ rhetorical question (and three different answers) to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out to see?” The final answer emphatically praises John as more than a prophet, saying none born of women is greater than him, yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than John.
In the third unit (Lk 7:31-34) Jesus compares the current generation to children in the marketplace. Like the children who refused to dance to the flute, John fasted and avoided strong drink. Like the children who refused to mourn, the Son of Man (Jesus’s term for himself) did not fast and drank wine. John was called a mad man and Jesus was called “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”
[In part two, we will look at a tradition buried in the Fourth Gospel that seems to have been suppressed in the synoptic gospels and put the pieces together to give us a picture of how John influenced Jesus.]
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