Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (15 page)

Yet there are enough differences between John and the Essenes to make one cautious
about drawing too firm a connection. John is presented not as a member of a community
but as a loner, a solitary voice calling out in the wilderness. His is by no means
an exclusivist message but one open to all Jews willing to abandon their wicked ways
and live a life of righteousness. Most crucially, John does not appear to be obsessed
with ritual purity; his baptism seems to have been specifically designed as a one-time
affair, not something to be repeated again and again. John may have been influenced
by the water rituals of other Jewish sects of his time, including the Essenes, but
it appears that the baptism he offered in the Jordan River was uniquely his inspiration.

What, then, did John’s baptism mean? The gospel of Mark makes the astonishing claim
that what John was offering at the Jordan was “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness
of sins” (Mark 1:4). The unmistakably Christian nature of this phrase casts serious
doubt on its historicity. It sounds more like a Christian projection upon the Baptist’s
actions, not something the Baptist would have claimed for himself—though if that is
true, it would be an odd statement for the early church to make about John: that he
had the power to forgive sins, even before he knew Jesus.

Josephus explicitly states that John’s baptism was “not for the remission of sins,
but for the purification of the body.” That would make John’s ritual more like an
initiation rite, a means of entering into his order or sect, a thesis borne out in
the book of Acts, in which a group of Corinthians proudly claim to have been baptized
into
John’s baptism (Acts 19:1–3). But that, too, would have been problematic for the
early Christian community. Because if there is one thing about which all four gospels
agree when it comes to John the Baptist, it is that sometime around his thirtieth
year, and for reasons unknown, Jesus of Nazareth left his tiny hillside village
of Nazareth in Galilee, abandoned his home, his family, and his obligations, and trekked
down to Judea to be baptized by John in the Jordan River. Indeed, the life of the
historical Jesus begins not with his miraculous birth or his obscured youth but at
the moment he first meets John the Baptist.

The problem for the early Christians was that any acceptance of the basic facts of
John’s interaction with Jesus would have been a tacit admission that John was, at
least at first, a superior figure. If John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins,
as Mark claims, then Jesus’s acceptance of it indicated a need to be cleansed of his
sins by John. If John’s baptism was an initiation rite, as Josephus suggests, then
clearly Jesus was being admitted into John’s movement as just another one of his disciples.
This was precisely the claim made by John’s followers, who, long after both men had
been executed, refused to be absorbed into the Jesus movement because they argued
that their master, John, was greater than Jesus. After all, who baptized whom?

John the Baptist’s historical importance and his role in launching Jesus’s ministry
created a difficult dilemma for the gospel writers. John was a popular, well-respected,
and almost universally acknowledged priest and prophet. His fame was too great to
ignore, his baptism of Jesus too well known to conceal. The story had to be told.
But it also had to be massaged and made safe. The two men’s roles had to be reversed:
Jesus had to be made superior, John inferior. Hence the steady regression of John’s
character from the first gospel, Mark—wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor
to Jesus—to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose
at all except to acknowledge Jesus’s divinity.

Mark casts John the Baptist as a wholly independent figure who baptizes Jesus as one
among many who come to him seeking repentance. “There went out to him people from
all over Judea, and from Jerusalem, to be baptized by him in the River Jordan, and
to confess their sins … and it happened that, in those days, Jesus came
from Galilee, from Nazareth, and he too was baptized by John in the Jordan” (Mark
1:5, 9). Mark’s Baptist admits that he himself is not the promised messiah—“There
is one coming after me who is stronger than I am,” John says, “one whose sandals I
am not worthy to untie” (Mark 1:7–8)—but strangely, John never actually acknowledges
Jesus to be the one he is referring to. Even after Jesus’s perfunctory baptism, when
the sky opens and the spirit of God descends upon him in the form of a dove as a heavenly
voice says, “You are my son: the Beloved. In you I am well pleased,” John neither
notices nor comments on this moment of divine interjection. To John, Jesus is merely
another supplicant, another son of Abraham who journeys to the Jordan to be initiated
into the renewed tribe of Israel. He simply moves on to the next person waiting to
be baptized.

Writing some two decades later, Matthew recounts the narrative of Jesus’s baptism
almost word for word from Mark, but he makes certain to address at least one of his
predecessor’s glaring omissions: the moment Jesus arrives on the banks of the Jordan,
John immediately recognizes him as the “one coming after me.”

“I baptize you with water,” the Baptist says. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit
and with fire.”

At first, Matthew’s John refuses to baptize Jesus, suggesting that it is he who should
be baptized by Jesus. Only after Jesus gives him permission does John presume to baptize
the peasant from Nazareth.

Luke goes one step further, repeating the same story presented in Mark and Matthew
but choosing to gloss over Jesus’s actual baptism. “Now when all the people had been
baptized, and Jesus too was baptized, the heavens opened …” (Luke 3:21). In other
words, Luke omits any agent in Jesus’s baptism. It is not John who baptizes Jesus.
Jesus is merely baptized. Luke buttresses his point by giving John his own infancy
narrative alongside the one he invents for Jesus to prove that even as fetuses, Jesus
was the superior figure: John’s birth to a barren woman, Elizabeth, may have been
miraculous,
but it was not nearly as miraculous as Jesus’s birth to a virgin. This is all part
of Luke’s concerted effort, which the evangelist carries forth into his gospel’s sequel,
the book of Acts, to persuade John’s disciples to abandon their prophet and follow
Jesus instead.

By the time the gospel of John recounts Jesus’s baptism, three decades after Mark,
John the Baptist is no longer a baptist; the title is never used of him. In fact,
Jesus is never actually baptized by John. The Baptist’s sole purpose in the fourth
gospel is to bear witness to Jesus’s divinity. Jesus is not just “stronger” than John
the Baptist. He is the light, the Lord, the Lamb of God, the Chosen One. He is the
preexistent
logos
, who “existed before me,” the Baptist says.

“I myself saw the holy spirit descend upon him from heaven like a dove,” John claims
of Jesus, correcting another of Mark’s original omissions, before expressly commanding
his disciples to leave him and follow Jesus instead. For John the evangelist, it was
not enough simply to reduce the Baptist; the Baptist had to reduce himself, to publicly
denigrate himself before the
true
prophet and messiah.

“I am not the messiah,” John the Baptist admits in the fourth gospel. “I have been
sent before him … 
He must increase, as I must decrease
” (John 3:28–30).

This frantic attempt to reduce John’s significance, to make him inferior to Jesus—to
make him little more than Jesus’s herald—betrays an urgent need on the part of the
early Christian community to counteract what the historical evidence clearly suggests:
whoever the Baptist was, wherever he came from, and however he intended his baptismal
ritual, Jesus very likely began his ministry as just another of his disciples. Before
his encounter with John, Jesus was an unknown peasant and day laborer toiling away
in Galilee. John’s baptism not only made him part of the new and redeemed nation of
Israel, it initiated him into John’s inner circle. Not everyone who was baptized by
John became his disciple; many simply returned to their homes. But Jesus did not.
The gospels make it
clear that rather than returning to Galilee after his baptism, he went “out into the
wilderness” of Judea; that is, Jesus went directly into the place whence John had
just emerged. And he stayed in the wilderness for a while, not to be “tempted by Satan,”
as the evangelists imagine it, but to learn from John and to commune with his followers.

The first words of Jesus’s public ministry echo John’s: “The time is fulfilled. The
Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). So does
Jesus’s first public action: “After this Jesus and his disciples went into Judea and
there they were baptizing, and John also was baptizing …” (John 3:22–23). Of course,
Jesus’s first disciples—Andrew and Philip—were not his disciples at all; they were
John’s (John 1:35–37). They only followed Jesus after John was arrested. Jesus even
addresses his enemies among the scribes and Pharisees with the same distinct phrase
John uses for them: “You brood of vipers!” (Matthew 12:34).

Jesus remained in Judea for some time after his baptism, moving in and out of John’s
circle, preaching his master’s words and baptizing others alongside him, until Antipas,
frightened by John’s power and popularity, had him seized and thrown into a dungeon.
Only then did Jesus leave Judea and return home to his family.

It would be back in Galilee, among his own people, that Jesus would fully take up
John’s mantle and begin preaching about the Kingdom of God and the judgment that was
to come. Yet Jesus would not simply mimic John. Jesus’s message would be far more
revolutionary, his conception of the Kingdom of God far more radical, and his sense
of his own identity and mission far more dangerous than anything John the Baptist
could have conceived. John may have baptized by water. But Jesus would baptize by
the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit and
fire
.

Follow Me

The Galilee to which Jesus returned after his stint with John the Baptist was not
the Galilee into which he had been born. The Galilee of Jesus’s childhood had undergone
a profound psychic trauma, having felt the full force of Rome’s retribution for the
revolts that erupted throughout the land after the death of Herod the Great in 4
B.C.E
.

The Roman response to rebellion, no matter where it arose in the realm, was scripted
and predictable: burn the villages, raze the cities, enslave the population. That
was likely the command given to the legions of troops dispatched by Emperor Augustus
after Herod’s death to teach the rebellious Jews a lesson. The Romans easily snuffed
out the uprisings in Judea and Peraea. But special attention was given to Galilee,
the center of the revolt. Thousands were killed as the countryside was set ablaze.
The devastation spread to every town and village; few were spared. The villages of
Emmaus and Sampho were laid waste. Sepphoris, which had allowed Judas the Galilean
to breach the city’s armory, was flattened. The whole of Galilee was consumed in fire
and blood. Even tiny Nazareth would not have escaped the wrath of Rome.

Rome may have been right to focus so brutally on Galilee. The
region had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity for centuries. Long before the
Roman invasion, the term “Galilean” had become synonymous with “rebel.” Josephus speaks
of the people of Galilee as “inured to war from their infancy,” and Galilee itself,
which benefited from a rugged topography and mountainous terrain, he describes as
“always resistant to hostile invasion.”

It did not matter whether the invaders were gentiles or Jews, the Galileans would
not submit to foreign rule. Not even King Solomon could tame Galilee; the region and
its people fiercely resisted the heavy taxes and forced labor he imposed on them to
complete construction of the first Temple in Jerusalem. Nor could the Hasmonaeans—the
priest-kings who ruled the land from 140
B.C.E
. until the Roman invasion in 63
B.C.E
.—ever quite manage to induce the Galileans to submit to the Temple-state they created
in Judea. And Galilee was a constant thorn in the side of King Herod, who was not
named King of the Jews until after he proved he could rid the troublesome region of
the bandit menace.

The Galileans seem to have considered themselves a wholly different people from the
rest of the Jews in Palestine. Josephus explicitly refers to the people of Galilee
as a separate
ethnoi
, or nation; the Mishnah claims the Galileans had different rules and customs than
the Judeans when it came to matters such as marriage or weights and measures. These
were pastoral people—country folk—easily recognizable by their provincial customs
and their distinctly rustic accent (it was his Galilean accent that gave Simon Peter
away as a follower of Jesus after his arrest: “Certainly you are also one of [Jesus’s
disciples], for your accent betrays you”; Matthew 26:73). The urban elite in Judea
referred to the Galileans derisively as “the people of the land,” a term meant to
convey their dependence on subsistence farming. But the term had a more sinister connotation,
meaning those who are uneducated and impious, those who do not properly abide by the
law, particularly when it came to making the obligatory tithes and offerings to the
Temple. The literature of the era is full of Judean complaints about the
laxity of the Galileans in paying their Temple dues in a timely manner, while a bevy
of apocryphal scriptures, such as
The Testament of Levi
and the
Enoch
corpus, reflect a distinctly Galilean critique of the lavish lifestyles of the Judean
priesthood, their exploitation of the peasantry, and their shameful collaboration
with Rome.