Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.
If you're not familiar with the nature of this study already, you may want to refer to the Introduction to this work, which you can find here.
The impetus for this writing is, of course, the apparent and innumerable contradictions between American Christian ideals (which include, primarily, violence and profit) and the words that Jesus actually spoke. We work to shine a penetrating light at these contradictions in an effort to save the world from an otherwise inevitable thermonuclear war sparked by American militarism and greed. The chasm between American Christian Conservatism and the actual Jesus Christ is so wide as to be unspannable by anything but a bridge of lies. This study of Jesus' words will be the torch with which that epic bridge of lies is unceremoniously burned to the ground.
This is important, so let's get to it.
Last time, when Jesus first spoke, he insisted that John the Baptist baptize him, despite John's assertion that he was unworthy to. Today, we will experience the moment immediately after the baptism, and the description of a miracle. Before we go there, however, we need to revisit an old friend. (I bet you can guess who...)
We mentioned, a couple of installments back, that one Flavius Josephus had some things to say about John the Baptist. We glossed over that, at the time, but today's the day to reopen Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews.
Antiquities is, to my knowledge, the only text outside of The Gospels that offers a contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous account of John the Baptist. Since The Gospels were all written by men who were attempting to proliferate The Jesus Movement, while Josephus had no interest in the spread of The Jesus Movement, the Josephus text can be seen as potentially the least biased and, thereby, most accurate of the accounts.
In Book 18 of Antiquities, near the beginning of Chapter 5, Josephus tells us what he knows about John. He does so only to explain why Herod's army had suffered a loss at the hands of Aretas, an Arab king. Josephus says:
Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod killed him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness. Now when [many] others came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved [or pleased] by 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 anything he should advise), thought it best, by putting 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 would be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod's suspicious temper, to Macherus, the fortress I before mentioned, and was there put to death. Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of his army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God's displeasure to him.
Josephus wrote this in retrospect, from Rome, in around Anno Domini 93.
Josephus writes almost as breathlessly as the evangelists, so there are a lot of data here. We will definitely be revisiting this text, and its context, over the next several years. Today, Josephus leads us to three considerations. Number one: Josephus seems to disagree with Matthew regarding the nature of John's offered baptism. Number two: Herod, a client king backed up by the might of Rome, was afraid of John the Baptist, and thought that John might, at any moment, become the leader of a full-scale rebellion. Number three: philosophical innovation and political radicalism were inseparable in first century Palestine.
To the first point, we hone in on Josephus' statement that John's followers were going to him "...not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness." The wording is tricky enough here that I availed myself of a couple of translations, but all of them that could be found retained the [awkwardness]. Josephus is saying "John baptized people to ritually purify their bodies, not to remit their sin, and believed that the soul could only be purified by right-living." This stands in stark contrast to what Matthew told us recently: that John baptized for repentance, or the remission of sin.
Remember when we postulated that John the Baptist might have known The Essenes, or been an Essene? Josephus' account of John fits right in with this theory, exactly because of how Josephus describes the baptism of John. Again, he describes it as being for "purification of the body." The Essenes, you will recall, bathed daily to maintain bodily ritual purity, which may not be a coincidence. Either way, we have at least two different versions of John's baptism to reconcile here: the one in Matthew, that is designed to purify one's soul of imperfections caused by sin, and the one in Josephus, which is designed to purify one's body for the gratification of God.
Second, let's focus in on the statement that "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 anything he should advise), thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause..."
While reading about how afraid Herod was of John, we must highlight the fact that Herod was a very powerful king. Although known historically as being somewhat paranoid, Herod was in charge of enough territory and people that it would have taken something significant to draw his attention in the way John the Baptist apparently did here. And, although the Jewish people were known to be prone to rebellion against foreign authority, it would have taken quite a crowd to have gotten the authorities worried about potential rebellion like Josephus says John did. All this leads one to the understanding that the baptism at the Jordan was not a small thing. There must have been a lot of folks going out to see this man. One gets the sense, from the Josephus account, that John's name was well known throughout Palestine at the time.
Is it not fascinating how the actions of a holy ascetic mystic made him the enemy of The State, as if he was some kind of political radical? This brings us to our third consideration, regarding the intermingling of ancient "church" and State.
The intersection of first-century faith and first-century politics is extremely apparent in Antiquities. The constant threat of rebellion by religious atypicals (Zealots, Essenes, Sicarii, and others) in the region meant that a tremendous amount of political energy was exhausted trying to guide theological belief. Public law and religious law were intertwined. Innovative theological thought or philosophy were seen as threats to political stability. Neither Jesus nor John would have been surprised at their respective death sentence. People like John the Baptist and Jesus Christ would have known intuitively that their religious ingenuity would make them political enemies of the varying mechanisms of power and empire.
Here are your take-aways:
1) Josephus contradicts Matthew by saying that John the Baptist was not washing away sin, but bodily impurity, with his baptism.
2) Josephus says that Herod had John killed because he feared a revolution by The Baptist's followers.
3) Religious zeal and ingenuity in the first-century were inherently political and revolutionary.
Let's set Josephus down for today, and pick Matthew back up.
Matthew 3:16 through Matthew 3:17
16 After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened [for him], and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove [and] coming upon him.
17 And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
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So Jesus gets dunked. This is a full submersion in the river Jordan. According to Matthew, he comes up from the water and, in that moment, the sky cracks open. The "Spirit of God" descends down upon him. A voice we can only imagine as thunderous - not specified as that of God - comes from where the sky has cracked open, and tells everyone present that Jesus is its son, and that it is happy with him.
So Jesus gets dunked. This is a full submersion in the river Jordan. According to Matthew, he comes up from the water and, in that moment, the sky cracks open. The "Spirit of God" descends down upon him. A voice we can only imagine as thunderous - not specified as that of God - comes from where the sky has cracked open, and tells everyone present that Jesus is its son, and that it is happy with him.
I'll reiterate that I do not personally believe in anything that cannot be borne out by sense. When I read The Gospel, the "miraculous" parts must be historically discounted in order to reconcile my senses with the narrative. The application of Christian morality, as we will show here over a series of years, does not require a profession of belief in anything metaphysical or extrasensory.
That said, one might wonder why we bother discussing passages like these. Why not go the route of Thomas Jefferson, who cut all the miraculous stuff out of his Gospels with scissors?
The most obvious answer is that we want to be thorough. We have precious little contemporaneous record of this man, Jesus. No matter how dubious or fantastic, all first-century texts regarding Jesus are inherently valuable, because the body of work is so small.
Studying the "miraculous" elements of these texts can also tell us a lot about the rapid evolution of Christian theology in the first and second centuries.
The fantastic elements of The Gospels, despite their being fantastic, help us compare and contrast the literary styles, theological understandings, and narratives of our four evangelists. We can use today's reading as an example of this.
Matthew 3:17's Marcan analogue, 1:11, reads "And a voice came from the heavens, "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased." So, the object to whom the voice is addressed changes between these Gospels. As we mentioned before, the author of Matthew likely had a copy of Mark sitting in front of him while he penned his Gospel. Why, then, would the evangelist in question choose to make this little change of the phrasing? The author of Luke, after all, retains the Marcan phrasing in Luke 3:22.
We can postulate a couple of reasons for the disagreement. The discrepancy could simply have been the result of an anomalous copying error. Or, perhaps, the author of Matthew strayed from his two synoptic brethren because he had an alternative source for this material. Perhaps the author just thought "if the voice was coming from the sky, then everyone would have been hearing it. Let's make that totally clear." It's a guessing game, at this point in history.
The point to drive, here, is that the four Gospels represent four separate and different accounts of the life of Christ. Some of the Gospels agree with one another some of the time, but it is, in fact, very rarely that they all agree about a particular thing. With that said, we will close today with a big, important rhetorical question: "If The Gospels do not tell the same story, which story of Jesus is the true story?"
Gnaw on that until next time, and, please, share this writing.
Love
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