On Matthew 4:1 through Matthew 4:2

Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.  This will eventually be a years long project that I hope will be called "the most intensive study of The Gospel ever written."  If you are here for your first time, avail yourself of the introductory posting, which can be found here.  It explains broadly what we hope to achieve here.

Please note that I have (finally) gotten around to creating the separate page for the running list of Jesus' sayings.  That page can be found here. There will also always be a link to it at the bottom of each study entry. It looks very simple, but it will allow for precise exploration of Jesus' philosophy later on.  Please familiarize yourself with its parameters.

We have little time to waste, so today we're jumping right into our Gospel reading.

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Matthew 4:1 through Matthew 4:2

1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. 

2 He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry.

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I don't know if you see what I see, but there is so much here.

We are about to spend a couple of study sessions with this "devil" character, so things may get strange for a while.  

Recall that Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist, and, immediately, a voice came from the sky with praise for Jesus.  Now, the narrative takes one of its many sideways jerks and Jesus is, straight away, led by the Spirit (of God) out into the middle of the desert specifically "to be tempted by the devil."

What follows is nine verses during the course of which Jesus Christ interacts with and talks exclusively to "The Devil."

To get through these verses with our understanding of Christ intact, we need to work our minds around the Christian conception of The Devil, "Satan," and evil in general.  That will be the work of the next couple of sessions here.  Before we dive resolutely into that dark subject matter, though, let's focus in on Matthew 4:2 for a moment.

Here, The Man is recorded as having fasted for forty days and nights in the desert away from civilization.  This is an amazing feat.  Beyond amazing, this is the kind of feat we could call quintessentially ascetic and shamanistic.  John the Baptist can be imagined doing such a thing.  (Let's concede here that the forty-day figure was an exaggerated one, but that the fasting did last for a significant period of time.)

Fasting as a mechanism of communion with the divine predated Jesus by millenia.  It has been long known that ritual fasting can lead to hallucinations or "visions" or "spiritual experiences," brought on, at least in part, by the brain's reaction to a nutrient-deprived, stressful environment.  Throughout history, mystics from innumerable faiths and world-views have availed themselves of the mind expanding nature of fasting to get closer to their myriad Gods or Nirvanas.

For anyone who doubts the mind altering effects of fasting, I challenge you to - after first consulting with your doctor to see if it is safe for you to do so - fast for just forty-eight hours.  No calories for forty-eight hours.  In my experience, the mind without calories for forty-eight hours is, frankly, not itself.  The mind, in that state, behaves the way it does on various psychoactive compounds.

I focus in on Matthew 4:2 because it says a lot about Jesus, if he actually did this thing.  Jesus would have known that forty days without food were going to make him hallucinate and open his mind up.  So, if he deliberately wandered out there, he did so deliberately to "trip," for lack of a better word.  He went out to seek special knowledge through an altered state, perhaps in the exact way that, for instance, shamans in Peru today seek revelation through altered states induced by entheogenic teas.

Why is it important to consider Jesus' altered state here?

The reader will recall that I work to reconcile the story of Jesus with what the senses tell us about reality.  Given that it is certainly the capacity of the human mind, under duress, to produce demons of hallucination, we can easily see anything "supernatural" occuring to Jesus in the desert as the result of the hunger-and-heat-stroke visions he would have likely endured during a spiritual quest of this nature.  So, where literalists see a literal demon talking to Jesus, I see a self-inflicted hallucination.

You are welcome to see it either way.

The wandering in the desert, a feat of extreme asceticism, occurs in slightly differing forms in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.  It does not occur in The Gospel According to John.  Since the wandering in the desert for forty days is "triple tradition*," we lean towards accepting it as historical.  

Immediately subsequent to the forty days in the desert, in all three Synoptics, is the "Beginning of the Galilean Ministry."  Can we thus look at the forty days as the gestation period for the coming ministry?  Can we see it as a period of revelation for Christ during which his understanding of the world and his philosophy began to coalesce (or finished coalescing) from experience, sense, and self-reflection?

Yes, we can.

Do we have to read the following passages against our senses, believing that an ill-defined figure called "The Devil" is literally visited upon Jesus during his forty day ordeal?

No, we do not.

We will be back over this tricky ground again, of course.  Let's move forward for now, knowing that there are multiple ways to interpret the passages we are shortly going to study.

Today, we need to briefly introduce The Devil, aka Satan, aka Beelzebul, aka The Prince of Darkness.  As I said, we will be with this figure for a few installments, and we will be using those installments to delve deep into its origins and evolutions.  For now, we will start with a very broad aperture look at belief in The Devil.

The word "satan" was a noun before it was a proper-noun. Satan is originally Hebrew, and means "adversary" or "opponent."  The word "devil" comes from the ancient Greek "diábolos," meaning "accuser" or "slanderer.”  Beelzebul is from the Hebrew "ba‘al-z'vúv" meaning "Lord of the Flies."

Modern understanding of Satan comes not from scripture but from the writings of later Christians who were, generally, trying to understand the Problem of Evil in the context of a perfect God.  The Devil does not occur in the five books of The Pentateuch**, and it is arguable that he doesn't occur in The Old Testament at all outside the Books of Job and Zechariah.  Certainly, Satan is not defined in The Old Testament, nor is he given a back-story or biography.  

The New Testament does not help us much in defining or giving biography to this evil figure, either.  He is mentioned there in several books, including those of The Gospel, but knowledge of him is always presupposed in The New Testament, the same way it presupposes the knowledge of Mammon, one of the other demons mentioned in The Gospel.

The near absence of thought in the ancient Jewish scripture about The Devil followed by the numerous mentions of a devil in The New Testament which presuppose common knowledge lead one to believe that something changed in the way Jews understood their cosmology during the Intertestamental Period***.  We will spend time looking at what exactly happened during that period, in regards to cosmological beliefs.

This is all to say, though, that the half (or slightly more than half) of the population of modern America that believe in The Devil cannot have gotten their common concepts about him from scripture.

What's the common concept of The Prince of Darkness, then?

The Devil is frequently portrayed in Christian art and writing as being red or darker in skin-tone, having hairy or animal legs and cloven hooves, having horns on his head, and carrying a pitchfork which he uses to torment the damned in hell.  All of these attributes have multiple precedents in ancient pre-Christian mythologies.

Common tradition sees The Devil as a powerful angel, once favored by God in heaven, who had sinned in pride and was therefore exiled out of heaven to a realm of torture called "hell."  Common tradition says that Satan holds dominion over Earth, and is the source of sin and human folly.  Somehow, Satan balances the power of God on earth, despite the fact that God is understood to be singularly omnipotent.  Common tradition literally believes that this malevolent being called Satan is present in all places and at all times in the earthly realm, and constantly works to cultivate pain and turmoil for all of humanity.  

Responsibility for all evil deeds, evil people and calamities of all sorts may and should, ultimately, according to the common concept of Satan, be attributed to this dark figure.

I must reiterate: this stuff is not in The Bible.  These concepts came either from intertestamental apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, or were among many invented between the dawning of the Imperial Church in the fourth century and the modern era.  The Bible features various demons and devils, but doesn't offer the specificity on this topic that later evolved in Christian thought.  Over the next few sessions, we will study the origins and the evolution of these concepts.

Today, I just want to leave you with this question: if you believe in The Devil, who exactly gave you those beliefs, and where did they get them?

Think it through to the end.

We hope to see you next time, when we will discuss the concept of demons and spirits as they pre-dated even the Jewish thought systems.  Until then, please share this writing.

Love.

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* "Triple Tradition" means "occuring in all three Synoptic Gospels," and is a good sign that a passage contains some historicity.  

** 'The Pentateuch" is the name given to the first five books of The Old Testament.  It includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

*** The period of time between The Old Testament narratives and The New Testament.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.
For the index of Christ's words, click here.

On Matthew 3:16 through Matthew 3:17

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.

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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.

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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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:13 through Matthew 3:15

Welcome to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, your guidebook to The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Here, we're studying the moral code of Christ, verse by verse.  Our reasons are manifold.

We are going at a deliberately slow rate, to ensure that the work will be as exacting as possible.  Today, we will take three verses.  Sometimes we might take two.  Sometimes only one.  We'll do no more than three, though, under normal circumstances.  The totality of this study will take us years.  We work this slowly because we want to be as certain as possible in any conclusions we draw from our study.  We work this slow because to work any faster would guarantee our constantly going off half-cocked and unprepared.*

Today is special because today is the first day we will be reading words attributed to Jesus in our study.  Those of you who read the Introduction may recall that we quoted Jesus in passing there, but that does not count.

Soon we will number the sayings of Christ and break them apart into single ideas.  There will be a separate page here at The Moral Vision which you will have access to by a link at the bottom of the text.  The page will contain a running list of the sayings of Jesus by number, along with a few data points i.e. "Does the saying endorse violence?" "Does the saying endorse human authority?" "Does the saying have Jesus claiming he is God?" "Does the saying endorse materialism?"  The list will also cross-reference the saying with its analogues in the opposing three Gospels.  We will attempt to keep that page up-to-date as much as possible, but updating may occur in fits and starts.

Some of you may have noticed that we've mentioned "red letters" a couple of times without taking the time to explain what "red letter" means exactly.  Some of you may know what we mean off-hand, and some may have no idea, but you can purchase Bibles that have the words of Jesus printed in red text, so that it stands out from the rest of the text.  They call them "Red Letter Bibles."  They are helpful.  This study itself will be in red letter.

Ok.  I think we're ready.  Ladies and gentlemen, it's my excited pleasure to introduce to you the subject of our study, Jesus Christ.

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Matthew 3:13 through Matthew 3:15

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. 

14 John tried to prevent him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” 

15 Jesus said to him in reply, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed him.

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Yay!  We're here, finally!

We don't want to get all over-spun, so we'll take this a verse at a time.

Recall that we last left Jesus still a baby in Matthew 2:21.  The narrative jumps from Jesus being a baby, freshly returned from his exile to Egypt (which likely never actually occurred), to Jesus being one of the many adult Jews who are going out to receive John the Baptist's baptism.  The time span between these two points, or Jesus' formative years, we know next to nothing about.  Matthew certainly gives us little clue.  In Matt 3:13, Jesus simply leaves Galilee to get to where John the Baptist is, on the river.

We should take the time to avail ourselves of a map of Palestine the way it was in the first century, which is easily available online.  On a map, we see that Galilee was bordered, for a very short distance along its south-eastern limit, by the Jordan.  This is right where the river flows out of the Sea of Galilee.  The river flows due south where it eventually becomes a tributary of the Dead Sea.  

The wording in Matt 3:13 gives us an indication that Jesus had traveled south far enough that he was no longer in Galilee.  John could have been baptizing, then, anywhere between thirty and seventy miles from Nazareth.  Remember, Nazareth is where we last left Jesus and thereby assume he journeys from.  If Jesus walked, it could have been a two to four day trek out to John.  If Jesus took a camel, the journey would likely have been a day or two at the maximum.  We aren't told how Jesus travelled, but it can be assumed that we meet him at the end of a lengthy journey.

Matt 3:13 explicitly calls out the purpose of Jesus' journey to John the Baptist.  It is the same as that of most of the people crowded around John by the Jordan: he makes the journey to be baptized.

What is John's baptism, again?  A washing away of impurity.  A washing away of sin.  John's baptism is of repentance.  Jesus, who people normally think of as "without sin," nevertheless travels this distance - probably a multiple day ordeal through unforgiving desert heat - explicitly "to be baptized by [John]."

Why would someone who is above sin need a baptism of repentance from it?

Some might say that Jesus is identifying himself with humanity for humanity's sake.  "He is sinless, of course, but has come to humans in the form of a human to have a human experience before their eyes, so he starts it off in this human way: asking for a baptism of remission from sin."  This reads a lot into the text that isn't explicitly there.

Matt 3:14 has John the Baptist experiencing parallel confusion.  He doesn't feel capable of baptizing Jesus, for some reason.  He says "you should wash away my sins, not the other way around."

One interesting thing about Matt 3:14 is that it seems to pre-suppose a relationship between Jesus and John.  John sees Jesus and immediately says "no, you're too good to be baptized by me," as if he is already familiar with the character and nature of Jesus.  This could certainly be seen as evidence that Jesus had spent some of his "formative years" with John the Baptist.  This is interesting because it contradicts the The Gospel According to John, which has John the Baptist claiming that he "did not know [Jesus]."  It also begs one-thousand difficult or unanswerable questions: "where did John and Jesus meet up, prior to the Gospel accounts?"  "What did they do together when they met?"  "Were they students in a common school of thought together, or co-creators of a school?"  Etc...  And, again, these questions are all contingent on the supposition that the two did, indeed, know one another prior to their meeting in Matthew chapter 3.**

We should also recall that this "baptism in the desert" situation was atypical for the Jews.  Their traditions didn't call for an immersion for the cleansing of sins, and, if they had, they would have likely performed such rituals in Jerusalem where all the other traditional rites were performed, not out in the middle of the desert away from civilization and security.  It was not as if you might, as a person from that region, assume that everyone around at the time had gone out, or would go out, to receive John's baptism.  It's likely that many wouldn't have even known John's name.

Since the baptism John offered was a new one that existed outside of existing Jewish law and tradition, we can assume that John's group of followers would have been comprised of people who had been left somehow wanting by the existing law and tradition.  It's safe to assume that most of the people that went out to John sought drastic change in their lives.  More often than not, those seeking drastic change are the poor, the marginalized, and the disaffected.***  It was these that John primarily baptized, with the occasional upper-class elite venturing out "just to see," like we saw The Sadducees and the Pharisaic elites do.

Finally, in Matthew 3:15, we get Christ's response, and his first words, so-to-speak.  When John the Baptist has resisted baptizing Christ, Christ responds “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”  John the Baptist responds with reflexive obedience and baptizes Jesus.

Notation in The New American Bible says "Here... righteousness seems to mean the saving activity of God.  To fulfill all righteousness is to submit to the plan of God for the salvation of the human race."  It would seem as likely that Jesus merely meant "everyone else is out here getting baptized, and it's the normal thing to do among your audience, so just baptize me."

It would seem just as likely, too, that these words didn't actually even get spoken.  You'll notice that they do not occur in any of the other Gospels.  In our effort to find the truest knowable Jesus, we will constantly be checking to see in how many Gospels his sayings are repeated, and if there is any wild variation between the iterations.  Generally, albeit not always, the more times the saying was recorded, the more likely it was to have been historical.  The fact that the dialogue at hand today is unique to The Gospel According to Matthew gives us some cause to be wary as to its historicity.****

These verses are denser than what we were used to, early on.  When Jesus speaks, which is a good percentage of the upcoming text, we will always find this kind of scholastic density, so it works to our advantage that the story is told four times over.  We have plenty of time to unpack everything.

We'll take our leave of it here, today.  Join us next time when a full-on miracle including a "voice from the heavens" will unfold.  

Thank you for reading.

Please share this writing.

Love

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* We will still go off half-cocked, mind you.  Just not as frequently as all that.

** We will learn more about this when we read Luke's portrayal of the life of John the Baptist, which is the most detailed.

*** Why would one want a change if one had no want? 

**** Historicity means "historical authenticity."

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:11 through Matthew 3:12

Hello.  You're here, finally, and now we can start.

This is an in-depth study of the morality of Jesus Christ as we can discern it through The Gospels.  If you're new and would like to be completely up-to-date, return to the Introduction first, here.

As I said last time, the post subsequent to this one will introduce the words of Jesus Christ to this work for the first time.  It's been three months of study and we're finally on the cusp of our subject.  I can't tell you how excited I am for this.

I'm almost as excited, though, to be presently spending our time with Jesus' companion and possible teacher, John the Baptist.  With The Baptist seems like the best place to be, as we prepare ourselves for the intricate and years long process of parsing and cross-referencing the recorded words of Joshua.

Last time, I was a little more personal with y'all.  I broke away from our collective "we" for a bit to try to explain anew the reason for this endeavor.  In the end, I feel that I did not pronounce my point very well.  I would like to supplement that writing with a caveat.

I am a person who makes moral compromises all of the time.  I am a person who has, in the past, made tremendous moral compromises that have had devastating results for my life, and the lives of those around me.  I have been in the back of a cop car more times than I can count.  I have had my head picked by more therapists and psychiatrists than I can remember.  I have, at times, fully rejected any moral code, and allowed myself to be taken under by a torrent of alcohol, drugs, and primate instinct.

I mentioned that I knew, for a fact, from experience, that applying aspects of Christian morality would push me closer to being who I prefer to be as a human.  This was a rather vague statement on my part.  It will remain relatively vague, but I would like to augment it some.

Here's the caveat: Christian morality, or the "Christian Program," as I'm seeing it in my head lately, is a list of standards and prescriptions.  That list includes items which vary in difficulty, for me, from super-easy to extremely-difficult.  When I said that I knew that applying aspects of Christian morality in my life would change it for the better based on experience, I should have written "very limited experience."  Because my experience with it is very limited.  Working the Christian Program perfectly at once seems impossible.  It likely is impossible.  I don't claim to be anywhere near that state.  As a percentage, maybe I hit 5% of the program on a good day.  That might be pushing it.

Please keep in mind that I come to you from a place of moral degradation and, if you like, "sin," not from a place of elevation.

The question to me is begged, then: "how do you know that applying the program works, if you haven't done it with totality?"

Because the program works in increments like that, I guess; do none of the program, get none of the results.  Do some of the program, get some of the results.  Do all of the program and...

...no one knows this part, I suspect.  Maybe we'll never know.  Bear in mind that it is an ideal, something I am far, far beneath.

All this is to plead the following, dear reader: please understand that my fervor for The Gospel is about my desperation to save myself from myself, and that I would keep writing this even if I knew that no one else would ever read it.

I hesitate to say it before we've worked hard to define the term, but I say it honestly whenever I pray: "I am a sinner."

I hope that makes sense...

Let's get back to our Gospel.

------------------------------

Matthew 3:11 through Matthew 3:12

11 I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. 

12 His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

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Remember, from last time, that John the Baptist is out in the desert by the Jordan, baptizing crowds of Jews who are coming out to him from all over the region.  Some Sadducees and Pharisaic elites have appeared, and he is in the middle of a rant directed at them.  He's accused them of being unworthy, and of philosophically hiding from obligation behind their Jewish heritage.

John says he is washing away sin with his baptism of water.  (Recall that baptism comes from the Greek "to immerse" or "to dunk.")  He says to the Pharisees and Sadducees: "I offer a cleansing from sin that is easy, in water.  But there comes another, greater than I, who will immerse you in fire to cleanse your sins."

So what can we say John is anticipating in this one who "is mightier than [him]?"  Verse 11 seems to have him saying "the one who is mightier than me will offer you respite from your sin, as I do, but his mechanism of freeing you from sin, you will find, is much more intense."

It seems within reason that John is still referring, albeit hyperbolically, to a coming Davidic King of the Jews that would usher in Jewish military triumph over the region and return the Jews to a sovereign and elevated state.

It is interesting and relevant that the word we have here translated as "spirit," in the original Greek of Matthew, was "pnevmati," which can be alternatively translated as a "blast of wind" or a "breeze" or a "current of air."  Let's keep that in the back of our mind for a moment.

In verse 12, we have the metaphor of an ancient worker's tool representing, perhaps, the military triumph of the coming King over those who do not stay in line with the law and the prophets.

We can talk more about the metaphor in a moment, but we ought to briefly "geek-out" here on the literal meaning of "winnowing fan."

In grain agriculture, when preparing produce for consumption, one must separate the chaff, or the "hull," of the plant from the kernel or "seed" inside.  The chaff, like the husk of an ear of corn, is not pleasant to eat and provides little nutritional value.  It must be separated from the portion of the plant that is pleasant to eat, and does have good nutritional value.

Today, in developed nations, grain hulling is done primarily by machines.  In ancient times, they had their own mechanisms, which are still used by many people today.

One way to separate chaff from seed on a small scale with only ancient technology is by the use of a "winnowing fan."  After the grain has been "threshed," or beaten in order to loosen the hull around the grains, the winnowing fan is employed.  The tool is nothing but a broad, shallowly concave "fan," made usually of woven plant materials.  Threshed grain is gathered into the fan and then tossed repeatedly into the air in a rhythmic sifting motion.  The wind in the air carries the light, broken, undesirable hull material away with each toss, while the heavier seeds fall back to the fan for easy recovery.

John says that the one who comes after him will separate the wheat from the chaff by a winnowing fan.  One imagines that a Jewish eschatologist at this time could only have been referring to the gathering together of God's chosen people in a wonderful earthly Kingdom of God, and the expulsion of non Jews from said Kingdom.

John's meaning here is not immediately and obviously apparent, and certain people will read into these verses a reference to "hell" and to "eternity."  I do not believe this is what was going on here, but that possibility is floating.

What we can see almost for certain is the Greekness of the author of Matthew shining through.  Verse 11 and 12 are all about the Greek conception of "the elements."  You remember the elements, right?  Earth, wind, fire and water?  We see every one of these ancient elements represented in these two verses.

He mentions "earth" in the "threshing floor."  He mentions "wind" in the "holy spirit" which we saw could be alternatively translated as "holy wind."  He mentions wind again, in the mechanism of the winnowing fan, blowing away the undesirable material.  He mentions fire twice, once in regards to the coming baptism and once in regards to the fate of the chaff.  And, of course, he mentions water when he refers to his own baptism.

These inclusions in the text indicate that the author is writing to an audience that is thoroughly Hellenized, in addition to Jewish, in makeup, and that he understands this well.  The use of these physical elements, now that we've identified it, works to ground the fiery preaching of John.  We can imagine that he is talking about things that will be physically real in the "there and then," not about intangible, metaphysical things.

These verses are mirrored almost exactly in Luke, and they appear in Mark in a reduced form.  The interesting one to read will be Mark's, for comparison, but that is long, long in our future.

These verses are dense, and packed with meaning and possibility.  We will not uncover all of it here and now.  Rest assured that we will have ample opportunity to rehash this.

We'll take our leave of this here, today.  Next time, some of the text we read will be in "red letter."  That is to say that, as we've already repeated, we will be dealing with words that are ascribed directly to Jesus Christ!

I am ready for this.  I hope you are too.  Please share this writing.

Love

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:9 through Matthew 3:10

Welcome back to The Moral Vision.

If you're new, you can check out an Introduction to this work in the very first installment, here.

As a reminder to everyone, this study's purpose is to "find philosophical bedrock."  

What do I mean by "philosophical bedrock?"  I mean an understanding of life through human philosophy that is so deep and so strong that it cannot be dug up or dislodged or broken through by any mechanism.  I mean a common philosophy so firm and flat and broad that, upon it, humanity could easily build a temple to encompass all things, and a bridge to the universe beyond our galaxy.

I've looked far and wide, for decades, for philosophical bedrock.  It's a funny thing.  Everyone says they have it, yet none can show it.  

I've searched with a suicidal desperation.  Trudging through human philosophy is like walking through a quicksand of vanity: it all just falls away under the weight of life.  It's mesmerizing to gaze at, but none of it will hold your foot.  

My searching left me not just wanting, but deeply wanting; not just unsatisfied, but deeply unsatisfied.  I searched and searched until, one day, finally, thankfully, an old Russian novelist pointed the bedrock out to me from across history. 

So, why do I study Jesus specifically? 

Because, when Tolstoy pointed out the solid, infinitely massive slab of true philosophical bedrock, I was dumbfounded to find Jesus Christ standing alone, firmly upon it.*  

I have found no more stable ground anywhere in the world than this, under Christ's humble feet.

Frequently, because of the revolutionary nature of the Jesus that we meet in The Gospels, I have written, and will write, about an outward revolution.  Already, several times, we've had cause to compare the image of Jesus and his followers to modern Christianity in a way that should spark revolution inside those not crippled by myopia.  But I want to be very clear here (which I may not have been thus far): the outward revolution is secondary or perhaps even tertiary to my primary purpose.

The purpose here, for me, is to get myself completely out of this blasted philosophical quicksand.  There is a great inward revolution to be fought, before any other.

The outward is subordinate to the inward.  Without an inward revolution, there can be no outward revolution.

I study Jesus today because I need a better way to interact with the world around me.  I study Jesus today because I have verified, in my own life, that when I adopt aspects of his philosophy into my heart, for whatever period of time, my life changes.  I become, in fact, closer to the kind of person that I prefer to be.  

When I am mindful of Christ's program, I become full up of love and creativity and hope.  When I am mindful of Christ's program, the challenges of daily life and of the world at large appear tiny to me, so that bearing them seems effortless.  

I study Jesus to refine my understanding of his philosophical program.  More rigorous application of the program will increase, I believe, the goodness and livability of my life in general terms.  This is the primary purpose here.

I may speak frequently of an outward revolution, but please understand that the inward revolution is the true payoff here.  The revolution is against the self before it is against anyone else.

The payoff is a feeling of grace that leads one to be totally "ok" in one's own skin, or what I call "heaven."

Let's take a reading from The Gospel.

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Matthew 3:9 through Matthew 3:10

9 And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. 

10 Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

------------------------------

Here we have a continuation of what John the Baptist was saying last time to The Pharisees and Sadducees who have come out to see him.

Today, the eschatology ratchets up a little more.  John the Baptist's message out in the desert is an apocalyptic one, indeed, and it may draw one's mind to the brimstone tent revivals of the old American South.  

In Matthew 3:9, John tells his visitors that, in the coming end-of-times, being Jewish alone won't be enough to save one from calamity.  He tells The Pharisees and Sadducees that they can't just relax in the belief that their salvation and happiness is assured them by God only on account of their lineage.  He says "God could put Jewish blood in these rocks here, if he wanted.  It's not your blood that is precious to him, and so it is not your blood that will earn you relief!  You must produce the fruit!"

The "good fruit" from 3:8 appears again in 3:10.  In 3:8, as you recall, he demands to see the good fruit from The Pharisees and Sadducees.  In 3:10, The Baptist uses trees as a metaphor for humans, and says that whatever tree doesn't produce the "good fruit" will be cut down and thrown into a fire.  As our understanding of first-century Jewish eschatology grows, verse 10 will make more and more sense.  These words, if recorded accurately, probably refer to a coming bloody military triumph of a Jewish King over foreign influences in Jerusalem; the coming of a "Kingdom of God."

Fire and brimstone, from The Baptist.

Tangentially, 3:9 and 3:10 may have come from the "Q" or "Quelle" source.  "Q" is a hypothesized early gospel writing that did not survive to modern times.  "Q-sourced" text is text that we find in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark.  In Biblical scholarship, one major school of thought is that Matthew and Luke were written with a copy of Mark and a copy of the Q-Gospel open in front of the respective authors, for use as source material.

When we get into the actual quoted words of Jesus, we will be taking careful consideration of where we think the words were initially recorded.  Frequently, that place will be the hypothesized "Q."  That said, we will be studying Q in detail frequently over the next few years.  For now, just know that today's reading from Matthew is not reflected in the older Markian Gospel.

We will retire of it here, today, with the first words in The Bible attributed to Jesus Christ just around the corner.  I don't mind telling you that they occur in Matthew 3:15, so we will read them here not next time, but the time after that.  

I hope you are as excited as I am.  Yay, bedrock!

Please share this writing.

Love.

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* Tolstoy was actually kinda smug about it at times, but I don't hold it against the old timer.  I mean, he's dead and all.  Plus he wrote all them fancy novels...

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:7 through Matthew 3:8

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of Bill Swerski's Superfans.  I'm Bob Swerski, fillin' in for my brother Bill.

No.  Wait.  Forget all that.  Let me start over.

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.  This will be the most exhaustive dissection of the morality of Jesus Christ you'll ever read.  Bring your open heart and mind.

Today, we have more John the Baptist on our plate.  We will dig straight in, exploring Matthew 3:7 and 3:8.  We will then briefly consider the possibility that John the Baptist had partaken in something called a "Nazirite Vow," which we will describe in some detail.

Let's get started.

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Matthew 3:7 through Matthew 3:8

7 When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 

8 Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance.

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Last time, we learned who John the Baptist was, and deduced his take on contemporary society, which was that the whole system had gone pear-shaped and was not worth engaging on its terms any longer.

Today, among the crowds of Jews going out to be baptized by John, appear groups of Sadducees and Pharisees.  Remember that The Sadducees were a priestly elite class and The Pharisees were a popular movement that far outnumbered The Sadducees at the time of Jesus.

The phrasing of verse 7 seems to indicate that the multitudes coming out to be baptized were, generally, neither Sadducee nor Pharisee.  If this is the case, we are left to wonder who it was that was meeting John there on the banks of the Jordan.  

We can be certain that they aren't gentiles, as, shortly, John appeals to the multitudes' common ancestry in Abraham, demonstrating that John's followers are primarily Jewish.  

If the crowds didn't consist of Pharisees or Sadducees, then, based on what we know about first-century Palestinian-Jewish demographics, they would most likely have consisted of Essenes, Zealots, or some mixture thereof.  This, however, seems unlikely.  As you will recall, The Essenes were a monastic group who we believe were not prone to travel, and The Zealots were a sect of radical militants who advocated for war with Rome, having their minds firmly rooted in the material and present aspects of creation.  These facts probably preclude these groups from hearing or taking interest in John's cries.

It seems more likely that the crowds were, despite the phrasing in today's reading, made up primarily of people who identified with the Pharisaic tradition. We can see the "Pharisees" mentioned in verse 7 distinctly as Pharisaic elites - priests, clerics or administrators of some kind- and the crowds distinctly as Pharisaic commoners.  

To reiterate: the crowds going out to John probably did adhere generally to the Pharisaic oral traditions, but this fact is obscured here by vagueries in the text.  

A lot of our subject is thus obscured.

We digress.

John the Baptist is speaking to Pharisee elites, and Sadducees (who were all elite).  What does John have to say to this socially and economically elevated group who had, upon hearing of the "crazy baptist in the desert," trekked out of the safety of civilization to see him?  He says, approximately, "you don't belong here, you snakey jerks.  There's a storm a'comin', and you ain't supposed to know about it.  If you think you belong here, prove it to me by showing what good fruit your repentance from sin has earned you!"

Choice words from The Baptist.  John's statement begs several questions.  

Some questions that come immediately to mind are: 

   - Of what would "good fruit" consist?  

   - What is the exact nature of the impending storm or "coming wrath?"

   - By what mechanism has John become aware of the impending storm?

   - How would John have defined "repentance?"

   - How would John have defined "sin?"

Let's take these one at a time.

- Of what would "good fruit" consist? - 

One possibility is that "good fruit" would consist of spiritual gifts (inner peace, outer peace, joy, elation, transcendence, revelation, and the like) related to repentance and self-study, and that John is asking these people to prove their worthiness by displaying the rewards they've already earned by their righteousness in repentance.

Another possibility is that people were making offerings out in the desert by John's instruction, and that John was challenging these elites to make an offering with him and the crowd.

One might also see the "good fruit" as evidence in general of a piously lived life.  The text is definitely ambiguous here, so it's impossible to nail down definitive specifics.  As with so many things in history, we are left with a plurality of possibility.

- What is the exact nature of the impending storm or "coming wrath?" - 

As we've discussed, whenever we see eschatological thinking in first-century Palestine, we have to recall that the first-century Jew in Palestine was living through what would have absolutely felt like apocalyptic events.  Many Jews awaited a coming King in the line of David who would smash the Roman occupation of Jewish lands and usher in an era of plenty for The Jews, centered around a glorified Temple.  It stands to reason that the "coming wrath" would be the reckoning that Romanizers and the religiously lax would face with the triumphant Davidic King.  

- By what mechanism has John become aware of the impending storm? - 

The reader will forever be left grasping at this, I fear.  A traditional view is that John the Baptist received his teaching by the same mechanism that the prophets of old had received theirs: by divine or angelic inspiration.  There are countless such divine transmissions in The Old Testament to which one could refer to substantiate the possibility of this.  The more scholastic view would be that John's end-of-the-times message was an offshoot or amalgamation of one or more of the varying contemporary eschatological sects or movements within the Semitic religions.  

We must also face the possibility that Christian concepts from the late first century AD are being back-projected by the author of Matthew, and that John the Baptist said something substantially different than what The Gospel records.  We can dispel this possibility some by reading what our old friend Josephus said about John, which we will do before long, but not today.

- How would John have defined "repentance?" - 

Broadly, we can say that John would have defined "to repent" the same way the dictionary does today: to "feel or express sincere regret or remorse about one's wrongdoing or sin."

John is telling the multitude to turn their heart away from "sin," again, broadly.

The idea of repentance occurs dozens of times in The Old Testament.  The Jewish concept of the process of repentance evolved to be, in some cases, a very regimented thing.  Gates of Repentance, a thirteenth century Jewish ethical writing, for example, lays out a list of things one must do in order to consider themselves "repentant," including:

   - Regretting and acknowledging the sin or transgression.
   - Forsaking the sin or transgression.
   - Confessing the sin or transgression. And...
   - Praying for atonement.

We cannot tell if John meant a specific kind of regimented repentance, or merely the expression of "sincere regret or remorse."  We can be sure, though, that his use of the word repentance indicates that he feels the people he is talking to have sinned.

- How would John have defined sin?- 

It is most likely that The Baptist defined sin the exact way Jews had long traditionally defined it - as a transgression against any of the nearly innumerable laws of the Tanakh which had been handed down directly from God over the lengthy history of their people.  The author of Matthew certainly offers us no clue that John the Baptist has a view of sin that is different from this ancient definition.

From what we can ascertain in The Gospel, John clearly thinks of sin as both rampant and grave during his time.  He basically accuses everyone living in the region (or perhaps all of Judaica, or perhaps everyone in the world) of harboring unrepented sin.  Looking at the period in context, with the painful process of Hellenization recently complete in all of Palestine, and Rome breathing down everyone's neck, it's easy to see why some contemporary minds, John's included, looked at the situation and said: "we messed up somewhere.  This occupation and its tumult are what have come of our sin.  We must repent!"

We will find cause to study repentance and sin again and again in different contexts as we move forward.

-----

Next, let's take a look at another possible aspect of John the Baptist's life.  Let's take a look at "Nazirite Vows."  (We come to this discussion via the tutoring of a learned friend of mine, who mentioned it when we first started talking about John the Baptist the other day.)

"What are Nazirite Vows?" one may ask.  Well, you know I like etymology, so let's get that out of the way first.  "Nazirite" derives originally from the Hebrew "nāzar" which means "to separate or consecrate oneself."  That said, Nazirite Vows were vows of a kind of asceticism that existed within the Jewish tradition since early times.  The Nazirite Vows are described in The Book of Numbers, written in the fifth century BC.  The description is lengthy, so we won't read it here in its entirety.  To follow along, open up your Bible to Numbers and check out 6:1-21.

The Nazirite Vow was a vow that male or female Jews alike could take.  Like all vows, it was a promise to adhere to a set of obligations or austerities in order to attain some reward greater than what has been lost to the vow.

Austerities included in the Nazirite Vow:

Numbers 6:3 - "they shall abstain from wine and strong drink."

Numbers 6:4 - "they shall not eat anything of the produce of the grapevine; not even the seeds or the skins."  (That's right y'all, no raisins.)

Numbers 6:5 - "no razor shall touch their hair," and they will "[let] the hair of their heads grow freely."

Numbers 6:6 - "they shall not come near a dead person."  Explicitly, even if the corpse is family.

There are also a set of rules and some prescribed rituals for ending the period of one's vows, for whatever reason.

So, what's the reward for having taken these vows?  In my best estimation, the reward is the same intangible "close-to-Godliness" offered by so many such vows in so many such faith systems around the world.  In the words of the Book of Numbers, 6:8: "As long as they are nazirites they are holy to the Lord."

There has been some mix up over the centuries between "Nazarene" and "Nazirite," which is understandable, given that the Nazirites and Jesus were both kinds of ascetics.  As we see in The Gospels, though, Jesus did drink wine and he did go near dead bodies.  We can be fairly assured in saying that Jesus was not living under a Nazirite Vow during his ministry.

John the Baptist, however, is a different story.  The Gospels show John as not imbibing (Luke 7:33), and we have no account of him going near a dead body.  We can also stretch our knowledge of humankind a little and imagine that the man living in the desert eating locusts for breakfast hasn't had a haircut or a shave in a couple of weeks.  John, therefore, is a good candidate for a possible Nazirite.  We can say that the Biblical portrayal of John the Baptist doesn't, at least, rule him out of having been under The Nazirite Vow.

For the curious: everyone's favorite long-haired fellow from The Old Testament, Samson, was a "nazirite from birth" according to The Book of Judges.

The Rastafarian religion is built in part on Nazirite ideals, and the passages from Numbers that we read are cited by adherents as obligating one to grow dreadlocks.  Rastas also avoid drinking alcohol based on the Nazirite tradition.

The more you know!

I'm certain this will come up again.  For today, we'll thank my friend for introducing us to the Nazirites, and leave John the Baptist crying out in the desert.

Come back again, and please share this writing.

Love.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:4 through Matthew 3:6

Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.

If this is your first visit, you can check out the introductory installment here.  It will help orient you to our purpose.  

As a general reminder to everyone, our purpose is to pull back a dark and heavy veil that has, since the time of Christ himself, obscured his true and humble visage from the vast majority of his followers.  This writing is explicitly not for profit, and this work is to be considered "open source."

This writing is for the open-hearted.  This writing is for the revolutionary-minded.

Last time, we met John the Baptist.  I might have mentioned that The Baptist is probably my second favorite Gospel character.  Today, we're going to talk a little bit more about that character.  On that account, we'll start today with our reading.

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Matthew 3:4 through Matthew 3:6

4 John wore clothing made of camel’s hair and had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. 

5 At that time Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan were going out to him 

6 and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins.

------------------------------

When one approaches the study of John the Baptist, one will do well to focus on a couple of specific "-isms": asceticism and baptism.  (It dawns on me that the average modern American reader might not know what this word "asceticism" means.*  For the uninitiated, asceticism is defined as "severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.")

Last time, we mentioned a possible connection between The Essenes, whom we learned about a few weeks ago here, and John the Baptist.  As we discovered, some see a link between the frequent ritual bathing of first-century Essenic communities and the baptism that John offered in the Jordan.  We also mentioned that John lived ascetically, much as The Essenes did.

Verse 4 today highlights some specifics about John the Baptist's asceticism.  We find John wearing an uncomfortable hair garment, rather than a soft fabric manufactured from wool, which would have been widely available in the area at the time.  His leather belt is mentioned specifically as well.  We will keep an eye out, but it would appear that the description of John's clothing is the most specific mention of one's attire we find in the entirety of The Gospels.  Scholars see this as evidence that what John was wearing must have been notably different from the contemporary standard.  His manner of dress sets him apart from the community he came up in.

Regarding John's clothing, notation in The New American Bible points us to 2 Kings 1:8, where we see the prophet Elijah described thus:

"He wore a hairy garment with a leather belt around his waist." 

We will discuss the prophet Elijah soon enough, as no picture of John the Baptist is complete without an understanding of this Old Testament personality.  We mention this here merely to highlight the fact that the text is being used yet again in a vain attempt to neatly place Jesus within the ancient Jewish tradition.

Just as we find John dressed in an unorthodox way, we find him eating an unorthodox diet.  The author of Matthew shows John eating "locusts and wild honey."  Again, the specificity of the passage leads us to an understanding that his diet was atypical and probably undesirable.

We can assume by the information in verse 4 that John has basically "dropped out" of society, and does not engage in the contemporary version of the rat-race.  The description reminds one of the modern street-philosopher, who chooses poverty and homelessness over what he sees as "wage-slavery," or perhaps of Diogenes, the early Greek Cynic philosopher, who deliberately denied property and lived on the streets among dogs.  John the Baptist is certainly a unique character, in the context of The Gospel.

Now let us turn our attention from John's asceticism to his baptism.

John is introduced to us in the wilderness, out by the Jordan river.  According to Matthew, everyone in the region was travelling to see John and to be baptized by him.  Perhaps the most compelling fact to understand here is that baptism, in the context of Judaism, barely exists at all.  Ancient mainstream Jews had some prescribed "ritual bathing" in their tradition, but that ritual bathing was far different from what we think of now as "baptism," and happened far less frequently than the ritual bathing done by The Essenes.  

Differences between Jewish ritualistic bathing and John the Baptist's baptism are myriad.  "Baptism" is understood by Christians generally as a "one time" event.  In contrast, the "ritual bathing" of ancient Judaism was something that could happen repeatedly, depending upon need.  Today, Christians generally see baptism as the regeneration or spiritual cleansing of a person as they enter the Church of Christ, and many understand baptism specifically as having the capacity to wash away sin.  Ancient Jews used ritual bathing to eliminate temporary "impurities," such as the impurity of having touched a corpse.  Many modern Christians see baptism as a prerequisite for "salvation," while ancient Jews had no such thoughts about their ritual bathing practices.

That said, whatever John was doing out by the Jordan, we can see it as innovative and outlier.  The people that followed him out to the desert did so seeking novelty, not tradition.

To understand why "the whole region around the Jordan [was] going out to him," perhaps it is best to pan out a little, here, and understand that the time of John the Baptist was a time of crisis for Judaism, and for Palestine in general.  Tensions were extremely high in the region, as Rome struggled to maintain control of a population who were prone to revolt and who refused to worship the Roman pantheon of Gods.  The rise of eschatological thinking during that period is well documented, and corresponds with the steady ratcheting-up of the imperial threat, which would have appeared existential to anyone who was paying attention at the turn of the millennium.  All of this speaks to John's beckoning in Matthew 3:2: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”

In those days, the political and religious tensions would have been high enough that preaching a near-to-come revelation or an end-of-days would have appealed to both pessimists and optimists alike.  One can imagine the average faithful Jew in Jerusalem at the time lamenting that "something has to change" in the face of increasing external meddling with the most sacred Temple matters. It is easy to imagine John attracting the disaffected and marginalized of these people with his message of an impending change.

From what Matthew has given us thus far, John is what we can consider some kind of revolutionary leader.  We can say with certainty that this was the kind of person who "marched to the beat of his own drum."

As we've mentioned before, John the Baptist is perhaps the only character in The Gospel that Jesus is ever deferential toward.  Some scholars believe that Christ may have received his cosmology through the teaching of the ascetic.  It cannot be stressed enough how important this figure is in shaping our understanding of the true moral vision of Jesus Christ.

We have only a couple more installments of our study ahead of us before we finally first see the grown-up Jesus on the scene.  Next time, we will stay with John the Baptist as he confronts The Sadducees and The Pharisees, who will go out to see what all the hubbub is about.  The next several verses are particularly dense, and we may find cause to slow our narrative down some to make sure that we capture all the relevant data.  Soon enough, though, we will be reading in red-letter and really getting to know Joshua of Nazareth.

Please join us next time to continue to be a part of what will shortly become a real-world revolution in the style of Christ, and please share this writing.

Love

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* I mean... they wouldn't, right?

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.