Last time, I dug deeper into the provenance of the Four Gospels and mentioned how very recent recoveries of ancient, faded, previously indiscernible text has brought significantly more data to bear on what we know historically about the events and contexts surrounding Jesus’s life and ministry. When it comes to the pericope of Jesus’s baptism, these discoveries offer some amazing insight.
But first, a preface. It should come as no surprise that Christian history overflows with internal controversy. The proliferation of multiple Christianities was evident even in Jesus’s lifetime, when his disciples confronted someone exorcizing demons in Jesus’s name (and Jesus told them not to reject such followers). We can also see immediate disagreement among the Twelve over leadership before Jesus died, disagreement between disciples and the council at Jerusalem, varieties of resurrection narratives, Pauline versus Petrine groups in the greater Mediterranean, and then clear variation and sometimes contradiction between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. That’s only the first generation of Jesus’s followers and the tip of the iceberg.
Going further, we can find evidence of ekklisies (ekklesia networks) headed by bishops in the same period as when the Synoptic Gospels were first composed, which contended over doctrine about Jesus’s divinity. We have the Didache, a very early series of instructions about ekklesia initiation and worship, that departs from the Gospels in some key aspects. We also have decades of contention over Gentile versus Jewish proselytism and exactly who got to participate in communion. Ekklisies in Antioch, Thessalonike, Ephesus, Edessa, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Carthage all accepted patronage and funding from elite Gentiles, who insisted on their own preferences of ritual and doctrine—leading to a significant clash of bishops that culminated in the first creedal statements being recited in these churches, and then later those creedal statements becoming ecclesiastical law endorsed and enforced by the Roman government in the 300s. All along the way, we also see schismatics in the wilderness attracting their own audiences toward esoteric interpretations of Jesus’s divinity, ministry, and philosophy.
Guess what? It was within that environment of narrative and doctrinal contention that the Four Gospels were standardized, canonized, and copied. One tumultuous term got retrojected back onto the actions of John who resided in the wilderness near the Jordan: βαπτίζω / baptizō (=to baptize).
We have far more direct and contextual evidence of what John was doing than the retrojected term baptizō offers. For one thing, John would not have recognized himself as a βαπτίζων / baptizōn (=baptist/baptizer), since the title did not yet exist (again a retrojection that is anachronistic, really). He clearly identified himself under two significant roles: the voice crying the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord (whom Isaiah prophesied would come) and a priest after the order of Aaron and the order of Abijah. As a priest, he most certainly observed what already existed as the central purification ritual since Moses: miqveh.
This chart shows how we have three important sources that relate to John’s action in the wilderness: the codices that tell us about him (that became the New Testament as we know it in the King James Version); the Torah (Law of Moses in the Old Testament) that tells us about purification rituals; and the Dead Sea Scrolls that contain a series of instructions from John’s community in the desert at the time of John about how to perform purification washings.
If we rely only on the accounts in the Four Gospels, we’ll have a Greek philosophical concept of baptism for initiation that developed in the decades and centuries after Jesus. And this concept was manifestly retrojected backward onto John to the point of renaming him: he becomes “the Baptist,” when John would not have recognized himself as neither Greek nor a Gentile nor a baptizer. We have more accurate text and context from the Old Testament and the Qumran “Miqveh scroll,” as well as confirming artifacts from archaeological excavations of miqva’ot (constructed miqveh basins) that date to the time and vicinity of John and Jesus. John was foremost a priest—a key figure in the very long practice of miqveh that has lasted to the present.
Priest of Aaron and Abijah
As a priest of Abijah, John inherited the right to perform ordinances in the temple that pronounced the people of Israel collectively clean at certain days of the year. As a priest of Aaron, John inherited the right to witness purification rituals of individual persons and to pronounce those individuals clean. According to the Torah and the Qumran scrolls, miqveh was the washing ritual that a priest could witness and authoritatively pronounce as correct and therefore cleansing for the person performing it. The Torah commanded the person to wash himself or herself in “living waters,” taken to mean water from the heavens (rain) or in “running waters,” such as springs or rivers. Full immersion of the whole body was also a requirement. The priest would watch for those two elements: proper water and proper immersion. And if done correctly, he would pronounce the person clean.
Contextually, it looks likely that John preached a collective purification of the people of Israel as a preparation for the kingdom of heaven and the coming of the Messiah—which, he also preached, needed to be achieved by individuals washing in the river as a personal repentance. He met resistance from priests, Levites, Pharisees, Sadducees, publicans, and soldiers. They variously claimed a chosen status as the covenant people, to which John replied that God could raise up children of Abraham of stones if God wished. Personal and collective purifications were needed if the people were to receive the Messiah.
Book of Mormon Comparison
What if we compare the Judaean and American comings of the Messiah? In the Book of Mormon account, the people had received preparatory prophecy from Samuel the Lamanite, and after having witnessed widespread destruction, had assembled near the temple when Jesus descended from the heavens. Once Jesus settled their disputations over baptism, they received the gospel message with open arms—they wished him to stay and were overcome by the words of his prayers on their behalf. The evidence of their collective preparation came after Jesus had departed: for centuries, there were no “-ites” among them, they lived in peace and prosperity, and there “could not be a happier people upon all the face of the earth.”
Contrast that with the Judaean setting: Jesus met resistance over purity customs, over Jesus’s behavior on the Sabbath, and ultimately over Jesus coming to the temple and condemning abuses against the poor at the temple treasury and in the courtyard. Chief priests conspired to have Jesus executed. Caiaphas reasoned that it was better “that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:49–51), and soon he and other chief priests handed Jesus over to the Romans. The Romans in 70 AD repelled a Jewish revolt by destroying Jerusalem and obliterating villages across Judaea, in effect disintegrating the Mediterranean remnant of the nation of Israel.
We know what might have been had the Judaean audiences responded to John’s message of preparation—the Lehite peoples in the Book of Mormon that survived mass destruction did prepare themselves, and they achieved the kingdom of heaven on the earth for a long while.
Clean and Unclean
If we examine Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, all from the Torah/Law, we’ll notice requirements that set up an intense purity culture among Israelite peoples. In short, commandments required Israelites to pay attention to “issues,” or flows/fluxes of bodily fluids, especially blood. An “issue of blood,” basically any form of bleeding or scabbing, meant the person had become “unclean” and needed to perform miqveh after the issue had stopped to become clean again. What’s more: if a person with an issue touched something, say a chair, that thing would become unclean; and if another person touched an unclean thing, that other person also would become unclean. Strict instructions directed people how to “show themselves” to priests as part of the purification.
In my estimation, this purity culture was the single greatest obstacle to Jesus’s audiences in Judaea receiving him. We’ll see this pop up all year in various forms—so-called “sinners,” or the class of people who had given up on performing cleansing rituals, were separated from the class of upright people observing cleanliness; perpetually unclean people with a persistent issue of blood, like lepers or the woman with a hemorrhage, were cast aside for the upright people to preserve their cleanliness; etc. Jesus had no trouble touching and being touched by such people, and this greatly incensed the adherents of the purity culture around him.
Jesus’s Miqveh
So Jesus came to John at the Jordan River in “Bethabara beyond Jordan” (Bethany-beyond-Jordan) and, in the context of closer Hebrew sources we mentioned earlier, probably requested John to witness Jesus perform miqveh and pronounce Jesus clean. John “forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” In the Qumran/Leviticus context, it makes sense for John to have said something akin to “I have need for you to witness my miqveh and pronounce me clean—why do you come to me?” And Jesus answered, saying, “Permit it now, it is fitting for us to fulfill all the dikaios (=rules/laws/strictures). Then he [John] permitted him [Jesus]” (Matt. 3:15, my translation). “And Jesus, when he was baptized, straightway (euthys = immediately) [came up] out of the water” (Matt. 3:16 KJV), and the heavens were opened and a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Notice how, regardless of our context and the mode of baptism, before John could have pronounced Jesus clean, it was Heavenly Father who pronounced Jesus beloved and well-pleasing. This (clearly) superseded the role of the priest—this was not the figurative sense of a priest standing in for God, this was God declaring Jesus clean, at least in the context of laws of purification and to any bystander witnessing this event.
Notice, too, how Jesus never does appear to perform a purification ritual again in the Four Gospels. And how Jesus becomes by his miqveh/baptism, the cleanser, the living waters that can bring purification to anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Jesus will do this repeatedly throughout his ministry to the dismay of puritanical observers who insisted Jesus kept violating the Torah and committing blasphemies. The ritual in similitude of the real thing was now fulfilled, superseded by the real thing—the Cleansing One, the Messiah Himself. And those with eyes to see understood this and followed him, celebrating his healing power and the living waters he was.
Sources
For more on the Dead Sea Scrolls, I recommend the following (in order of increasing technicality):
- Philip R. Davies, George J. Brooke, and Phillip R. Callaway, The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).
- James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994).
- James VanderKam and Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).
- Géza Vermès, An Introduction to the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls (London: SCM, 1999).
For a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, see:
- Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1997–1998).
For more on miqveh and miqva’ot, these are useful introductions and studies (again, ranging from general to specialist audiences):
- Stephen D. Ricks, “Miqvaot: Ritual Immersion Baths in Second Temple (Intertestamental) Jewish History,” BYU Studies 36, no. 3 (1996–1997): 277–286.
- William Sanford La Sor, “Discovering What Jewish Miqva’ot Can Tell Us about Christian Baptism,” Biblical Archaeology Review 13, no. 1 (January/February 1987): 52, 54–59.
- Peter F. Craffert, “Digging up Common Judaism in Galilee: Miqva’ot at Sepphoris as a Test Case,” Neotestamentica 34, no. 1 (2000): 39–55.
- Jonathan David Lawrence, Washing in Water: Trajectories of Ritual Bathing in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Literature (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006).
For more on the well-evidenced early Christian disputations over baptism and their retrojection onto the Four Gospels:
- Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, translated by the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (London: SCM Press, 1934).
- Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), volume 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
- Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (New York: Clarendon Press, 1987).
- Howard Clark Kee, “The Context, Birth, and Early Growth of Christianity,” in Christianity: A Social and Cultural History, edited by Howard Clark Kee, Emily Albu Hanawalt, Carter Lindberg, Jean-Loup Seban, and Mark A. Noll (New York: Macmillan, 1991).
- Todd S. Berzon, Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).