This page contains various extracts from articles, links to videos and collected thoughts by posters at BSA and other places.
Thoughts and observations about John the Dipper by folks at BSA.
- There’s an odd story in Matt. 11 and Luke 7 where John is still alive and he sends his disciples to Jesus to ask if he is “the one to come”. First, it’s odd b/c if John really heard God declare Jesus as his son, but secondly, it raises the question of its historicity.
- Another odd thing is that in Matthew, Jesus himself declares that John is the greatest man ever born!
- Luke goes even further in insisting that John knew Jesus was the Messiah. According to Luke, John is related to Jesus. John knows from his own birth that Jesus is the Messiah! Both Mary and Elizabeth know that Jesus is the Messiah. Nonetheless, Luke also appears to forget this and keeps Matthew’s (or Q’s) account where John is in prison wondering if Jesus was the Messiah or not. Again, this is nonsensical based on the earlier passages.
- In the Gospel of John, the Baptist did not know who the Messiah was. This contradicts Matthew and Luke. In this account, John does not preach a baptism for the forgiveness of sin; John baptizes to reveal the unknown Messiah! As with Matthew and Luke, this gospel has John insisting that Jesus is superior to himself.
- Seems unlikely that Matthew or Luke would invent the idea that John sent his disciples to Jesus while in jail to ask if he is the one; it contradicts their earlier claims. Either it is historical or the story was being widely circulated during their time and the authors decided to add it.
- An Alternative View by Michael Waddle:
- I don’t see any reason to think that John considered Jesus as anything more than one of his baptized elect. Jesus seems to have done his own thing, going into the cities and towns rather than waiting out in the wilderness like John. After John died, his followers concluded that the Messiah was coming soon, but that John wasn’t it. A lot of gospel material intends to convince the Baptist community that it was actually Jesus that John was preparing people for. I don’t think John the Baptist asked about Jesus, as described in the Gospel of John, but I do think some of John’s followers asked that question, and I think that’s what the gospels are reacting to.
- In addition, Jesus seems to have thought that he (Jesus) was indeed the Messiah, or at least, to have not objected too loudly when other people called him that, but there are a few odd verses here and there that indicate that the Messiah or Son of Man was someone else. Why? It’s possible that early on, Jesus believed the same thing that many of John’s followers believed: that the son of man was coming soon, and we need to prepare the way for him. Only later, he might have been convinced that it was him. That’s speculative, but it fits in with what I conclude about the Baptist community.
- Another Alternative by Charles Bledsoe:
- The upshot of applying the criterion of dissimilarity here is that it lends credibility and weight to the historicity of the John the Baptist-Jesus relationship—it being unlikely that Christ-believers would have concocted a relationship between John and Jesus in which John’s spiritually superior position is implied by his baptizing Jesus—and so the question of how that relationship factored into the trajectory of Jesus’ career as a preacher is certainly a very important one.
- I would speculate that to some extent Jesus caught his grandiose apocalypticist delusional beliefs from John; i.e., his belief in an apocalyptic scenario that came to include his own addition of a delusion of grandeur about the role that he would play in the eschaton and God’s eschatological kingdom on earth. And John then perhaps to some extent bought into Jesus’ grandiosity.
A very good article about John the Baptizer and Jesus is at the BSA Library Why Jesus Went Back to Galilee by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor. A pdf is in his directory in DropBox.
The Book of John says John said he did not know Jesus. But Luke says they were relatives whose mothers visited during their pregnancies.
John 1:29-34 The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” 32 And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. 33 I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ 34 And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
But Luke 1:36 says “And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.”
Was John the Baptist an Essene? by Otto Betz
BAS Review 6:6, December 1990. Opening paragraphs follow. – The Dead Sea Scrolls, found between 1947 and 1956 in caves on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, provide us with a picture of a first-century Jewish community that could well have been the home of John the Baptist. At the very least, the possibility is worth exploring. Whether or not the possibility is probable, however, is a question not easily answered. My own view is that the Baptist was raised in this community by the Dead Sea and was strongly influenced by it, but that he later left it to preach directly to a wider community of Jews.
James Tabor’s papers and posts
- Papers at https://jamestabor.com/?s=john+the+baptizer.
- Essays on John the Baptist: Mark our Earliest Narrative Source Feb. 26, 2017 – In this new six part series [JDT] present responses to essays offered in my course at UNC Charlotte on “John the Baptist.” John is the most underrated figure in Christian tradition, rarely given his due as a messiah and inaugurator of the movement Jesus himself arose from. The responses are by my former student, Jeff Poplin, now a USAF Lt Colonel and fighter pilot, graduated with honors from the Air Force Academy, married with children. Jeff wrote them without notes in response to exams given in the course! They offer a good, concise, and rather extraordinary summary of what we covered in the course:
- From his Chapter about Pantera in a pdf he shared 12/26/2024. Notice, according to Luke, immediately after learning about her pregnancy, Mary “arose and went with haste” to the “hill country of Judea,” that is one hundred miles south of Nazareth. There she found refuge with her kinswomen Elizabeth—who was pregnant at that time with John the Baptist (Luke 1:39). The Greek word translated “with haste” (spoudé), connotes the idea of something done with zealousness and determination. Tradition has it that Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah, who was a priest, lived in Ein Kerem, five miles west of Jerusalem. From Nazareth Mary would have traveled nearly one hundred miles, which would take three or four days minimum, through some very rugged and potentially dangerous terrain. Presumably she is traveling alone.
Was Paul’s Baptism Different? Dr. James D Tabor
John the Baptist: The Most Significant Figure In Religious History? by James McGrath
