John the Baptist in History and Theology , livre ebook

JOHN THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY AND THEOLOGY
Studies on Personalities of the New Testament
D. Moody Smith, Founding Editor
John the Baptist in History and Theology

Joel Marcus

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-900-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-901-9 (ebook)
Front cover illustration
St. John the Baptist from the Isenheim Altarpiece, c. 1521-16, by Matthias Grunewald, courtesy of the Musee d Unterlinden, Colmar, France/Bridgeman Images
In memory of Moody Smith scholar, friend, and man of God
,
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
The Competition Hypothesis
CHAPTER 2
Qumran
CHAPTER 3
The Elijah Role
CHAPTER 4
Baptism
CHAPTER 5
Jesus
CHAPTER 6
Herod Antipas
Conclusion
APPENDIX 1
The Chronology of John s Life
APPENDIX 2
Is Josephus s Account of John the Baptist a Christian Interpolation?
APPENDIX 3
Database by Source of Information about John the Baptist in the Canonical Gospels and Josephus
APPENDIX 4
Was John from a Priestly Background?
APPENDIX 5
The Others in Josephus, Antiquities 18.118
APPENDIX 6
Knut Backhaus s Interpretation of Acts 19:1-7
APPENDIX 7
The Day-Baptists
APPENDIX 8
John the Baptist s Use of Isaiah 40:3
APPENDIX 9
The Baptist in the Slavonic Version of Josephus s Jewish War
APPENDIX 10
Apocalyptic Belief and Perfectionism
APPENDIX 11
The Meaning of Purification in John 3:25
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
NOTES
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX OF MODERN AUTHORS
SUBJECT INDEX
INDEX OF ANCIENT SOURCES
PREFACE
Moody Smith, the editor of this series, approached me many years ago-fifteen years? twenty?-about the possibility of writing a book about John the Baptist. I told him that I first had to finish my commentary on Mark but that I might like to do it afterwards. When afterwards arrived, however, I found myself writing articles on the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity, with the idea of eventually producing a monograph on that subject. Moody very sagely pointed out that John the Baptist was a key figure in the parting of the ways, and I eventually realized that (a) he was right, and (b) I didn t yet know how to make the parting-of-the-ways project gel into a book. So I followed his advice and wrote this book, and I have to say that the experience has turned out to be much more interesting than I had expected. I hope the reader will share my fascination with the task of trying to separate the historical Baptist from the theological interpretations that have encrusted his image, both in the canon and outside of it, and with the task of trying to make sense of that discrepancy.
I wish to thank Moody, in memoriam, for his belief that I was the right person to do the job, and I m glad that he finally got to see and approve a draft of the manuscript before his final illness. I feel the loss of his friendship and support keenly; he was a wise, good, and godly man, and I will miss him both on and off the tennis court. I also wish to express my deep gratitude to Dale Allison and Mike Winger, who gave me detailed comments on the entire work: greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his leisure for his friend s monograph. I also received some very helpful feedback from Al Baumgarten. I am also grateful for the chance to present portions of the work to the New Testament Seminar at Duke University and to the Christianity in Antiquity seminar at the University of North Carolina. And I want to thank Tyler Dunstan and Sinja K ppers, Ph.D. students in the Duke Graduate Program in Religion and Classical Studies Departments, respectively, for help with indexing and copyediting; and Joseph Longarino (see p. 205 , n. 88 ). At the University of South Carolina Press, I have greatly appreciated the help of Pat Callahan, the design and production manager, and especially the forbearance and attentiveness to detail of Bill Adams, the managing editor.
Unless otherwise noted, biblical passages are from the Revised Standard Version (RSV), which tends to be more literal than the newer NRSV; translations of Septuagint passages are from the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS); translations of pseudepigrapha are from James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (OTP); translations of Dead Sea Scrolls material are from Emmanuel Tov, ed., The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library (DSSEL); translations of Mishnah passages are from Herbert Danby, The Mishnah; translations of Tosefta passages are from Jacob Neusner, The Tosefta; translations of passages from the Babylonian Talmud are from Isadore Epstein, ed., Hebrew-English Edition of the Babylonian Talmud; translations of classical sources are from the Loeb Classical Library (LCL); translations of apocryphal New Testament materials are from J. K. Elliott, ed., The Apocryphal New Testament; translations of the church fathers are from The Ante-Nicene Fathers or The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (ANF or NPNF). Abbreviations of ancient sources generally follow Billie Jean Collins, ed., The SBL Handbook of Style , 2nd ed.
Introduction

THE PROBLEM OF JOHN THE BAPTIST
Who was John the Baptist? According to our earliest sources, the Synoptic Gospels, he was the predecessor of Jesus of Nazareth, the Stronger One whom John prophesied would come after him and whose sandal latch he was unworthy to loosen. While John only baptized in water, this Stronger One would baptize in the Holy Spirit (Mark 1:7-8) or in the Spirit and fire (Matt. 3:11-12//Luke 3:15-18). John s acknowledgment of his successor s superiority is sharpened in the Fourth Gospel, in which both the author and John himself emphasize that he is not the Messiah but only the Messiah s predecessor (John 1:19-23); not the light but only a witness to the light (1:6-8); not the bridegroom but only the best man (3:27-29). This attitude of self-abnegation vis- -vis Jesus is epitomized by the Baptist s final words in the Fourth Gospel: He must increase, but I must decrease (3:30). 1
But is this picture of John reliable? Knut Backhaus is the latest of many scholars to point out that serious questions arise about the historicity of this Gospel portrait, partly because it is so obvious that it serves Christian interests. As Backhaus puts it: What has survived may be compared to the Baptist on the Isenheim altarpiece: he is standing under a cross he never saw, in Christian company he never met, with a lamb he never spoke of; and what the Christian painter is mostly interested in is his oversized finger pointing to Christ, whereas his figure clothed in exotic garments steps back into the shadows of history. 2 The dilemma, Backhaus adds, is that we are almost totally dependent on this tendentious Gospel portrait for our knowledge about the history of the Baptist. The only other first-century sources are the book of Acts, written by the author of one of the Gospels (Luke), and the work of the Jewish historian Josephus, who was born a few years after the deaths of John and Jesus (37-38, CE ), 3 who died towards the end of the first Christian century, and whose account of the Baptist ( Antiquities 18.116-119) is itself so terse and tendentious that it does not provide much critical control over the information in the New Testament. 4
Almost forty years before Backhaus, John Reumann compared these difficulties in an illuminating way with those in the quest for the historical Jesus. 5 Reumann noted that some scholars who in his view had been rightly skeptical about their ability to uncover the historical Jesus had been wrongly sanguine about uncovering the historical John. Reumann warned, however, that the problems involved in trying to reconstruct the life and ministry of the Baptist were at least as difficult as those involved in trying to reconstruct the life and ministry of his famous successor:
All the hazards of the quest for the historical Jesus exist in the search for the history of John, and then some: conflicting sources, canonical and beyond; tendentiousness in sources; the unsettling role of form and redaction criticism; problems of religionsgeschichtlich [history-of-religions] background; the theology of the early Christian church; plus the fact that, if we take seriously the possibility of the Baptist provenance for some of the materials, what we have in the New Testament is separated from historical actuality both by Christian usage and by (earlier) Baptist use . It is as if we were trying to recover the historical Jesus from traditions filtered through a second, later disciple community of another faith, say Islam (save that the separation in time from the event is shorter). 6 If in the Gospels, to use R. H. Lightfoot s oft misunderstood phrase, we hear, in the case of Jesus little more than a whisper of his voice, then in the case of the Baptist we have only an echo (or echoes) of his whisper. In short, there is more diversity in modern studies about the Baptist than assumed, more optimism than warranted about recovering knowledge of him historically, and more reason to suspect we cannot throw real light on him than even in the case of Jesus.
Nor are such judgments merely a product of post-World War II skepticism. In a classic work published in 1911, Martin Dibelius, drawing on the 1898 monograph of Wilhelm