Well, we can agree they’re a little more relevant than the Mormons but I can never resist alliteration. 🙂
I started typing a counter-argument, then I realized there was no point. Because you have no point for me to respond to. You got caught out on the facts, and you’re trying to back off the ledge. I’m going to let you. Argument over. I will neither read nor respond to whatever you say next. My advice is to say nothing. Let it die.
godspell I’m perfectly aware I’m wasting my time on this (I’ve had this kind of conversation before) but you’re committing the same error that Albert Schweitzer identified a hundred years ago. Namely, you’re creating your own Jesus in an effort to make him relatable. But he can’t be relatable because he swam in a completely different conceptual sea than the one we swim in. We don’t think the way he thought. Even our most hardcore fundamentalists don’t think the way he thought. (For one thing when they have a tummy ache they pull out the antacid pills instead of calling for an exorcist.)
Even though it differs in the particulars your Jesus is just as much a Jesus of Faith as Billy Graham’s was. Historical Critical method can provide us with a telescope to examine Jesus from a great distance but even then we can spy him only dimly. It is a great paradox. The more we learn about Jesus and his milieu the more alien and strange he becomes. To know him is to lose him.
The church began the process of creating their own Jesus almost immediately. And that was the only way the Church could survive was by doing just that, making its own Jesus. This is what Paul did. This is what Mark did. (We’re just fortunate that the NT writers valued their traditions enough so as to preserve pre-Easter glimpses.) It’s useful to remember that the few surviving groups whose practices most clearly resembled those of the Historical Jesus were all eventually branded as heretics.
Look, godspell, respond if you wish but I understand your point of view. I know how you feel about mine. I’ve had my say.
Robert said
Some others might be interested: Among his other arguments, Joel Marcus in ** you do not have permission to see this link ** interprets Josephus (Antiq 18,118) to be saying that Herod decided to arrest and execute John the Baptist because ‘others’ (in addition to Jews) began to be attracted to his movement (p 37). He defends this interpretation of Josephus in his Appendix 6 (pp 135-136). Definitely worth a read.
I read Prof Marcus’ book with a great deal of pleasure. I’ve always found John to be one of the most interesting and enigmatic figures in the NT. I think we’ve discussed this before but my only problem with it is his speculation about a relationship between John and the Essene community. I think any similarities could be explained by a common reservoir of ideas that all such apocalyptic groups would have shared rather than a direct influence. But I can see, in a field where such limited primary resources exist, where the impulse to connect the dots most be almost impossible to resist.
Actually he never addressed one of my questions, about the actual logistics of baptism. Did John personally baptize each person himself? Oversee disciples who did? (Is this how Jesus got his start?) How did it work? Total immersion? Was it a purifying ablution as in the Temple? When I had the chance to ask Prof Marcus I got the answer I half expected. We just don’t know.
Marcus spends most of that appendix arguing against the majority view among scholars that ‘others’ does not refer to gentiles. His view is in the minority here, and he quotes no one who agrees with him, but he makes an interesting case that John was beginning to attract some support among gentiles. Galilee was composed of various factions of Jews, pagans, and of course the Samaritans. Josephus is basically just saying John was becoming what we would today call a populist leader, and Herod was concerned that a rebellion might spring up around him.
The notion of John having too large a power base, according to Josephus, is what governed Herod Antipas’ decision to have John executed. The gospels, however, don’t mention John having gentile support–why not, since they were written for an increasingly gentile audience? Perhaps because this was not well-known. (And perhaps because it isn’t true.) Josephus may have had better contacts with people associated with the Herodians, court gossip and such. But he’s only reporting things he’s heard. It does make sense that a client king with an unsteady grip on power over an ethnically diverse area would play divide and conquer, and a charismatic leader who spoke for more than one faction would be a problem.
I’d suggest that Marcus is very possibly correct when he says John was just beginning to attract some gentile support. Antipas, lacking overwhelming military force, and being a Jew himself, had better intelligence sources than a Roman governor would. He was hearing reports of a greater variety of people coming to see John speak. Possibly gentile, but Samaritans (whose uprising Pilate later crushed, and was removed from office because it was felt he’d done so too harshly) are also a possibility. Either would be a problem, and Antipas nipped it in the bud. So it’s impossible to say whether John was intentionally reaching out to pagans, or if he was just tapping into general discontent with the status quo, as charismatic preachers so often do. The situation wasn’t given a chance to develop.
If this had been widely known, it would probably be referenced in the gospels, since this would provide more support for Jesus’ reported openness to gentiles, and to the later decision to have a mission to convert pagans. But presumably Jesus would have known. He would have paid very close attention to what his teacher was doing, and there is no indication he disapproved of anything John had done (perhaps feeling John had not done all that could be done). And if we’re going to say Jesus was an ultra-orthodox rabbi who didn’t want to be polluted by contact with gentiles–how then can we explain his reverence for John, so great that we now remember The Baptist almost entirely because of the gospels? (Nobody would have paid much attention to the very brief and very approving passage Josephus wrote, otherwise.)
So now we have a very intriguing explanation for that passage where Jesus tells his disciples not to go to the towns heavily populated by pagans in Galilee. Because Jesus knew John had been killed for going outside his immediate group–as Antipas would see it, making a power play, though that may not have been at all what John had in mind, believing as he did in the Kingdom.
Jesus doesn’t want his followers arrested and wiped out, nor does he think that God’s purpose will be served by him meeting the same fate as John. Not yet.
That being said, Jesus would have known John was just starting to attract non-Jewish attention, so he certainly would have seen no problem with doing the same. Antipas isn’t going to care (or even notice) if he talks to a few here, a few there. And because his mission went on a few more years, his disciples had more time to absorb this ethos, which they passed on to new converts, some of whom were certainly not Jewish, and so the road to large scale pagan conversion was prepared when Paul showed up. John’s own disciples would have been too intimidated after what happened to their teacher, assuming that he even had time to communicate a greater openness to gentiles. He may have just been working this out in his own head when Antipas cut it off.
Originality isn’t always about doing something first. More often, it’s about doing it better. Shakespeare never wrote an original play in his life. All based on pre-existing material, but he did more with it, put his own flourish on it. We can’t know about John–maybe people just showed up, and what was he going to do, tell them to leave? John waited for people to come to him. Jesus went out and looked for people. That was the primary difference between them.
This has been helpful. Thanks for providing the raw materials. Even if you didn’t know what to do with them. 😉
I gave Marcus’ book a quick scan online, having read a physical copy some months back.
I did not feel in the least way rebuked by his take on John and Jesus. He raises a lot of interesting points–which you two have predictably missed.
Also, he thinks John and Jesus may have been consciously playing out the OT relationship of Elijah and Elisha–and then he goes on to compare that to (among other things) the relationship between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.
So seems like he doesn’t have any problem with using modern history to cast light on ancient history.
His idea is that Jesus’ ministry was an expansion franchise–an extension of John’s ministry, but with Jesus having great freedom of movement in terms of how he conducted his affairs. He believes there was a rivalry between them, but not necessarily an unfriendly one. And he thinks Jesus may have been seen to have greater spiritual gifts than John, but that John’s spiritual authority was considered greater. (Again, like Elijah and Elisha.)
This is all speculation, but informed speculation, and interesting speculation.
Not a lot of silly nitpicking aimed at nothing but supporting already-held POV’s.
The point is to learn. I feel like I did learn something this time. Jesus may have told his disciples to avoid openly preaching in gentile towns because Antipas had taken John’s growing appeal to some non-Jews as an aggressive act. And yet we have much evidence Jesus went on talking to gentiles. Why? He thought John would approve. But he did it a different way.
But I thought you wanted to have a discussion!
We’ve actually stumbled across an interesting idea–that Jesus was thinking about John’s death when he ordered his disciples to avoid gentile towns–and you run away. It makes perfect sense, it explains a lot, and it even provides a bit more evidence Marcus is right that Josephus was saying John had just started attracting pagans. It might even tie in to the Lukan passage about soldiers–maybe Antipas was pissed his solders (who wouldn’t all be Jews) were taking advice from John. This is actually doing more than dueling quotes, and attacking anyone who questions scholarly consensus, followed by doing it yourself, because you’re special.
Did you ever hear the one about the kid who owned the only baseball in town, and when they wouldn’t let him pitch, he took it home?
Of course you have.
Working for a library, I have all the equipment I need. Play ball!
😀
And we have to assume that’s a direct quote? Or that Jesus would necessarily want to say “We’re going to lay off the gentiles a bit, because Antipas might take it wrong?”
We have to allow for Matthew’s heavy emphasis on Jesus being The Perfect Jew, and for the real Jesus perhaps being a tad disingenuous at times (as is true of all leaders). He was walking a very fine line in Galilee, after John lost his head. If it could happen to John–who he believed to be at least his equal–then it could happen to anyone. But if he shows himself to be afraid of Antipas, or the Romans, he loses street cred.
If Marcus is right, and John and Jesus saw themselves as the new Elijah and Elisha–imagine how much of a shock it was to Jesus when Elijah was just marched off to jail, and got his head whacked off. Nobody should for one moment underestimate what a gut punch that was. Jesus as we know him was formed in no small part by the way he had to regroup intellectually after he realized that yes, Prophets of God could be killed, just like anyone else.
Given the undoubted errors in the source material, do we really have to make it all the pieces fit together perfectly? Has anyone, ever?
(As I’ve said to bren, I dislike responding to posts done in that format you used further up. Stay focused, and write out a few paragraphs in your own words. Picking other people apart line by line may be fun–I’ve done it myself–but it’s not useful.)
If Marcus is right, and John and Jesus saw themselves as the new Elijah and Elisha…
This of course presumes that there was any special relationship between John and Jesus at all. All we have about John in the NT is from the perspective of Christian believers who assumed Jesus’ superior status. We have no real evidence that John even knew who Jesus was. Do you think John personally knew every last supplicant?
And yet we have much evidence Jesus went on talking to gentiles…
What evidence is that? We have accounts written by gentiles claiming he did decades later.
Picking other people apart line by line may be fun–I’ve done it myself–but it’s not useful.
Especially when it’s being done to you right?
Stephen, why do you even bother to bring up scholarly consensus when you feel free to thumb your nose at it on a daily basis?
You have zero evidence for Jesus being arrested at the temple courtyard, and does that deter you one iota? Heaven help anyone who asks you to back that up! It’s just OBVIOUS!
Why would they bring up John at all in the gospels? They need to make his status greater, because it was well known that Jesus was John’s disciple, that John baptized him, and that Jesus spoke a great deal about John after his death. The harder you have to work to justify a theory, the more likely it is to be a lousy theory–you would have to work damn hard to say there was little or no connection between Jesus and John, when John is such an integral part of the beginning of all four gospels. You never did figure out that path of least resistance thing, did you?
Here we are, finally having an interesting discussion, and you’re sulking because you don’t want Jesus to be interesting. But here you are, spending untold hours of your life, talking about him. Just like you did as a kid. How’s that line from Brokeback Mountain go? (You know the one.)
As for the half-hearted snark, I’ll give you a C minus–generous. 🙂
PS: So Jesus wasn’t John’s disciple? No strong influence from John? Are you sure you want to make this claim? It just makes him seem more original. Well, never mind. ::shrugs::
BDEhrman
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