Because even with those epiphanies, John did not know what to expect, nor could he understand what Jesus was doing.
The Jews were expecting a diviniely anointed Messiah, NOT a divine Messiah.
And the Messiah was supposed to be announcing liberty to prisoners, and John was rotting in Herod’s dungeon. So not surprising that he might have wondered what was going on, and whether he had gotten something wrong, somewhere.
We do an injustice to John (and, for that matter, to Mary) when we imagine that they were gifted with some level of omniscience, or even of prescience.
I agree with your point about John, but the Jews not expecting a divine messiah is ironically not necessarily true. Different sects had different expectations about the Messiah, and strands of 2nd Temple Jewish belief do in fact make reference to a messiah that some Jewish scholars have called “semi” and “quasi” divine:
“In later Judaism it (the term messiah) is associated with a semi-divine figure whose future reign will usher in everlasting justice, security, and peace.”
“Supernaturalism comes to enrich the portrait of the king-messiah, as the political necessities of the Davidic dynasty demand theological validation.”
Lenowitz, Jewish Messiahs.
The Midrash to Isaiah 52 says the “King Messiah” will be loftier than Abraham, Moses, and the Angels, and the later Rabbinic commentary on this Midrash put this exalted context in perspective as being very nearly Divine.
A Talmudic commentary on the “thrones” in the plural found in Daniel 7:9-10 had Rabbi Akiva suggesting an interpretation that one throne is for the Ancient of Days and the other is for His messiah.
In Isaiah 9:6, four names are understood by the Targums to be referring to the messiah. An interesting tidbit is that the Greek Septuagint translated one of this Davidic King’s names as the “angel of great counsel” while the Hebrew itself actually called him “mighty God,” a kind of “demi-god” according to George Buchanan Gray.
The “Similitudes of Enoch” describes a heavenly figure, and 4 Ezra features a transcendant messiah. One scholar stated that the reason for the increasingly supernatural aspects of the Messiah was most likely due to their disappointments in the successive failure of the earthly variety.
As such, I think that your idea of John having a wrong idea of the messiah is still entirely possible, but it would most likely be because his strain of Judaic thought had a different idea of the messiah, as opposed to your assertion that the Jews as a monolithic entity had no such concept.
As such, this personally cleared things up a bit better for me. It always struck me as odd that John questioned Jesus’ identity in this way particularly in view of the high Christology he demonstrated in the Gospel of John. The idea that he was making a statement for his followers never rang true to me; even a cursory reading of the passage seems to scream out the very real conflict that John was having, and it seems a disservice to the poignancy of the passage to suggest otherwise. Rather, it seems instead to be a rather touching, brutally honest call for John, and by extension all Jews, to reevaluate what their own traditions and views on what the Messiah would be, and how he would fulfill their expectations. It’s never easy to look at your own views and come to the realization that you were wrong, and this appears to be the conflict John is having, and even more disturbingly, the gospel doesn’t ever show what his reaction was to Jesus’ answer.
In summary, I don’t think John is honestly questioning whether Jesus’ identity is the Messiah. I think he knows Jesus is. Rather, it would seem to me that John is having so much trouble letting go of his own strand of Judaism’s beliefs of what the Messiah should be, that he’s questioning whether Jesus is truly the one in sort of a last-ditch effort to maintain his presuppositions, with a rather painful expectation of the answer. John predicted that the Messiah would baptize with blood and fire. Maybe John’s idea of what this meant was not Jesus’ idea of what it meant.
