I’d like to know what they’re teaching you in that NT class. John the Baptist
is a revered figure in Mandaeism (which is really a gnostic religion) - by contrast, Jesus is seen as a false prophet - but he didn’t found it.
In historical Jesus studies, there’s this concept known as the
‘criterion of embarrassment’. Simply put, this denotes certain elements and events in Jesus’ life which early Christians are said to have found to be ‘embarrassing’ (or to be more correct, ‘difficult’ or ‘against the grain’) for a number of reasons - for example, they couldn’t quite neatly square it with their beliefs about Jesus - yet which they couldn’t just shake away. These events are often considered to be more historically plausible precisely for that reason: it’s hard to imagine early Christians making up stuff that they themselves would find difficult and uncomfortable.
Two textbook examples of ‘against the grain’ material would be the crucifixion of Jesus and His baptism. The crucifixion would obviously be one of more hard-to-swallow events in Jesus’ life, especially in the ancient world because it’s a very shameful death - as St. Paul said, it is a “stumbling-block”. The baptism of Jesus, meanwhile, has some difficulty too because John the Baptist in the tradition preached “a baptism of repentance to the remission of sins.” If you take the event simply by itself, it might make Jesus look like as if He came to be baptized to be forgiven of whatever sins He had (which would go against Jesus being without sin), or make Him look like as if He became a disciple of John (I mean, Jesus is superior to John, right?) - which could potentially be fodder for opponents of Christianity. But the event cannot simply be dismissed or covered up, so the question is, how can one pass on this tradition faithfully without making Jesus appear sinful or inferior to John?
Now the gospels handle the dilemma quite differently from each other. Mark’s, out of the four, is the simplest: he just states matter-of-factly that Jesus was baptized in the space of a single sentence without further elaboration. “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” Matthew, meanwhile, inserts a short dialogue between John and Jesus that makes it clear that Jesus is in the higher position - Jesus came to be baptized of His own free will, “to fulfill all righteousness.”
Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented.
Luke is a little more clever: Jesus in his version is already baptized when he goes back to Him - the deed is already done ‘off-screen’. In addition, he doesn’t say directly that Jesus was baptized
by John: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying…” BTW, Luke doesn’t necessarily imply that Jesus was baptized
after John was imprisoned. He simply mentions the story of John’s imprisonment in the general context of his exhortations to the people. (In other words, it’s not linear.) In fact, that’s one of the ways he deals with the dilemma: he inserts the ‘flash-forward’ to John’s imprisonment before Jesus’ baptism perhaps to shift focus away from the event itself.
John has a more developed approach: in the first three chapters, he repeatedly has John the Baptist emphasizing how Jesus is higher than he is. (In fact, JB doesn’t even get a proper closure unlike in the other gospels; he just disappears without a trace from the narrative as soon as he says: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”) The gospel does allude to the descent of the Holy Spirit (recorded in the other gospels as occurring at Jesus’ baptism), but doesn’t say that it happened when he baptized Jesus.
And John bore witness: “
I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”
