Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §11.2
of conception and birth from the Spirit with divine sonship (explicit in Luke, implicit
in Matthew) strikes a chord which resonates with the beginning of Jesus'
mission (see below §11.5) and with a fundamental motif in earliest Christianity.
50 The believers who experienced the Spirit bringing them such a vivid sense
of sonship to God will hardly have thought that Jesus' sonship was of a lesser
kind. On the contrary, the tradition of Rom. 8.15-17 and Gal. 4.6-7 presumes that
these early experiences were understood as a sharing in Jesus' own sonship. This
suggests in turn that the conviction that Jesus' own birth was 'from the Spirit'
was arrived at very early in the disciple groups and first churches.
In other words, once again, as with Jesus' Davidic sonship, so also with Jesus'
divine sonship, perhaps what we see most clearly in the birth narratives is diverse
elaboration of the core conviction that Jesus was born of God's Spirit in a
special way. If so, then once again the birth narratives provide a valuable index of
how earliest Christian thinking developed. But they do not provide a good place
from which to begin researching the history of Jesus' mission.
11.2. John the Baptizer
Despite the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, the Gospel tradition as a
whole invites us to begin our study of the impact made by Jesus with John the
Baptizer and with Jesus' baptism by John. Indeed, a historical study of Jesus has
little choice but to attempt to 'locate' him in relation to John. For several reasons.
a. The Historical Stature of John
Initially at any rate, John seems to have had as great a claim to historical significance
as Jesus, if not greater. He receives favourable mention by Josephus, who
introduces him as 'John, the one called Baptist (baptistes)' and goes on to speak
of him at some length (Ant. 18.116-19), beginning thus:
He was a good man and had exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to
practise justice towards their fellows and piety towards God, and so doing to
join in baptism. In his view this was a necessary preliminary if baptism was
to be acceptable to God. They must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever
sins they committed, but as a consecration of the body implying that the
soul was already thoroughly cleansed by right behaviour (18.117).
50. Particularly Rom. 8.14-17; Gal. 4.6-7; see also John 3.5-8, 34.
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