Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§11.2 Beginning from the Baptism of John
Josephus. That evidently proved an unsettling thought to many of Jesus' followers
(had Jesus needed to repent?). Hence Matthew's added note that John himself
had urged the inappropriateness of his baptizing Jesus (Matt. 3.14-15). 61 Why Jesus
submitted to baptism if it was not to express repentance on his own behalf has
been a thorny issue for Christian theology ever since. 62
A second fairly firm fact is that Jesus' mission seems at first to have overlapped
with John's. This is one of the points at which the Fourth Evangelist's testimony
fills out what otherwise would have been a worrying historical gap.
Moreover, according to the Fourth Gospel, Jesus' first disciples came from the
circle of John's disciples (John 1.35-42). More striking still, Jesus may well have
modelled his own mission on John's. John's disciples seem to have seen Jesus as
a competitor proving to be too successful by half: Jesus was baptizing more people
than John (3.26; 4.1)! This testimony is given more credibility by the Fourth
Evangelist's haste to deny it: 'it was not Jesus himself who baptized but his disciples'
(4.2). 63 Even so, a mission in which Jesus' disciples baptized was not so
very different from John's, since 'baptism' was such a distinctive feature of the
mission of the one known as 'the Baptizer'!
Here we can detect the same sort of embarrassment as we found in Matt.
3.14-15. For the Synoptic Evangelists seem to go out of their way to draw a veil
over any period of overlap between Jesus and John. Mark 1.14 makes a point of
noting that Jesus began his own mission in Galilee only 'after John was arrested'
(followed by Matt. 4.12). And Luke marks out the distance between John and Jesus
even more pointedly. He inserts the account of John's imprisonment by
61. Note also the Gospel of the Nazareans: 'Behold, the mother of the Lord and his
brothers said to him, "John the Baptist baptizes for the remission of sins; let us go and be baptized
by him". But he said, "What have I committed, that I should be baptized of him, unless it
be that in saying this I am in ignorance?"' (Jerome, contra Pelagianos 3.2; text in Aland, Synopsis
27). In some ways, more striking still is the fact that the Fourth Evangelist does not even
mention Jesus' baptism by John in a description which focuses attention on John's witness of
the Spirit descending on Jesus (John 1.31-34). But the Fourth Evangelist does not even mention
'repentance' and since he also avoids mention of the last supper in John 13 there are presumably
other theological motives at work.
62. See, e.g., the discussion by G. R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament
(London: Macmillan, 1963) 45-55; 'he identified personally with John's appeal for conversion'
(Schillebeeckx, Jesus 137); 'he has, by implication, confessed his sins' (Taylor, Immerser 272).
P. W. Hollenbach, 'The Conversion of Jesus: From Jesus the Baptizer to Jesus the Healer',
A/VKWII.25.1 (1982) 196-219, argues rather fancifully that Jesus was 'a substantial member of
society'(l), who 'through John's preaching . . . discovered that he had participated directly or
indirectly in the oppression of the weak members of his society' (199-200). Cf. and contrast
Chilton: 'The Jordan's waters washed away his feelings of estrangement. He repented of the
anger he had felt, of his resentment against his own people in Nazareth' (Rabbi Jesus 49).
63. See further below § 14.8b.
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