Jesus the
Baptizer
The Fourth Gospel’s depiction of
Jesus’s early baptismal ministry (John 3:22–24; 4:1–2) points in the same
direction. These references are curious because the Gospel first
matter-of-factly reports that Jesus was baptizing in Aenonby-Salem (3:23), then
says that, in general, Jesus was baptizing and making more disciples than John
(4:1), then qualifies this by saying that Jesus himself did not baptize, but
only his disciples (4:2). We have no other early reports, either in the New
Testament or elsewhere, about Jesus baptizing. Why does only John report
this—and why does he do so only to immediately deny it?
On the one hand, we might, with
Dibelius, ascribe the motif of Jesus’s baptizing to the Fourth Gospel’s desire
to emphasize his superiority to John. Both Jesus and John have baptismal
ministries, but Jesus’s is more popular (4:1); he baptizes, and all come to him
(3:26; cf. the emphasis on Jesus’s universal appeal in 12:19, 32).22 On the
other hand, we might, with C. H. Dodd, take the notices about Jesus’s baptizing
as a historical memory, one that the final redactor of the Gospel is concerned
to contradict lest readers think Jesus was just John’s imitator.
Dodd seems to have the better argument
here; as John Meier points out, the denial of Jesus’s baptismal activity in 4:2
“supplies us with perhaps the best New Testament example of how the criterion
of embarrassment works.” Memories that early Christians seek to suppress are
likely to be true. Although the Fourth Evangelist does use the memory of
Jesus’s baptismal activity to score points about his superiority to John, it is
hard to see the record of that activity as a mere setup to the assertions of
superiority in 3:26 and 4:1, since the Fourth Evangelist could have made the
general point, as the Synoptic authors do, without recourse to a dominical
baptismal ministry, and the latter creates more problems than it solves. What
the Fourth Evangelist really seems to be doing is damage control: trying to
turn an uncomfortable memory to his advantage. In this endeavor he was not
entirely successful, as shown by 4:2, which is probably a later gloss.
Jesus, then, probably did have a
baptismal ministry, first as John’s emissary, then perhaps independently. The
Fourth Evangelist has developed this memory into an argument for Jesus’s
superiority to John: they both baptized, but Jesus baptized more people. The
final editor or a later glossator, however, has contradicted this because the
original memory reveals too much about Jesus’s dependence on John—which may
also explain why the Synoptic tradition has mostly suppressed it. The memory
may, however, be indirectly reflected in the controversy about Jesus’s
authority in Mark 11:27–23. Here Jesus answers the question about his authority
by a counter-question about the authority of John’s baptism. This may imply
that Jesus’s ministry was thought to derive its authority from John’s baptismal
ministry because Jesus continued it.
A later product of a Johannine
community, 1 John 5:6, bolsters this reconstruction. This verse defines Jesus
as “the one who came through water and blood, . . . not in the water only but
in the water and in the blood.” As Martinus C. de Boer has shown, “came
through/in water” is probably a reference to Jesus’s baptismal ministry, the
ministry he performed through the instrumentality of water, just as “came
through/in blood” is a reference to the ministry he performed through his
redemptive death. This suggests that the memory of Jesus’s baptismal ministry—a
ministry that began as a continuation of John’s baptism—was firmly established
in the community of the Epistle writer and considered by some there to be the
central aspect of his redemptive work. This is why the epistle’s author has to
emphasize, “not in the water only.” The point of the counterargument in 1 John
5:6 is that it is not the baptismal water, which was already present in John’s
ministry, that cleanses from sin, but only the blood of Jesus (cf. 1:7). John’s
baptism—contrary to what John himself seems to have thought—did not wash away sin.
(Joel Marcus, John the Baptist in History and Theology [Studies on
Personalities of the New Testament; Columbia, S.C.: University of South
Carolina Press, 2018], 86-87)
On
John 4:2 being a gloss:
Early Christian commentators are aware of the problem; see, for
example, Augustine, in his Homilies
on John 15.3: “It may perplex you, perhaps, to be told
that Jesus baptized more than John, and then immediately after, that Jesus
himself did not baptize. What? Is there a mistake made, and then corrected?”
(trans. alt. from Saint Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels Collected Out of the
Works of the Fathers [Oxford: Parker, 1842]). Tertullian, Baptism 11,
has avoided of the difficulty by interpreting John 4:1 as a reference to Jesus
getting others to baptize, an “ordinary and general way” of speaking, similar
to saying, “The emperor has posted an edict” or “The governor beat him with
rods.” In contrast, to take John 3:26 and 4:1 literally would be unfitting:
“For unto whom could he baptize? Unto repentance? Then what need had he of a
forerunner? Unto remission of sins? But he granted that with a word. Unto himself?
But in humility he used to keep himself hidden. Unto the Holy Spirit? But he
had not yet ascended to the Father.” Trans. from Evans, Tertullian’s Homily on Baptism, 25.
(Ibid., 208-9 n. 25)