Thursday, April 18, 2024

Joel Marcus on "Jesus the Baptizer" and John 4:2 being a Later Gloss

  

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)