ApostateAbe

There actually seems to be abundant spin in the baptism story of Mark, which is easy to miss if you gloss over it because you have already heard about it dozens of time in Sunday school and sermons. Mark quotes John as saying, "After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie." It is an absurdly humble thing to say that makes sense only if Christians wanted to emphasize a very strong point that John is inferior to Jesus, which makes sense if people may be led to believe that the baptizer is superior to the baptizee. The baptism itself is spun into a miracle story, with God saying to Jesus, not John, "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." Nobody can read the story in Mark without being left with the impression that Jesus is superior to John, regardless of who baptizes who.

show_no_mercy

There are more options here than this.

1. In historicizing Jesus, Christians picked known characters from history for Jesus to interact with

2. Christians had no idea why they did baptizing in the first place, so they chose the popular and recent baptist for an etiological story, even though the history of the sect that eventually became Christianity has baptisms that go much further back than John

3. Christians did (1) and (2), and picked JtB just so that they could show how much more awesome the unknown Jesus was than the popular JtB

4. (Traditional Christian answer) Baptism started because Jesus/Christians started off as followers of JtB. Even though baptism (according to Mark) was for the cleansing of sin, and faith in Jesus cleansed sin, Chrisians still felt they were sinners even after their faith in Jesus (and/or his resurrection) so they continued to baptize because they liked water and/or the word "baptize" sounds cool.

5. Christians were all originally followers of JtB and invented a savior figure with the name "savior" (Joshua) to get rid of the Torah and did some combination of (1) and (2).

For me (4) seems like the most unlikely, and (2) seems the most likely. Why continue to baptize to cleanse sin when they had Jesus' resurrection?

bacht

Yes, and Mark was using the Malachi prophecy about Elijah (= JtB) returning before the end. Maybe at the time of writing the Baptist followers were serious competitors.

ApostateAbe

OK, great. There can be more explanations than that, dozens of conflicting explanations for absolutely anything, but of course what matters most are the best explanations. You find (2) to seem most likely:

Christians had no idea why they did baptizing in the first place, so they chose the popular and recent baptist for an etiological story, even though the history of the sect that eventually became Christianity has baptisms that go much further back than John.

My explanation is that John historically baptized Jesus, and Christians needed to spin the account away from what otherwise seems to imply that JtB was religiously superior to Jesus.

I think that my explanation has considerable explanatory power--my hypothesis expects the evidence to a much greater degree than your hypothesis. Why was JtB so gushingly humble toward Jesus in the gospel of Mark? Is it because the history of baptisms in proto-Christianity preceded John? So we expect that JtB is ridiculously humble toward Jesus?

If you want to argue that one explanation is better than another, then choose a methodology. I am using Argument to the Best Explanation.

Toto

I don't see how any of the listed explanations is superior to any of the others in explaining this aspect of the story. Whether the incident was historical or had some basis in history, or had no basis in history, Mark had every motivation to cast John as the precurser to Jesus who recognized Jesus' power.

aa5874

But, there are no known writings of antiquity from anyone who was identified as a former follower of John the Baptist or was baptised by John the Baptist.

The Jesus story appears to have been written FIRST by some individual and then LATER believed to be true by those called Jesus believers or the common name "Christians".

It would appear that it was the author of the story who chose to use John the Baptist. And then later, when the Jesus story had evolved it was the resurrection of Jesus that was given the most significant criteria for salvation of ALL mankind.

Examine the supposed last words of Jesus in gMatthew and and then the LATER gLuke. Baptism is completely missing in gLuke and replaced by the resurrection.

Matthew 28.18-20
Luke 24.46-49 It is clear that the resurrection of Jesus for salvation was a later development which again tends to show that the Pauline doctrine on salvation by the resurrection and the gifts of the Holy Spirit were late.

Dave31

There are parallels with both baptism and the scripture, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased," and both may be found in Egypt long prior to Jesus or Christianity.

* The Pyramid Texts are 4,400 years old.

There is an entire chapter regarding Egyptian baptism in Christ in Egypt, which includes the baptism of Osiris, Horus etc.

ApostateAbe

One explanation is superior to the other in terms of explanatory power. If John was a precursor to Jesus, does it as easily follow that John was over-the-top humble? It is plausible, at least, but both explanations are plausible. If you want to say that one explanation is better than the other, then use ABE or some other methodology. If you want to say that many explanations are the same, as I expect you might, then use ABE or some other methodology.

Toto

That's not the issue. You keep confusing the gospel story with what actually happened. We don't know anything about what happened except that Mark reports that John was humble and said he was unworthy to lick the boots of the savior. This story by Mark does not require much in the way of explanation beyond Mark's exhaltation of Jesus.

Is there some aspect that your theory does a better job of explaining? If there is some actual history here, why are the references to John in the gospels so disjointed and contradictory?

show_no_mercy

How do you figure that? In either case - yours or Christians picking JtB because he was popular - we would have the spin doctoring regardless. JtB was apparently insanely popular. It fits the Christian propaganda machine to attach themselves to a popular person and make their mascot "even more betterer".

Imagine a commercial put out by an anonymous agency. You see Super Awesome Sports Player SASP talking about some unknown sports player, gushing about him. If you think highly about SASP, then his opinion about how much more betterer this unknown is of him is going to affect your view of the unknown. You're going to pay attention to this unknown and maybe keep watching the follow up commercials about the unknown.

Logically, since this is an anonymous commercial, is there any reason to think that the two sports players have any sort of relationship outside of this commercial? Or could it simply be a propaganda machine put out by fanboys of the unknown sports player trying to get attention? Better yet, in another more legitimate commercial about SASP (Josephus), we have no mention of SASP's unknown protege's rival team in his mention of SASP.

Written text is even more malleable than the commercial format, because the equivalent of the SASP doesn't even have to be aware that their likeness is being used.

But if baptisms didn't precede Christianity, then they make no sense. If Christians were only baptizing because Jesus was baptized, then why baptize to get rid of sin when Jesus already got rid of sin upon his resurrection? The very first Christians should have ditched it and it would have never made its way to Mark or Paul. Paul never mentions baptism for the remission of sins. It actually seems as though at the least baptism explicitly to expunge sin is an invention of Mark - it's the opposite of how Josephus describes JtB. In Josephus, JtB does his dunking to cleanse the body and assumes that the dunkee has gotten rid of his sin by some other means. If Mark had kept Josephus' description of JtB's purpose for dunking, then the spin doctoring wouldn't make any sense - especially with your explanation.


If we're going for explanatory power, you have to explain why Christians kept baptising to get rid of sin (according to how Mark describes it) when sin was already cleansed by the death of Jesus and his resurrection. Paul has no ire about baptisms being useless because they've already been saved by Christ Jesus, so why did Christians continue to baptize? Your explanation doesn't explain that.

Not only that, but the messiah was supposed to have a herald. Having JtB dunk Jesus fulfills prophecy.