Section II

john the Baptist

John the Baptist, in his manifestation and agency, was like a burning torch; his public life was quite an earthquake—the whole man was a sermon; he might well call himself a voice—‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord’ (Joh 1:23).

But if we attempt to seize the characteristic features of this great phenomenon, we shall be able plainly to distinguish the Nazarite, the prophet, and the religious reformer in a more confined sense, although these characteristics are combined in him in a most living expressive unity.

He ‘grew and waxed strong’ in the virgin solitudes of nature (Luk 1:80). In his excursions from the hill-country of Judea, he had become acquainted with the sacred loneliness of the adjacent desert region,¹ and here the Spirit of the Lord had spoken to his spirit.² In chosen privation as a free son of the wilderness, he had accustomed himself to the simplest diet; locusts and wild honey sufficed him. He clothed himself in raiment of camel’s hair, with a leathern girdle about his loins.³ Thus the Nazarite assumed the form of the preacher of repentance. But he also knew the significance of his Nazarite vow; he knew that he had to lead back Israel from the illusions of their formalized temple-worship into the wilderness, from which they had at first emerged as the people of the law, that they might purify themselves in the wilderness for the new economy of the kingdom of God. The Nazarite is a preacher of repentance in the deeply earnest tone of his soul, and therefore in the pensive seriousness of his appearance.

It does not, however, in the least follow from this devoted man’s mode of life that he wished to convert others into ascetics like himself.⁴ He was perfectly aware of the singularity of his position, and knew how, with noble freedom, to appreciate other modes of life, and especially higher spiritual stages. But that the persons who became his disciples must have accommodated themselves to his peculiar habits, lies in the very nature of such a connection. They were his assistants in administering baptism, and must therefore have complied with the pre-requisites of this employment—of this symbolic preaching of repentance.⁵

But the divine commission which constituted him a prophet was the revelation that the kingdom of God was at hand for His people; that therefore the Messiah, as the founder of this kingdom, was forthcoming, and that he was destined to prepare the way for Him. The Spirit of God had also assured him, that by a divine sign the individual would be manifested to him whom he would have to point out as the Lord and Founder of this kingdom. He had become familiar with the idea and presentiment of this destination while under his parents’ roof; but the absolute conviction which made him a prophet was imparted by the Spirit of the Lord, at the close of his youthful preparation, in the wilderness. First of all, he had the certainty that the Messiah was already living, though unknown, among the people; then at the decisive moment, on the banks of the Jordan, he received a divine disclosure respecting His person. Such, therefore, was the presentiment, the inspiration, the function and divine mission of his life—to announce the advent of the Messiah, and to make a path for Him in the souls of the people. He was, so to speak, the individualized and final prophetic presentiment of the Messiah among His own people. And only thus, as the herald of Christ, is he an organically necessary and historically conceivable phenomenon.⁶ But the prophet, from his wide, clear survey of the pilgrimages to Jerusalem, had from early life been cognizant of the moral and religious decay evinced in the temple-righteousness of his people. He saw through the corruption of the Pharisees and scribes with all the indignation of a genuine Israelite. The holy zeal of all the prophets was concentrated in the lofty repugnance of his powerful soul, and made him in a more restricted sense one of those men of zeal who appeared in Israel in critical moments, as restorers of the damaged Theocracy: such were Phinehas (Num 25:7) and Elijah; and such was Jesus Himself on the occasions when He purified the temple. In this zeal John became an administrator of baptism, or the Baptist. The whole nation appeared to him, as they really were, unworthy and incapable of entering the holy kingdom of the New Covenant, but most of all their leaders and representatives. It was to him a certain fact, that a great general declension had taken place from the spirit of true Judaism, and that even the better sort needed first to undergo a great purification to enable them to receive the King of Israel; and that, after all, the winnowing fan of this King would be needed to separate the chaff from the wheat. The leaders of the people appeared to him mostly as serpents and vipers, in their thoroughly hypocritical natures, and the people in general polluted by the unclean beasts of their evil passions; and thus, according to the law, a great universal purification was required.⁷ The theocratic zealot, therefore, preached the baptism of repentance for the reception of the coming One. With unparalleled boldness he met the Israelitish community with the solemn declaration, that the whole camp was unclean, and that they must first undergo a holy ablution before they could enter into the new community. Thus he, in fact, excommunicated the whole nation, and prescribed for it a symbolical repentance, as a preparation for entering the social communion of the Messiah. The application which John, in his theocratic zeal, made of the rite of holy ablution to his polluted nation, accounts for the institution of his baptism. It was among the requirements of the law, that the Jewish proselytes were to undergo this washing when they passed over from the camp of the unclean, the heathen, to the camp of the clean, the Israelites. But John needed not this inducement to practise baptism. As restorer of the Theocracy, he recognized its necessity as soon as to his inspired theocratic wrath the conviction was established, that Israel had become a camp of the unclean. On the other hand, he too well understood the difference between symbolical and real acts, to confound with his own baptism the sprinkling with clean water which the prophets (Eze 36:25; Zec 13:1) had foretold, and which in a figurative manner denoted the Spirit-baptism of Christ itself.⁸ But still less could he fail to distinguish that symbolical act of which he was the administrator, from that anointing with oil which in the Old Testament represented the positive bestowment of the Messianic gifts of the Spirit, in distinction from the washing, which was the sign of negative consecration.⁹ John was perfectly aware that the true essential Baptizer was to come, who would first baptize with the oil of life, with the Holy Ghost, and with fire. It was his own mission to restore the community as members of the old economy, in order to present them pure and set apart for the transition into the kingdom of heaven. What he required of the people was in perfect accordance with this mission. Each individual was to purify himself as an Israelite, to change his mind in earnest repentance, and in consequence to put away the evil of his life, and to practise the virtues belonging to his national calling. Thus would he be fitted for receiving the higher baptism, that of Christ, the real participation of His new, heavenly life.

The prophetic feeling of the Baptist did not deceive him. By those warnings with which, like a second Elijah, he stood forth in the wilderness of Judea, he succeeded in arousing and agitating the nation. The verdict of his zealous spirit, in which he described the theocratic commonwealth as polluted, and announced a baptism of purification, was acquiesced in by the people. They resorted to him at the Jordan in crowds. He received them with solemn reprimands, and exhorted them to conversion, and the practice of the neglected duties of mercy, brotherly love, honesty, and righteousness (Luk 3:11-14). But as for those who were borne along with the tide of the excited multitudes, and only came to submit to the symbolic rite as a new instrument of ceremonial righteousness, he calls them ‘a generation of vipers’ (Luk 3:7). They were induced to flee from the wrath to come, not by the Spirit of the Lord, but compelled by a regard to theocratic forms. Their fleeing was therefore pretended. They believed themselves, after all, to be safe from the coming wrath as children of Abraham. Therefore the prophet exclaimed, ‘Depend not on your descent; from these stones God can raise up children to Abraham.’ A spirit who could so mortify the Israelitish pride, who expressed in such strong terms the possibility of the call of the Gentiles into the kingdom of heaven, was no gloomy ascetic, no man of mere statutes. His words of rebuke were pointed quite specially at the Pharisees and Sadducees (Mat 3:7). Whether they travelled in one caravan to the Jordan is not known; nor does it follow in the least from the language of the Evangelist. But at all events, to John’s spiritual vision they formed, according to their inner motives, a closely connected band, one caravan of hypocritical penitents. These Pharisees, indeed, followed the track of the people in their acknowledgment of John. The first powerful action of the prophet forced them to accommodate themselves to the popular feeling. They were also moved more or less by enthusiastic hopes of the advent of a Messiah according to their own mind. But as soon as the Pharisees stirred in this direction, the Sadducees were obliged to follow in their footsteps, according to their wont, in order to maintain before the people the appearance of orthodoxy.¹⁰ But John understood their real character; and yet he could not refuse to baptize them, since he had to treat them according to their profession, not according to the thoughts of their heart. It was this contrariety which kindled his wrath into a glowing flame, and led him to employ the strongest terms of censure.¹¹ He could not deny them the possibility of reconciliation, but still felt himself compelled to announce the judgments which the Messiah would inflict on the wicked. In threatening accents he declared that the axe was laid at the root of the trees. With sadness he felt and confessed that he could baptize only with water the people as they stood before him, a mingled throng of persons eager for salvation, and of hypocritical pretenders. But it gave him consolation that he could announce a mightier One, before whose noble, kingly image his soul was humbled in the dust, with whom he dared not to associate himself, as being no better than a menial or a slave, since he had the feeling that he was not worthy of direct communion with Him.¹² ‘I baptize you with water,’ he said, ‘but there cometh One after me who shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.’ Such was the Messiah in his sight; and thus was He to sanctify the people that they might become the people of the New Covenant. The baptism of fire must certainly be distinguished in this place from the baptism of the Spirit.¹³ This follows plainly from the image, according to which Christ purifies the grain of His threshing-floor with the winnowing fan, and then burns the chaff. But the Messiah, in fact, administers this twofold baptism in His whole career throughout the world’s history. The saving effects of his administration through time will be supplemented by the judgments which result from the rejection of His salvation. This law strikingly shows in the destruction of Jerusalem, as well as in many other fire-baptisms of historic notoriety, how judgment impends over those circles in which the baptism of the Spirit is despised; and so it will continue to the end of the world. It also holds good in the inner and outer life of the individual as he comes into contact with Christ—one of the two baptisms will be infallibly his portion. A man, in meeting with the Spirit of Christ, is either inflamed by the gentle glow of this Spirit, which arouses and purifies, renovates and transforms his life in all its depths; or he begins to burn with a lurid flame of antichristian rancour in destructive enmity against the kingdom and word of Christ. But in the more general contemplation, the fire-baptism may without hesitation be identified with the Spirit-baptism of Christ; and so much the more, because no one receives the salvation of the Christian spiritual life without passing through the fire of Christ’s judgment.

That John formed a correct estimate of the supporters of the Jewish hierarchy, is proved by the attitude which they afterwards assumed against him. But equally was his confidence justified, that the Messiah was already living among the people. While many Pharisees had submitted to his baptism for the sake of appearance, Christ submitted in true obedience to this divine ordinance, because He thoroughly understood its significance for the people and for Himself.

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Notes

John’s manner of life was not a completely isolated phenomenon. It occurred more frequently as a link between the order of the Nazarites and that of the prophets or the rabbinical vocation, and exhibited what was true in Essenism, namely, an abstemious hermit-life, which in its strictness, as contrasted with the general mode of living, was dedicated only to the people’s good. Such a recluse was Banus, the teacher of Josephus; his manner of life resembled that of John. See Vita Josephi, § 2; Neander’s Life of Christ, § 34. Josephus mentions John the Baptist incidentally, Antiq. xviii. 5, § 2: his account of John’s baptism is not at variance with that of the Evangelists. He represents John as requiring the people, in order to gain the divine favour, not merely to put away from them this or that particular sin, but to purify their souls by righteousness, and to join with that the consecration of the body by baptism. The special gist of John’s baptism, its relation to the kingdom of the Messiah, Josephus from his stand-point could not understand.¹⁴

1) See Robinson’s Researches [and Andrews, p, 128].

2) We are here reminded of Fox, the founder of the sect of the Quakers, and of other distinguished characters of world-wide reputation.

3) See Von Ammon, die Gesclichtedes Lebens Jesu, i.251, [Kitto, Daily Bible Illust, 32d Week, 3d Day.

4) When Strauss imagines that John, as ‘the gloomy, threatening preacher of repentance,’ would have found it difficult to be on terms of friendship with Jesus, he substitutes for the historical image of John in the Gospels one very different from that which really belongs to him.

5) Exod, xix. 10, 15.

6) That John, on the contrary, the fabrication of antagonistic criticism, the gloomy monk who in his poor enthusiasm would fain be and ought to be a prophet, and yet is so little of a prophet that he has no presentiment of the Messiah when He comes into his immediate vicinity, and much too late arrives in prison at the conjecture that Jesus may be the Messiah—is a historical monster and a caricature of the biblical Baptist, which we may dispose of in a note, in passing.

7) Lev. xiv. xv.

8) As for example, Strauss, Leben Jesu, i. 351; also Neander, Life of Jesus Christ, p. 50.

9) The same holds good of Christians of the apostolic age, How strictly. the Essenes distinguished the washing from the anointing is acknowledged. Only within the pale of modern criticism can the Old Testament washing be confounded with the Old Testament anointing.

10) Josephus, Antig. xviii. 2.

11) We may pass by the decision of Bruno Bauer on these threatening addresses of the Baptist.

12) Compare Matt. iii. 11 and the parallel passages. In these words we may find an answer to the question, Why the Baptist had not personally attached himself to the Lord?

13) Neander, Life of Jesus Christ, p. 55 [Bohn].

14) [The chapter on John in Ewald’s Geschichte Christus’ (pp. 146-160) is, as. might be expected, one of the most suggestive in the book. The whole position of John is sketched by the hand of a master. His priestly birth and upbringing, his discovery of the urgent need of deliverance for Israel, his praying in the desert for the coming of the Messiah, his apparent resemblance to but real difference from Essenes and Pharisees, all are depicted in the most striking and instructive manner.—ED.]