Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

certain affinities between the two that should not be easily dismissed.
     In any case, John would not need to have been an actual member of the Essene community
     to be influenced by their teachings and ideas, which were pretty well integrated into
     the Jewish spirituality of the time.
    Although it is never explicitly stated that John’s baptism was not meant to be repeated,
     one can infer that to be the case for two reasons: first, because the baptism seems
     to require an administrator, like John, as opposed to most other water rituals, which
     were self-administered; and second, because John’s baptism assumes the imminent end
     of the world, which would make its repetition somewhat difficult, to say the least.
     See John Meier,
Marginal Jew
, vol. 2, 51.
    John Meier makes a compelling case for accepting the historicity of the phrase “baptism
     for the forgiveness of sins.” See
Marginal Jew
, vol. 2, 53–54. Josephus’s claim to the contrary can be found in
Antiquities
18.116. Robert L. Webb argues that John’s baptism was a “repentance-baptism which
     functioned to initiate [the Jews] into the group of prepared people, the true Israel,”
     meaning John did in fact form his own distinct sect; see
John the Baptizer and Prophet
, 197 and 364. Bruce Chilton completely dismantles Webb’s argument in “John the Purifier,”
     203–20.
    The heavenly affirmation “This is my son, the Beloved” is from Psalms 2:7, in which
     God addresses David on the occasion of his enthronement as king in Jerusalem (Beloved
     was David’s nickname). As John Meier rightly notes, this moment “does not mirror some
     inner experience that Jesus had at the time; it mirrors the desire of the first-generation
     Christian church to define Jesus assoon as the primitive Gospel story begins—all the more so because this definition
     was needed to counter the impression of Jesus’s subordination to John, implicit in
     the tradition of the former being baptized by the latter.”
Marginal Jew
, vol. 2, 107.
    Among those scholars who make a convincing case that Jesus began his ministry as a
     disciple of John are P. W. Hollenbach, “Social Aspects of John the Baptizer’s Preaching
     Mission in the Context of Palestinian Judaism,”
Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt
(
ANRW
) 2.19.1 (1979): 852–53, and “The Conversion of Jesus: From Jesus the Baptizer to
     Jesus the Healer,”
ANRW
2.25.1 (1982): 198–200, as well as Robert L. Webb, “Jesus’ Baptism: Its Historicity
     and Implications,”
Bulletin for Biblical Research
10.2 (2000): 261–309. Webb summarizes the relationship between John and Jesus thus:
     “Jesus was baptized by John and probably remained with him for some time in the role
     of disciple. Later, in alignment and participation with John and his movement, Jesus
     also engaged in a baptizing ministry near John. Although he was still a disciple of
     John, Jesus perhaps should be viewed at this point as John’s right-hand man or protégé.
     While tensions may have arisen between John’s disciples and those around Jesus, the
     two men viewed themselves as working together. Only later, after the arrest of John,
     did a shift take place in which Jesus moved beyond the conceptual framework of John’s
     movement in certain respects. Yet Jesus always appears appreciative of the foundation
     that John’s framework initially provided for him.”
    Regarding Jesus’s sojourn in the wilderness, one must remember that “the wilderness”
     is more than a geographic location. It is where the covenant with Abraham was made,
     where Moses received the Law of God, where the Israelites wandered for a generation;
     it is where God dwelt and where he could be found and communed with. The gospel’s
     use of the term “forty days”—the number of days Jesus is said to have spent in the
     desert—is not meant to be read as a literal number. In the Bible, “forty” is a byword
     for “many,” as in “it rained for forty days and nights.” The implication is that Jesus
     stayed in the wilderness for a long time.
    I disagree with Rudolf Otto, who claims that “John did not preach the coming of the
     kingdom of heaven, but of the coming judgment of wrath”;
The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man
, 69. It is Otto’s point that John was concerned chiefly with the coming judgment
     of God, what he calls “the Day of Yahweh,” whereas Jesus’s focus was on the redemptive
     nature of God’s kingdom on