Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

inspiration.
    What, then, did John’s baptism mean? The gospel of Mark makes the astonishing claim
     that what John was offering at the Jordan was “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness
     of sins” (Mark 1:4). The unmistakably Christian nature of this phrase casts serious
     doubt on its historicity. It sounds more like a Christian projection upon the Baptist’s
     actions, not something the Baptist would have claimed for himself—though if that is
     true, it would be an odd statement for the early church to make about John: that he
     had the power to forgive sins, even before he knew Jesus.
    Josephus explicitly states that John’s baptism was “not for the remission of sins,
     but for the purification of the body.” That would make John’s ritual more like an
     initiation rite, a means of entering into his order or sect, a thesis borne out in
     the book of Acts, in which a group of Corinthians proudly claim to have been baptized
into
John’s baptism (Acts 19:1–3). But that, too, would have been problematic for the
     early Christian community. Because if there is one thing about which all four gospels
     agree when it comes to John the Baptist, it is that sometime around his thirtieth
     year, and for reasons unknown, Jesus of Nazareth left his tiny hillside villageof Nazareth in Galilee, abandoned his home, his family, and his obligations, and trekked
     down to Judea to be baptized by John in the Jordan River. Indeed, the life of the
     historical Jesus begins not with his miraculous birth or his obscured youth but at
     the moment he first meets John the Baptist.
    The problem for the early Christians was that any acceptance of the basic facts of
     John’s interaction with Jesus would have been a tacit admission that John was, at
     least at first, a superior figure. If John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins,
     as Mark claims, then Jesus’s acceptance of it indicated a need to be cleansed of his
     sins by John. If John’s baptism was an initiation rite, as Josephus suggests, then
     clearly Jesus was being admitted into John’s movement as just another one of his disciples.
     This was precisely the claim made by John’s followers, who, long after both men had
     been executed, refused to be absorbed into the Jesus movement because they argued
     that their master, John, was greater than Jesus. After all, who baptized whom?
    John the Baptist’s historical importance and his role in launching Jesus’s ministry
     created a difficult dilemma for the gospel writers. John was a popular, well-respected,
     and almost universally acknowledged priest and prophet. His fame was too great to
     ignore, his baptism of Jesus too well known to conceal. The story had to be told.
     But it also had to be massaged and made safe. The two men’s roles had to be reversed:
     Jesus had to be made superior, John inferior. Hence the steady regression of John’s
     character from the first gospel, Mark—wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor
     to Jesus—to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose
     at all except to acknowledge Jesus’s divinity.
    Mark casts John the Baptist as a wholly independent figure who baptizes Jesus as one
     among many who come to him seeking repentance. “There went out to him people from
     all over Judea, and from Jerusalem, to be baptized by him in the River Jordan, and
     to confess their sins … and it happened that, in those days, Jesus camefrom Galilee, from Nazareth, and he too was baptized by John in the Jordan” (Mark
     1:5, 9). Mark’s Baptist admits that he himself is not the promised messiah—“There
     is one coming after me who is stronger than I am,” John says, “one whose sandals I
     am not worthy to untie” (Mark 1:7–8)—but strangely, John never actually acknowledges
     Jesus to be the one he is referring to. Even after Jesus’s perfunctory baptism, when
     the sky opens and the spirit of God descends upon him in the form of a dove as a heavenly
     voice says, “You are my son: the Beloved. In you I am well pleased,” John neither
     notices nor comments on this moment of divine interjection. To John, Jesus is merely
     another supplicant, another son of Abraham who journeys to the Jordan to be initiated
     into the renewed tribe of Israel. He simply moves on to the next person waiting to
     be baptized.
    Writing some two decades later, Matthew recounts the narrative of Jesus’s baptism
     almost word for word from Mark, but