Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

he makes certain to address at least one of his
     predecessor’s glaring omissions: the moment Jesus arrives on the banks of the Jordan,
     John immediately recognizes him as the “one coming after me.”
    “I baptize you with water,” the Baptist says. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit
     and with fire.”
    At first, Matthew’s John refuses to baptize Jesus, suggesting that it is he who should
     be baptized by Jesus. Only after Jesus gives him permission does John presume to baptize
     the peasant from Nazareth.
    Luke goes one step further, repeating the same story presented in Mark and Matthew
     but choosing to gloss over Jesus’s actual baptism. “Now when all the people had been
     baptized, and Jesus too was baptized, the heavens opened …” (Luke 3:21). In other
     words, Luke omits any agent in Jesus’s baptism. It is not John who baptizes Jesus.
     Jesus is merely baptized. Luke buttresses his point by giving John his own infancy
     narrative alongside the one he invents for Jesus to prove that even as fetuses, Jesus
     was the superior figure: John’s birth to a barren woman, Elizabeth, may have been
     miraculous,but it was not nearly as miraculous as Jesus’s birth to a virgin. This is all part
     of Luke’s concerted effort, which the evangelist carries forth into his gospel’s sequel,
     the book of Acts, to persuade John’s disciples to abandon their prophet and follow
     Jesus instead.
    By the time the gospel of John recounts Jesus’s baptism, three decades after Mark,
     John the Baptist is no longer a baptist; the title is never used of him. In fact,
     Jesus is never actually baptized by John. The Baptist’s sole purpose in the fourth
     gospel is to bear witness to Jesus’s divinity. Jesus is not just “stronger” than John
     the Baptist. He is the light, the Lord, the Lamb of God, the Chosen One. He is the
     preexistent
logos
, who “existed before me,” the Baptist says.
    “I myself saw the holy spirit descend upon him from heaven like a dove,” John claims
     of Jesus, correcting another of Mark’s original omissions, before expressly commanding
     his disciples to leave him and follow Jesus instead. For John the evangelist, it was
     not enough simply to reduce the Baptist; the Baptist had to reduce himself, to publicly
     denigrate himself before the
true
prophet and messiah.
    “I am not the messiah,” John the Baptist admits in the fourth gospel. “I have been
     sent before him … 
He must increase, as I must decrease
” (John 3:28–30).
    This frantic attempt to reduce John’s significance, to make him inferior to Jesus—to
     make him little more than Jesus’s herald—betrays an urgent need on the part of the
     early Christian community to counteract what the historical evidence clearly suggests:
     whoever the Baptist was, wherever he came from, and however he intended his baptismal
     ritual, Jesus very likely began his ministry as just another of his disciples. Before
     his encounter with John, Jesus was an unknown peasant and day laborer toiling away
     in Galilee. John’s baptism not only made him part of the new and redeemed nation of
     Israel, it initiated him into John’s inner circle. Not everyone who was baptized by
     John became his disciple; many simply returned to their homes. But Jesus did not.
     The gospels make itclear that rather than returning to Galilee after his baptism, he went “out into the
     wilderness” of Judea; that is, Jesus went directly into the place whence John had
     just emerged. And he stayed in the wilderness for a while, not to be “tempted by Satan,”
     as the evangelists imagine it, but to learn from John and to commune with his followers.
    The first words of Jesus’s public ministry echo John’s: “The time is fulfilled. The
     Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). So does
     Jesus’s first public action: “After this Jesus and his disciples went into Judea and
     there they were baptizing, and John also was baptizing …” (John 3:22–23). Of course,
     Jesus’s first disciples—Andrew and Philip—were not his disciples at all; they were
     John’s (John 1:35–37). They only followed Jesus after John was arrested. Jesus even
     addresses his enemies among the scribes and Pharisees with the same distinct phrase
     John uses for them: “You brood of vipers!” (Matthew 12:34).
    Jesus remained in Judea for some time after his baptism, moving in and out of John’s
     circle,