The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist by R. Nir (review)

Rivka Nir is noted for meticulous, careful dissection of ancient texts, having established an excellent reputation with her Destruction of Jerusalem and the Idea of Redemption in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch (2003) and Joseph and Aseneth: A Christian Book (2012). This book follows in that vein with a detailed literary analysis of Josephus and the relevant biblical texts. Her thesis is straightforward:

. . . I have attempted to prove that the figure of John the Baptist, as reflected in all our available sources, is filtered through a Christian prism. He is depicted not as a Jewish prophet, apocalypticist or ascetic but as a Christian who speaks for the ideas and beliefs of Christian theology and its core faith in the messiah Jesus.

(258)

Her arguments are impressive and well worth consideration in this yet another quest for the historical personage behind a received narrative. She contends that we cannot now know the John the Baptist of history: Christian theology has intervened and John is presented as a Christian witnessing to Jesus. John is not a Jew working out of the conceptual matrix of Second Temple Judaism. So his baptism is not a form of a Jewish mikvah nor that of the immersion ritual of the Dead Sea Scroll community at Qumran. His was different.

Nir’s methodology is that of detailed historical literary analysis, examining key ideas and situating them in the context of what we know of Second Temple Judaism and emerging Christianity of the late first century, the period that the Gospel writers reflect. Her major evidence has to do with the concept cluster in which the Gospels present John the Baptist. The conceptual landscape is Christian. Ideas such as “repentance,” “kingdom of heaven,” “the coming one,” “baptism,” “forgiveness of sins,” “holy spirit,” “the wrath to come” and “fruit worthy of repentance” are all interpreted in accordance with evolving Christian belief. The Jewish and Christian understanding of these concepts differ and Nir outlines the contrasts clearly. Repentance, in its Jewish sense, for instance, as a return to the covenant with God as expressed in Torah, is just not present in the Gospel accounts of John the Baptist.

Similarly Josephus’s description of John the Baptist’s water ritual makes it clear that his ritual is not a Pharisaic baptism but an early Christian one. Nir carefully analyses the text, pointing out that the action is “a collective mass baptism under the administration of one person, which must be preached and proclaimed to be administered.” This along with “its characterization as an initiatory baptism into an elect group” (258) are hallmarks of the Christian rite of baptism.

Moreover, John’s baptism “combines physical purification with inner moral spiritual purification, in which the latter constitutes a prerequisite for the former” (258). This contrasts with a Jewish Pharisaic baptism, which is a different ritual in which immersion signifies cleansing the body from various states of impurity. The contexts differ, significantly.

This, in turn, argues for the view that Josephus’s account of John the Baptist is “not from the hand of the Jewish historian but a late interpolation written by a Christian or a Jewish Christian” (259). That finding is bound to be controversial but it adds to the suspicion that the passages about Jesus and James, brother of Jesus, have all been inserted into Josephus’s text by later Christian hands. Thus Josephus is not an independent witness to the subject matter of the Gospels.

Nir’s meticulous study has implications for the larger question concerning “the parting of the ways.” The distinctions she draws out carefully delineate lines between the beliefs and practices of Second Temple Judaism and its early rabbinic modifications on the one hand and developing Christian theology on the other hand. There are important boundaries which should not be blurred.

Nir’s findings that John the Baptist is portrayed in neither the canonical Gospels nor in Josephus as a mysterious...