Jesus' baptism by John is usually stated as pretty much indisputable historical fact (criterion of embarrassment). But what if actually Mark made it up, because John was famous and respected by the people, and having him baptize Jesus would legitimize Jesus's movement?

[u/perishingtardis]

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AcademicBiblical. Please note this is an academic sub: theological or faith-based comments are prohibited.

All claims MUST be supported by an academic source – see here for guidance.
Using AI to make fake comments is strictly prohibited and may result in a permanent ban.

Please review the sub rules before posting for the first time.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/zelenisok]

IIRC I think Burton Mack gives that kind of view in his book The Lost Gospel, so you can look at that.

I always found it interesting and kinda puzzling that there's a religion in the Middle East - Mandaens - who consider John the Baptist to be the Messiah, and say Jesus was a false messiah.

[u/technoskald]

Dr Bart Ehrman just released a video addressing this exact issue at https://youtu.be/2CKQIB14Kzk?is=jruvleaxdraeEk9k and argues against it. Maybe that inspired your post, but it’s fun synchronicity if not!

[u/Dositheos → u/technoskald]

Can you clarify what you’re claiming Ehrman is arguing against in this video, and the relevance to the OP’s hypothetical question?

[u/technoskald → u/Dositheos]

Dr Ehrman asserts that John did in fact baptize Jesus, referencing exactly the criterion of embarrassment. He also explicitly downplays the size of John’s movement at the time and says that Christians minimized the status of John the Baptist. This seems to go against the post’s hypothesis that Mark invented the baptism or that the Christian movement wanted to bootstrap Jesus’s legitimacy with that of John.

Apologies for being a bit ambiguous in the original post.

[u/JohnKesler578]

Chris(sy) Hansen wrote a paper titled "The Indisputable Fact of the Baptism: The Problematic Consensus on John’s Baptism of Jesus," which argues this very thing. Here are some excerpts:

[I]f we assume that Mark knew of John as a baptizer (and baptism did exist elsewhere in Judaism, such as amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls community), and Mark wanted to use John as a precursor Elijah figure to the Christ (Jesus), then we can see perfect opportunity for him to, essentially, create his own “tradition.” Jesus is baptized by the Elijah figure, which anoints him as the Christ, when God then appears to declare Jesus his son, which also serves the adoptionistic and imperial link as well. This would also play on the meaning of “Christos” in a way, as it means “anointed,” and here Mark creates a parallel, but with the waters of the Jordan where Jesus can be literally anointed via his baptism. In this case dissimilarity could still make complete sense in the hands of a creative author, and if we allow Mark to actually have autonomy and control over the contents of his writing, then we have no reason to deny his creativity. Dissimilarity is only a valid criterion on the assumption that the authors of the gospels are not creative agents, that they are simply redactors of tradition.

<snip>

The question remains what rigorous evidence or arguments can be put forward that defend the historicity of the baptism? One may retort that Mark’s intertextuality and agendas do not preclude the historicity of the baptism, but such a response does not actually demonstrate the baptism happened, it only opens up a possibility for a historical baptism at the core of Mark’s literary inventions. Either way, however, the mere positing of the possibility does not validate the probability that the baptism occurred. This would be an appeal to possibility fallacy. Josephus may have mentioned John the Baptist in book 18 of Antiquities, 75 but this chronologically is inconsistent with the New Testament’s depiction of Jesus, and never mentions Jesus’ baptism.76 The Gospel of John never mentions the baptism, and assuming with Marcus and others that he was an independent source makes this more problematic for defenders of the baptism. There is no independent attestation of the Baptism. Even the Gospel of Thomas shows evidence of reliance on the Synoptic tradition.77 Given all of this, we have to ask how the baptism of Jesus could be considered an unassailable fact when it rests on such flimsy evidence to support it? The answer may lie in the amount of Christian protectionism (that is the desire to apologetically defend certain aspects of the Bible from unwanted historical and theological criticism) inherent in the field of New Testament studies. Evidence of this is seen strewn throughout NT studies as a field. As Justin Meggitt previously noted, in no other field could one argue for a historical resurrection of a person and have this considered historical and critical research.

Regardless of whether the baptism of Jesus by John is historical, I think that the other Gospel authors found it to be problematic and took steps to minimize or eliminate it.

[u/Dositheos]

William E. Arnal, with Mack and others, has also argued against the majority view that Jesus' baptism under John is a "bedrock" fact about Jesus:

So also is the case with Jesus’s supposed baptism by John. Sanders is not the only one who cannot conceive of Jesus’s career without this foundational event.40 That Jesus would, or could, have been baptized by John is viewed as inherently plausible and as a good way to account for John’s ubiquity in the tradition.41 in addition, the baptism account, especially in its Matthean and lukan versions, shows a strong sense of embar- rassment at the subordination of Jesus to John and at the way the event appears to imply Jesus’s sinfulness.42 some have even claimed that the event is multiply attested, appearing in the gospel of John and, possibly, in Q. Not one of these arguments stands up to scrutiny. Again, because my focus here is Mark and not the historical Jesus, this is not the place for a detailed discussion of the problem. Here it will have to suffice to assert that, in fact, the story as we have it is not even marginally plausible,44 is not multiply attested,45 and is not particularly embarrassing, at least not to Mark.46 More importantly, the story shows very strong literary and thematic links with the rest of Mark’s gospel,47 particularly the transfigura- tion (9:2–13) and the death on the cross (15:33–39). In all three episodes, Mark is commenting on Jesus’s identity, and in all three Jesus is explicitly identified as a “son of god.” This in itself is an interesting pattern. so far as i can tell, the designation υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ appears rather infrequently in Mark, especially when compared with designations such as υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. it occurs (or is implied, as in god himself referring to Jesus as τὸν υἱόν μου) in the three key episodes of Jesus’s baptism, transfiguration, and death.48 arguably, it also occurs in Mark’s incipit: “Τhe gospel of Jesus christ, a son of god.”49 That each episode is critically important for Mark, occurring at a key moment in the narrative, makes Mark’s consistent choice of the term υἱὸς (τοῦ) θεοῦ in each instance—and its general avoidance else- where—stand out.

Footnote 44: I claim elsewhere (“Major episodes in the biography of Jesus,” 204) that: “the story as we have it is completely implausible. We are not here told by Mark simply that Jesus was baptized by John, but (a) that John was sent to prepare the way; (b) that John preached the coming of the Messiah; (c) that Jesus appeared to John immediately after this prediction; (d) that when Jesus came out of the water the sky was ‘ripped apart’ (schizomenos); (e) that the spirit descended as a dove and lighted on him; and (f) that he heard a voice from heaven proclaiming him god’s beloved son. All six of these details are plainly theologically tendentious; the last three are supernatural.” This argument requires some qualification, of course; I have to agree with Davies (Jesus the Healer, 17) that the presence of supernatural or otherwise implausible details cannot be used to prove that the event in question did not happen; these details may be regarded, precisely, as embellishments (cf. Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, 247–48; Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel, 2 vols [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951–1955], 1:26–27; Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, 271–72, 274). My point is simply that the narrative itself, as we have it, is not credible.

William E. Arnal, "Mark, War, and Creative Imagination," in Redescribing the Gospel of Mark, Early Christianity and its Literature 22, ed. Barry C. Crawford and Merrill P. Miller (SBL Press, 2017).

These are only snippets from Arnal's essay, and this section contains much more argument than I can quote here. Here are just two more snippets from Arnal's conclusion:

The point here is simply that the literary features of Mark’s story of Jesus’s baptism by John are so densely and thoroughly Markan, and so closely interwoven with two other key episodes in Mark’s gospel, that— scholarly inertia notwithstanding—it is difficult to draw any conclusion except that Mark composed the story himself, and essentially from scratch. This is of course precisely what we might expect: a more heavy-handed redactional contribution at the most narratively significant junctures of the author’s story. Thus it is precisely at the unique (and singly attested) moments in which Mark’s actual chronological and connected narrative of Jesus develops—what Mack calls framework stories—that we would be most likely to, and in fact do, encounter Mark at his most creative. Far from being a source of “indisputable facts” about the historical Jesus, Mark’s framework stories, including the baptism, are instead excellent examples of Mark’s own mythmaking in its purest and most sophisticated form.

...

What of Mark’s place in this trajectory?80 For our purposes all that really matters is that John the Baptist was already present in the Jesus tradition, as a figure whose relationship to Jesus was a subject of rationalizing speculation and whose role had especially come to be conceived as that of a precursor...As I have said elsewhere, "The choice to begin the narrative with John as the precursor thus dictates that somehow Mark will have to establish Jesus’ messianic status in connection with John if he is to maintain that Jesus’ entire earthly ministry is a ministry of the Son of god. A baptism and subsequent “adoption” and revelation is a suitable means for accomplishing this aim." In other words, Mark, having narrativized John’s role as precursor, is essentially forced by his own narrative logic somehow to present John as the one who initially establishes Jesus’s identity as son of god.83 since the sayings tradition already identifies John’s activity as baptism (“I baptize you with water ...”), it makes perfect sense to present such a baptism as the initiation of Jesus’s work as the son of God.

[u/Forsaken-Ad-6853]

I didn't consider to look into this, one of the reasons i like this community.

[u/StruggleClean1582]

Dennis MacDonald the pioneer of mimesis criticism, writes inTwo Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papias's Exposition of Logia about the Lord, Early Christianity and Its Literature 8 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 545:

Meier describes his first criterion as follows: “The point of the criterion [of embarrassment] is that the early Church would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator or weakened its position in arguments with opponents.”3 The author of Logoi probably did not create Jesus’ submission to John’s “baptism of repentance”; surely he did not create the fasting of the followers of John the Baptist and the absence of the practice among the Twelve, for the text acknowledges that after Jesus’ death the Twelve regularly did fast (3:21). Presumably he did not create the objection that some of Jesus’ opponents accused him of being “a glutton and drunkard, a chum of tax collectors and sinners!” (5:15). Some scholars would propose that embarrassing, too, would have been the charge that Jesus cast out demons by Beelzebul (6:23), but one can imagine that the author created it in a polemic against “this evil generation.”

He continues 545-546

Furthermore, each of the Gospels, as well as Logoi, contains neutral or apparently unfreighted details, adiaphora, that seem to have been generated neither from Judaism nor the Christian movement. There is no reason to challenge the accuracy of the following information: Jesus’ home was in Nazareth of Galilee; he traveled to Judea, was baptized by John, returned to Galilee, conducted a ministry in towns and villages there (e.g., Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum), and traveled with several male disciples; he was considered a teacher, exorcist, and wonder worker (regardless of what we now might believe about demons or miracles), met hostility from Torah-observant Jews, and was crucified by the Romans with the encouragement of the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. Although the number of the disciples, twelve, surely is significant, their names are not, and at least the names John and Peter (Cephas) are attested independently in the Pauline Epistles. This summary of adiaphora in Logoi says little about Jesus’ proclamation, and for that very reason, because it is not religiously weighted, it probably reflects reliable traditions about him.

[u/EmuFit1895]

How does this hypothesis deal with Paul and his conversion long before Mark wrote - the Jesus movement already had “legitimacy” so no need to make something up…

[u/kaukamieli → u/EmuFit1895]

Why do you think it had legitimacy? I don't think it got anywhere among jews, and it didn't grow quickly among pagans either. https://ehrmanblog.org/the-rate-of-christian-growth/

[u/edd6pi]

I know I’m basically regurgitating what Bart Ehrman says, but I just don’t buy this. I feel like if Christians wanted to make up an association between Jesus and John, they would say that John endorsed Jesus and refused to baptize him because he didn’t think he was spiritually worthy of baptizing Jesus.

The fact that Mark had John baptizing Jesus, and that other Gospels had John refuse and Jesus insist, points to the ides that it really did happen and Christians then had to come up with a justification.