Note 74 — Chapter I · RELATIONS BETWEEN JESUS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST.

This scene, peculiar to the fourth gospel, in which John rejects the title of Elias, with several others, demands a yet closer examination, and must be compared with a narrative in Luke (iii. 15), to which it has a striking similarity. In Luke, the crowd assembled round the Baptist begin to think: Is not this the Christ? μήποτε αὐτὸς εἴη ὁ Χριστός· in John, the deputies of the Sanhedrim74 ask him, Who art thou? σὺ τίς εἶ; which we infer from the Baptist’s answer to mean: “Art thou, as is believed, the Messiah?”75 According to Luke, the Baptist answers, I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose. According to John he gives a similar reply: I baptize with water; but there standeth one among you whom ye know not; He it is who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoes’ latchet I am not worthy to unloose: the latter Evangelist adding his peculiar propositions concerning the pre-existence of Jesus, and deferring to another occasion (v. 33) the mention of the Messiah’s spiritual baptism, which Luke gives in immediate connexion with the above passage. In Luke, and still more decidedly in John, this whole scene is introduced with a design to establish the Messiahship of Jesus, by showing that the Baptist had renounced that dignity, and attributed it to one who should come after him. If at the foundation of two narratives so similar, there can scarcely be more than one fact,76 the question is, which gives that fact the most faithfully? In Luke’s account there is no intrinsic improbability; on the contrary it is easy to imagine, that the people, congregated round the man who announced the Messiah’s kingdom, and baptized with a view to it, should, in moments of enthusiasm, believe him to be the Messiah. But that the Sanhedrim should send from Jerusalem to John on the banks of the Jordan, for the sake of asking him whether he were the Messiah, seems less natural. Their object could only be what, on a later occasion, it was with respect to Jesus (Matt. xxi. 23 ff.), namely, to challenge the authority of John to baptize, as appears from v. 25. Moreover, from the hostile position which John had taken towards the sects of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matt. iii. 7), to whom the members of the Sanhedrim belonged, they must have prejudged that he was not the Messiah, nor a prophet, and consequently, that he had no right to undertake a βάπτισμα. But in that case, they could not possibly have so put their questions as they are reported to have done in the fourth gospel. In the passage from Mathew above cited, they asked Jesus, quite consistently with their impression that he had no prophetic authority: ἐν ποίᾳ ἐξουσίᾳ ταῦτα ποιεῖς; By what authority doest thou these things? but in John, they question the Baptist precisely as if they pre-supposed him to be the Messiah, and when he, apparently to their consternation, has denied this, they tender him successively the dignities of Elias, and of another prophetic forerunner, as if they earnestly wished him to accept one of these titles. Searching opponents will not thus thrust the highest honours on the man to whom they are inimical;—this is the representation of a narrator who wishes to exhibit the modesty of the man, and his subordination to Jesus, by his rejection of those brilliant titles. To enable him to reject them, they must have been offered; but this could in reality only be done by well-wishers, as in Luke, where the conjecture that the Baptist was the Messiah is attributed to the people.