Note 19 — Chapter I · RELATIONS BETWEEN JESUS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST.

While from the account of Luke it appears that the divine call came to John in the wilderness, ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ, but that for the purpose of teaching and baptizing he resorted to the country about Jordan, περίχωρος τοῦ Ἰορδάνου (ver. 3); Matthew (iii. ff.) makes the wilderness of Judea the scene of his labours, as if the Jordan in which he baptized flowed through that wilderness. It is true that, according to Josephus, the Jordan before emptying itself into the Dead Sea traverses a great wilderness, πολλὴν ἐρημίαν,19 but this was not the wilderness of Judea, which lay farther south.20 Hence it has been supposed that Matthew, misled by his application of the prophecy, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ, to John, who issued from the wilderness of Judea, ἔρημος τῆς Ἰουδαίας, placed there his labours as a preacher of repentance and a baptizer, although their true scene was the blooming valley of the Jordan.21 In the course of Luke’s narrative, however, this evangelist ceases to intimate that John forsook the wilderness after receiving his call, for on the occasion of John’s message to Jesus, he makes the latter ask, Whom went ye out into the wilderness to see? Τί ἐξεληλύθατε εἰς τὴν ἔρημον θεάσασθαι (vii. 24). Now as the valley of the Jordan in the vicinity of the Dead Sea was in fact a barren plain, the narrow margin of the river excepted, no greater mistake may belong to Matthew than that of specifying the wilderness as the ἔρημος τῆς Ἰουδαίας; and even that may be explained away by the supposition, either that John, as he alternately preached and baptized, passed from the wilderness of Judea to the borders of the Jordan,22 or that the waste tract through which that river flowed, being a continuation of the wilderness of Judea, retained the same name.23