The sixteenth episode of the third season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast is posted today (December 8th, 2019). You can listen to the episode right now and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

Show Notes

This episode is based on the story of John the Baptist as told in Matthew 3:1-12. It also makes reference to the story of the crossing of the Jordan in Joshua 3. (Click the references to read the original texts). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

John the Baptist

John the Baptist is a key character in the gospel stories of Jesus, but he also seems to have been a character that cause no small amount of consternation for the early church and the gospel writers.

John came before Jesus and is said to have baptized Jesus. This seemed to imply that John was somehow greater than Jesus, that John was the master and Jesus was the disciple. You can also almost feel the gospel writers squirm as they tell the story. According to the Gospel of Matthew, John tried to get out of baptizing Jesus, even explicitly saying that it should have been the other way around and only relenting when Jesus insisted. The Gospel of Luke goes out of its way to avoid actually saying that John baptized Jesus. Because of all this, the main concern in most Christian sources on John the Baptist is to figure out the relationship between the two figures.

As a result, we do not really have an evaluation of John’s ministry independent of its relationship to Jesus’. It is very hard for us to understand what it was that attracted people to John and what they thought they were doing by going out to where he was. In this episode, I have tried to put ourselves in the sandals of those people who gathered by the Jordan River and to understand what they might have been thinking.

Why was he at the Jordan?

I have long believed that the key to understanding John the Baptist has to do with three things above all: location, location, location. The practice of ritual immersion in water was not uncommon among Judeans at that time, but John hardly needed access to a river in order to carry out such a ritual. Jews commonly immersed themselves in ritual baths that were built for this purpose. So why did John insist that the ritual needed to be carried out in that particular location?

The Jordan River was clearly not just any river for the Judeans. It was a key part of Judean history. The prophet Elisha, for example, began his career as a prophet by separating the Jordan River and crossing over it. (2 Kings 2: 13-18). He later cured Naaman the Syrian of his leprosy in the waters of that same river. (2 Kings 5: 1-19)

But, by far, the most significant episode in the history of the people of Israel that occurred at the Jordan was the crossing of the river by the people at the beginning of the conquest of the land of Canaan by Joshua, an episode that the prophet Elisha may have intentionally re-enacted at the opening of his ministry. (Joshua 3)

Joshua crosses the Jordan

I believe the best explanation for John’s choice of location is that he was intentionally reenacting these stories that were part of the traditions of his people, particularly the story of the conquest in the Book of Joshua. The idea of the Jordan River as the ancient and sacred boundary of the land that God had promised to the children of Israel remained powerful throughout the entire history of the people in the land. To gather at that spot was to invoke that ancient story and apply it to the needs of the moment. By calling the people out of the land to the Jordan and taking the people through the water, John was calling on them to begin a new conquest of the Promised Land.

Baptism

The word baptism has a very particular meaning today. The word is only used in religious contexts or in metaphors (e.g. “baptism by fire”) that make reference to a religious context. All of this masks the fact that the word that is used in the gospel stories for what John did was the common everyday word for immersing something in water. It would be just as accurate to translate what John was doing as “dipping” and to call him “John the Dipper.” We need to be very cautious there for how about loading 2000 years of Christian understanding of a technical term, baptism, into what it was that John was doing at the Jordan.

Repentance

According to the evangelists, John’s main demand of the people was repentance. This also is a word that I feel is commonly misunderstood in the modern context. Most people today confuse repentance with contrition. They would define repentance as feeling bad or apologizing for past sins and errors. John’s main focus does not seem to have been on such things.

The English word repent comes from a Latin term which does have to do with feelings of regret, so the mistake is understandable. But the Greek word that is used in the Gospels and that is translated as repent is metanoia. Metanoia is not about how one feels about anything but rather about how one thinks. It refers to a change of mind which leads to a change in actions.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

“AhDah” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“The Descent” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/