The arrow through the window

I found this in my Drafts folder, last modified September 20, 2021, with the title “The second baptism.” I post it now, unfinished, for synchromystic reasons.

My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!

Elijah said unto Elisha, "Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee."

And Elisha said, "I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me."

And he said, "Thou hast asked a hard thing."

-- 2 Kings 2:9-10

But Jesus said unto them, "Ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"

And they said unto him, "We can."

And Jesus said unto them, "Ye shall indeed." 

-- Mark 10:38-39

John answered, saying unto them all, "I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire: whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable."

-- Luke 3:16-17

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The prophet John promised a baptism "with the Holy Ghost and with fire" and implicitly identified Jesus as the one who would perform it. I suppose orthodox opinion would connect this prophecy with the extraordinary manifestations that took place at the feast of Pentecost six months after Jesus' death, when "there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost" (Acts 2:3-4).

What did John have in mind, though? What could "Holy Ghost" even have meant to a pre-Christian? Well, ghost, spirit, and wind are all the same word in the original Greek, and the very next thing John says is "whose fan is in his hand." A holy wind to separate the wheat from the chaff, and then a fire to burn up the latter. (For what it's worth, a "rushing mighty wind" also figures in the Pentecost story.)

Wind and fire call to mind Elijah, carried away in a whirlwind of flame, and in fact John, in promising a fire to come after him, may have been thinking of his role (denied by himself but affirmed by Jesus) as the apocalyptic second coming of Elijah.

For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings . . . . Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord" (Mal. 4:1-2, 5).

As John has it, the fire is only for the "chaff," but Malachi and Acts tell a different story. For Malachi, the same fiery Sun that burns up the wicked will heal the righteous. The Christians at Pentecost were engulfed in flames but not consumed. The fire is universal; what differs is how people are affected by it.

"Ye shall conceive chaff, ye shall bring forth stubble: your breath, as fire, shall devour you. . . .Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly" (Isa. 33:11, 14-15). Breath, in Hebrew as in Greek, is the same word as wind or spirit. For Isaiah, too, the righteous are not spared the fire but are able to live in it. As some old writer cited only as J. Spencer once put it, "Such is the condition of all God's children, . . . true salamanders, that live best in the furnace." (Fellow Mormons can likely guess how I happen to know that quote!)

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When Elisha was on his deathbed (2 Kgs. 13), the king of Israel came to him and, through streaming tears and with trembling voice, repeated the words Elisha had uttered long before, at the assumption of Elijah: "O my father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof." Did he think this magic formula would call down the flaming whirlwind of God? Did he see something Elisha didn't? At any rate, no manifestation was forthcoming.

Elisha did not immediately respond, but then -- "Take bow and arrows," he said. "Put thine hand upon the bow, open the window eastward, and shoot."

The king did so.

"The arrow of the Lord's deliverance," breathed Elisha -- and though later writers were to embellish the scene, those were his last words.

They buried him. No whirlwind, no chariot of fire, no flaming horsemen. Another generation passes, and a little more magic passes from the world. "Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?"

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Jehanne Darc's surname evolved, after her death, into d'Arc -- "of Arc," that is, "of the Bow." A friend sent me the section on Joan of Arc from The Saint Book by Mary Reed Newland. It ends thus:

The pyre, unusually high so all could see, prevented the executioner from giving the customary coup de grâce to shorten her suffering and as the flames rose she cried, "Jesus, Jesus." An English soldier swore that he saw a white bird rise up out of the flames. He stood transfixed until his companions led him away.

What did the white bird mean? Was it her spirit leaving her body, in bird form like an Egyptian ba? No, it was the Dove, and its meaning was that here was another baptism like that of Jesus, but this time by fire. Its implicit message, delivered in the age-old language of signa ex avibus, was, "This is my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name." (Does that parallel strike you as blasphemous? But why should it? Do you really think Jesus never intended for anyone to follow him?)

The original Dove that flew over Jesus' baptismal waters echoed the dove of Noah flying over the flooded earth. After the Flood, the rainbow -- l'arc-en-ciel, the arc in heaven -- was given as a sign that the earth would never again be flooded. Because, according to later tradition, the next Deluge would not be water but fire. What can survive a deluge? Only an ark. Is it a coincidence that Jeanne d'Arc

And there the draft ends. I would complete it now, but the thing is gone from me.

Was baptism an ordeal?

In "John the Drowner," I mention Rupert Sheldrake's theory that the baptisms performed by John involved holding a person underwater almost to the point of death, the goal being to effect a spiritual transformation by inducing a near-death experience. If Sheldrake is correct, it would mean baptism was an intensely traumatic experience -- a form of torture, really -- but that some were brave enough to undergo it willingly because of the promised spiritual enlightenment.

Is there anything in the Gospels to support such an extraordinary view?

One of the few hints I can find of baptism as an ordeal is in Mark 10, and the parallel passage in Matthew 20. James and John have just asked to sit on Jesus' right and left hand in his glory.

But Jesus said unto them, "Ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"

And they said unto him, "We can."

 And Jesus said unto them, "Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized: But to sit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine to give; but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared" (Mark 10:38-40).

The clear import of Jesus' question is, "Are you prepared to endure the ordeals that I will have to endure?" -- and the metaphors he chose to convey this are those of drinking from a cup and submitting to baptism.

The cup metaphor appears to have been a common one. Several Old Testament prophecies portray the Lord as punishing people by figuratively making them drink from a cup. (See, for example, Isaiah 51, Jeremiah 25, and Jeremiah 49.) Just before his betrayal and execution, Jesus famously prayed, "O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done" (Matt. 26:42). When Simon Peter tried to defend him with a sword, Jesus said, "Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" (John 18:11).

Baptism as such was something relatively new and could hardly have become a stock metaphor like that of the cup of wrath. Nevertheless, Jesus knew that James and John would understand his meaning; it was natural for them to connect baptism with the idea of an awful ordeal.

John's "baptism of fire" metaphor also suggests baptism as an ordeal.

And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire (Matt. 3:10-12).

The meaning of this fiery baptism is disputed, but at least in Matthew's version, the context strongly suggests that "baptize you with fire" means "burn you up," like chaff or like a barren tree.

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Against this idea that baptism was traumatic, we have the fact that it was so enormously popular. Luke 3:7 says a "multitude" came to be baptized. According to Mark 1:5, "there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan." We might imagine an extraordinary person like Jesus submitting to a death-defying ordeal -- after all, he followed up his baptism with a David Blaine-like 40-day fast! -- but the entire population of Judaea and Jerusalem? There have admittedly been occasional "crazes" for self-flagellation and the like (see the Convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard), but nothing on this scale.

And, speaking of that 40-day fast, Matthew tells us that "Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water" and then marched out into the wilderness to fast for 40 days and be tested by the devil. Whereas, if Jesus' baptism had actually been a drowning, John would have dragged his unconscious body out of the water and resuscitated him, and Jesus would have lain gasping on the shore, coughing the Jordan up out of his lungs, and certainly in no condition to set off on a 40-day camping trip with no food.

More to the point, though, the whole idea of John drowning people in order to produce near-death experiences is ridiculous. NDEs are not at all common, and in fact are essentially a modern phenomenon, made possible by modern medicine's ability to bring people back from deeper and deeper states. You have to bring someone very, very close to death for an NDE to occur, and obviously if you deliberately try to do that, you're going to end up killing the person more often than not. Can you imagine wanting to have an NDE of your own and asking a friend to hold you underwater until you seemed almost dead and then bring you back up and resuscitate you? Isn't it obvious that this would be a criminally insane thing to do -- that you would be very unlikely to experience an NDE and very likely to just die, in which case your friend would be guilty of murder?

John had enemies, and he eventually ended up in prison -- but only for the crime of criticizing the marital irregularities of the Herods. When he was finally executed, it was not for any capital crime he was accused of, but to satisfy the whim of a vengeful woman. If John had really been doing what Sheldrake suggests, he would have had victims, lots of them, and it would have been trivially easy for his enemies to have him put to death for murder. That they did not do so -- and that the Pharisees were afraid even to criticize him because of his popularity with the people -- strongly suggests that he wasn't doing anything like that.

John, the Bear Witness

Certain biblical figures have their counterparts in the starry sky, though it sometimes takes some ingenuity to recognize them. John P. Pratt, for example, identifies Simon Peter with the constellation Cygnus because the pricipal stars of Cygnus form the Northern Cross asterism, with the Swan's head being the base of the Cross, and Simon Peter was crucified upside down, with his head at the base of the cross.

John the Baptist's asterism is, obviously, the Big Dipper -- baptize coming from the Greek word that means "to dip." In Britain, the Dipper is called the Plough, but this also fits. Jesus compared himself to a sower, and John prepared the way for him. The most important thing about this asterism, though, is the way it points to the North Star. Polaris, appearing from Earth as a central, unmoving star around which all the others revolve, makes for an apt symbol of Christ; and John, who said, "Behold the Lamb of God," is often represented in art as literally pointing to Christ or to a symbol of Christ.

Note that in the painting above, the cross is placed at the top of a circle. This is the familiar globus cruciger imagery, symbolizing Christ's dominion over the whole Earth -- imagery which places the cross at the North Pole and thus associates Christ with Polaris.

It is also appropriate that Polaris is part of the Little Dipper asterism. Luke represents John as being Jesus' elder cousin, i.e. related to Jesus but "bigger."

The Big Dipper asterism is part of the Great Bear constellation. Here is how the Fourth Gospel introduces John.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

This could be dismissed as nothing but a bit of meaningless homonymy in English, but consider how John is described in Matthew and Mark: as wearing a hairy garment and eating wild honey. Is this not ursine imagery?

I have noted before that when Jesus said that he would give no sign but the sign of Jonah, this could have had a double meaning, because Jonah means "dove." After writing my "John the Drowner" post, I realized that Jesus' baptism -- the occasion at which the sign of the dove appeared -- specifically echoed the story of Jonah. Just as Jonah asked to be thrown overboard into the sea, in the expectation that he would be drowned, so Jesus yielded (as Roger Hathaway put it) "to the flood of drowning water." Whether or not John literally held Jesus underwater until he almost died, as Rupert Sheldrake speculates, the symbolism is certainly there. The "sign of the prophet Jonas" was thus enacted in two different ways at Jesus' baptism.

I have also recently connected Jonah's whale with the bear, comparing Jonah to Little Red Riding Hood who was swallowed by the "big bad wolf" (bear) but came out alive. I also mentioned Darwin's much-ridiculed story about seeing a bear swimming around with its mouth open catching insects and  speculating that whales may have originated in some such way. Darwin thus connects the whale not only with the bear but specifically with an insect-eating bear -- suggesting the insectivorous John, who supplemented his diet of wild honey with locusts.

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Note added: An old slave song refers to the Big Dipper as the "Drinking Gourd," so there's another Jonah connection.

And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered (Jonah 4:6-7).

Note that Jonah's gourd was "over his head" like the stars and disappeared "when the morning rose the next day," also like the stars. Not that I think the author of the Book of Jonah had stars in mind, of course; it's just another synchronistic link.

John the Drowner

Yesterday morning, I read this passage in Roger Hathaway's The Mystic Passion.

When Jesus went through the drowning of his human self, before John the Baptist, He knew the significance of yielding to the flood of drowning water, and that is why God spoke and said He was well pleased. Most of the people that John was baptizing were having their sins washed away, experiencing a cleansing, but Jesus was yielding the human nature to a death.

I found this striking because, though I have often heard baptism described as a symbolic death and resurrection, the figurative language tends to focus on burial ("buried in the waters of baptism"); I had never heard anyone call it a drowning before.

On the evening of the same day, I received an email with a link to a YouTube video of a conversation between John Butler and Rupert Sheldrake, and I watched most of it. Beginning at the 14:29 mark, Sheldrake proposes that John the Baptist was literally drowning people.

And I personally like John the Baptist because I think John the Baptist was really involved in powerful rites of passage. Basically, I think he was a drowner, and I think he held people under in the Jordan just long enough to induce a near-death experience by drowning.

And as you know, people who've had near-death experiences often say their lives totally changed. They've gone out of their body. They've gone into a totally different realm full of joy and light and meet dead people who are now gloriously resplendent with light, and they love being there, but they have to come back because it's only a near-death experience. And many of them have their lives changed by this. They've died, and they've been born again.

Now that's exactly what John the Baptist was doing to people. We know he was holding them underwater, not sprinkling them with water. He was actually holding him underwater by total immersion. They were transformed by this process, and it's usually considered to be just symbolic. But my view is, Why would you do something that's just symbolic when just for another minute or two underwater you could have the real thing, a near-death experience?

And I think our Lord had that at the baptism, which is when the first moment of the revelation to him of his divine affinity was, according to the account in the New Testament. So I think John the Baptist was an initiator who was leading people through a life-transforming rite of passage.

I'm not sure what I think about Sheldrake's theory, but it was quite a coincidence to run into such similar descriptions of Jesus' baptism in a single day like that.

The meaning of birds

Augury -- interpreting the behavior of birds -- is one of the oldest and most widespread forms of divination. It still survives in 21st-century Taiwan; I have seen a night-market fortune-teller interpret the hops and pecks of a tame sparrow.

Is it just an old superstition, or is there something in it? Are birds, those enigmatic little creatures with the blood of ancient dragons in their veins, perhaps a little magical?

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We once experienced a very clear bird-omen. My wife was at the home of a family whose daughters she tutored, and after one of these classes she was standing in the courtyard chatting with their mother. While teaching, she had felt that there was a "weird vibe" in the house, though everything seemed outwardly normal.

While they were talking, a large night heron suddenly appeared out of nowhere, flew full-speed into the concrete wall of the house, and fell down at their feet dead, its neck broken. There was no apparent explanation for this behavior. Birds flying into windows is normal, but concrete walls?

Days later, that family just imploded. I won't give any details here, but it was very, very bad.

Was the suicidal heron just an example of the broader phenomenon of omen or synchronicity, or is there something about birds as such? When my wife reported a "weird vibe," had she just subconsciously picked up on subtle changes in the behavior of the family members, or was it really something more like a literal vibration -- some ambient energy-like field that had become (to borrow a delightful word from those zany Scientologists) "enturbulated" -- something that birds, a sensitive lot, would react to?

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And what of the Spirit that descended "like a dove" on Jesus? I was taught in (Mormon) Sunday school that there was no actual dove involved, that the Spirit had merely descended "as gently as a dove" or something like that -- but I no longer believe that. Do doves have some specially distinctive way of descending? Spirits as such are not visible, but John the Baptist must have seen something, and the plain meaning of his words is that what he saw was a dove. Was the dove a hallucination induced by the Spirit as a means of communication? More likely, I think, an actual flesh-and-blood dove descended on Jesus, and John -- a prophet living in a culture that accepted ornithomancy as a matter of course -- interpreted the auspices correctly.

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Just after writing an earlier version of the above paragraph, I went out to get my motorcycle. As I approached the machine, a red turtle dove suddenly fluttered up from it, circled me once, and flew away. I'm going to play auspex here and call that a confirmation of my thoughts.

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A further synchronicity: While I was in the process of writing this post, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and found this comment from one Tom Hart (see this post):

You cannot underestimate how far people are trapped in modernity. I once watched a nationalist pagan Youtuber who, while talking about population genetics on his computer, noted that an owl had landed on a branch outside his window the night before. For an ancient pagan this would have been an event of enormous import, the only thing worth talking about; the birds were messengers from the gods and augury was central to paganism. But the Youtuber, despite identifying as anti-modern and totally primal, rejecting even Christianity as too modern, mentioned the owl in passing--as if it were a curious and mildly interesting fact. The population genetics on his screen were much more important and real to him, and so he spurned a divine messenger.

Even people who have taken a conscious step out of modernity are still consumed by its frame of reference; when they see a bird, they don't see a sign--just a wildlife fact.

Notes on John 3:31-36

This section could conceivably be a continuation of the quote from John the Baptist which begins in v. 27, but I think this is highly unlikely. The only real evidence in favor of that reading is the reference to the "wrath of God" in v.36 (on which more below). Leaving aside that one line, everything in this passage echoes what has been said earlier in the same chapter by Jesus and by the author, and none of it sounds natural in the mouth of John the Baptist. I take it that this is the author writing in his own voice again, as in vv. 13-21.

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[31] He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is above all.

The Greek word (ἄνωθεν) that is translated as "from above" here is the same one that is rendered "again" in v. 3: "Except a man be born again [or 'born from above'], he cannot see the kingdom of God." (A similar sort of polysemy exists in English, as when we speak of doing something "all over again," "from the top.") The two different translations seem right in their respective contexts, since Nicodemus's reply ("Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb?") clearly has reference to being born again, whereas v. 31 is about "he that cometh from heaven." Nevertheless, v. 31 is almost certainly intended to allude both to "he that came down from heaven" (v. 13) and to the importance of being "born again" (v. 3).

A strictly literal translation would be "he that is from the earth, is from the earth, and speaketh from the earth" ("ἐκ τῆς γῆς," repeated three times), and the immediate context suggests that Jesus is being contrasted with John. As great as John is, he is still "from the earth" and speaks from that perspective.

Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, "Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he" (Matthew 11:11). While I use Matthew with caution, considering it the least reliable of the Gospels, I consider this to be an authentic saying, on the grounds that Matthew would never have put such problematic (from the Matthean perspective) words in Jesus' mouth. While Matthew and Luke deny that Jesus had a biological father, their fanciful nativity stories would still include Jesus "among them that are born of women" -- and thus, according to Matthew 11:11, not greater than John the Baptist.

The Fourth Gospel shows us the correct interpretation of Matthew 11:11. Jesus was "from heaven" not because there was anything unusual about the circumstances of his biological birth -- he was a son of man, born of a woman -- but because he had been born again, born from above, born of the spirit, born of God. Though John was the one who recognized this transformation in Jesus -- seeing the Spirit of God descend on him and stay -- he was apparently not "born again" himself. John represents the highest peaks of holiness attainable without being born again. In a way, we might think of him as Jesus' "Virgil" -- his role being analogous to the one given to that poet in Dante's Comedy. (In fact, if we substitute Virgil's name for John's in Matthew 11:11, doesn't it ring just as true? It is perhaps what Jesus would have said had he been born a Roman rather than a Jew.)

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[32] And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth; and no man receiveth his testimony. [33] He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God is true.

This echoes what Jesus says to Nicodemus: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness" (v. 11). "Testimony" and "witness" translate the same Greek word (μαρτυρίαν). This is further evidence that this passage is the author writing in his own voice; John the Baptist was not privy to Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus and could not have quoted it.

Immediately after "no man receiveth his testimony" comes a statement about "he that hath received his testimony"! How to resolve this obvious contradiction?

The most natural interpretation is to read v. 32 as a bit of commonplace hyperbole, actually meaning something like "very few receive his testimony." Greek reference works (qv) seem not to countenance such a reading, though. We are told that οὐδείς (translated as "no man," but more literally "no one and nothing") "'shuts the door' objectively and leaves no exceptions," that it "categorically excludes, declaring as a fact that no valid example exists." A negation that was qualified in any way would use μηδείς rather than οὐδείς. In other words, v. 32 means "no one at all receives his testimony" -- not the sort of expression that would be used hyperbolically.

Could v. 33 be counterfactual ("Anyone who received his testimony would be setting to his seal...")? I don't think so, since it is in the indicative mood. What then can it mean?

"Set to his seal that God is true" means "confirmed that God is truthful or trustworthy." So perhaps the meaning is that Jesus' claims are so extraordinary that no one at all takes Jesus' word for it that they are true. Whoever seems to be "receiving his testimony" -- i.e., believing what he says because he says it -- actually believes not because of Jesus' testimony but because God has confirmed the truth to them directly. "He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me." (John 12:44; cf. Matthew 10:40, Mark 9:37, and Luke 9:48, all of which have "receive" in place of "believe on").

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[34] For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. [35] The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand.

"My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me" (John 7:16). The idea of Jesus having been "sent" by God is characteristic of the Fourth Gospel, occurring only in a few isolated passages of the Synoptics.

For "not . . . by measure" read "without measure." Others have been inspired, but only Jesus was fully inspired, to the extent that his words were the words of God.

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[36] He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.

The first clause is simply a restatement of v. 16. The final part, about "the wrath of God" seems out of place. It is the only occurrence of the word "wrath" (ὀργὴ) in the Fourth Gospel, and one of only five occurrences in the Gospels as a whole. Mark 3:5 has Jesus look around with anger at those who would criticize him for healing a man on the Sabbath, and Luke 21:23 has Jesus speak of "great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people" as part of an apocalyptic prophecy. The other two instances quote John the Baptist execrating the Pharisees and Sadducees who had come to be baptized: "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" (Matthew and Luke 3:7).

All in all, this does seem to be language more typical of John the Baptist than of the author of the Fourth Gospel, and some commentators do read all of vv. 27-36 as a quotation from John. For the reasons given above, I stand by my opinion that vv. 31-36 are the author's own words and not John's, but the context does render probable an allusion to John and his distinctive way of speaking. Perhaps we should imagine quotation marks around the last clause. He that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but -- as John, speaking "from the earth," would put it -- "the wrath of God abideth on him." This is the sort of thing I often do in my own writing -- quoting or alluding to someone made salient by context even when it means using phraseology with which I would normally have reservations -- so I can easily imagine the evangelist doing the same thing.

Notes on John 3:22-30

[22] After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judaea; and there he tarried with them, and baptized.

"These things" apparently refers to Jesus' interaction with Nicodemus, which seems to have taken place in Jerusalem. At any rate, Jesus was in Jerusalem just prior to the Nicodemus incident, and there is not mention of a scene change. Jerusalem is also where we would expect to find "a ruler of the Jews."

Jerusalem, of course, is in Judaea, so I assume what is meant is that they went into "upstate" Judaea, so to speak -- into the surrounding land, as opposed to the city of Jerusalem.

Although this verse describes Jesus as baptizing, John 4:2 clarifies that "Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples." Jesus baptized in the same sense that Nelson defeated the French at Trafalgar: by directing the activities of those under him.

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[23] And John also was baptizing in Aenon near to Salim, because there was much water there: and they came, and were baptized.

The places named appear nowhere else in the Bible and cannot be identified with any confidence, though of course that doesn't stop them from appearing on maps of "the Holy Land in the Time of Christ"! All we know is that "there was much water there" and -- based on John's disciples' speaking in v. 26 of "beyond Jordan" as somewhere else  -- that it was a Cisjordanian location. We might possibly assume, given that the whole length of a river has "much water," that it was some distance from the Jordan and that the "much water" had some other source. Indeed, Aenon may be derived from a Semitic word meaning "spring."

The implied need for "much water" in order to baptize has been cited as evidence that John baptized by immersion. I formerly took it for granted that this was indeed the original method of baptism, but as I explain in my notes on John 1, John 1:25 implies that the baptism of John was the sort of thing that the Messiah, Elijah, and the prophet like unto Moses were expected to do -- and the Old Testament connects all three of these figures with sprinkling rather than immersion.

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[24] For John was not yet cast into prison.

Both Mark (1:14) and Matthew (4:12-17) state that Jesus did not begin preaching until after John was cast into prison. Luke's chronology is unclear on this point. The Fourth Gospel alone has John and Jesus both preaching and baptizing at the same time, independently of one another and almost as if in competition. Which chronology is more likely to be correct?

It is a widely accepted principle of biblical criticism that, ceteris paribus, the more embarrassing an incident would be for those who recorded it, the more likely the record is to be true -- since, when people massage the facts, it is generally in order to make them more favorable and less embarrassing. By that standard, the Johannine account seems more likely to be true than the Synoptic version. It is certainly potentially embarrassing that John the Baptist, who was widely regarded as an exceptionally great and holy man, and who certainly knew of Jesus, never actually became one of his disciples. Mark (and Matthew, who relies on Mark) solve this by saying that Jesus didn't start preaching until after John was imprisoned, and that John thus never had the opportunity of becoming his disciple. The Fourth Gospel admits what was probably the truth: that John, despite having earlier hailed Jesus as the "Lamb of God," continued his own prophetic and baptismal ministry without deferring to Jesus' superior authority or becoming one of his followers.

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[25] Then there arose a question between some of John's disciples and the Jews about purifying.

The two parties to this dispute were "John's disciples" and "the Jews." Since John's disciples surely were Jews in the religious sense, I think we must read the latter designation as "Judaeans" (or "a Judaean"; the Greek is ambiguous). When we first meet the Baptist in John 1, he is baptizing "beyond Jordan" -- i.e., in Perea or the Decapolis -- rather than in Judaea, so it seems likely that he and most of his disciples hailed from those parts and were not citizens of Judaea.

The fact that John's disciples encountered Judaeans suggests that perhaps Aenon and Salim were located in Judaea. (Bible maps generally place them in Samaria or in the Cisjordanian Decapolis.) On the other hand, these "Jews" may have been a delegation of Pharisees sent from Jerusalem, like the similar delegation described in John 1.

I suppose that the question "about purifying" had to do with the baptism of John and its relationship to Jewish ritual cleansing.

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[26] And they came unto John, and said unto him, Rabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou barest witness, behold, the same baptizeth, and all men come to him. [27] John answered and said, A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven.

"They" means John's disciples (they call him Rabbi), perhaps accompanied by the Judaean(s) with whom they had been arguing.

The meaning of John's reply -- "A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven" -- is not clear (or perhaps it seems unclear to me simply because I disagree with it). The most natural reading is that everything that is done, is done, or at least countenanced, by God. If Jesus is baptizing, then God must approve of his baptizing. If all men come to him, he must deserve to have all men come to him. It would appear to be a similar sentiment to that expressed by Paul: "For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13:1). Or perhaps more like that of the Pharisee Gamaliel: "Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it" (Acts 5:38-39).

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[28] Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him.

When the Pharisees had implied that baptism was the prerogative of the Messiah, Elijah, and the prophet like unto Moses, John denied being any of the three. The implication was that other, greater baptists would come after him. It is therefore no cause for alarm when another baptist does in fact appear and draws greater crowds of followers even than John.

John had already said that Jesus was the "Lamb of God" and one "who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose"; here he implies more: that Jesus may be the Messiah himself.

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[29] He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom's voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled. [30] He must increase, but I must decrease.

What is the meaning of the bridegroom metaphor used here? Bruce Charlton, who believes that the wedding at Cana described in John 2 was Jesus' own, takes John's statement fairly literally, as a reference to the fact that Jesus had recently gotten married. I don't personally find this a very plausible reading. Confronted with the fact that "all men" are coming to Jesus to be baptized, why would John respond by saying, in effect, "Well, you see, he's just gotten married; I haven't"? Jesus is the Messiah because he's married? Lots of people are married.

If the bridegroom metaphor has any specific meaning -- if it is anything more than just a general reference to rejoicing in another's success -- then I think Jesus' "having the bride" must refer to the fact that the people are flocking to him. (In the Old Testament, the Israelite nation is often described as the bride of the Lord, and any backsliding into polytheism is compared to marital infidelity.) "He that hath the bride is the bridegroom" seems to mean that whoever in fact has the woman thereby has the right to have her -- a restatement of John's belief that "a man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven." From the fact that people are following Jesus we can conclude that they should be.

If this is in fact what John is saying, it seems obviously wrong to me. People (sufficiently large numbers of Frenchmen excluded) can be wrong and have often flocked to false teachers. I would like to think, then, that John must have meant something else, but I can't think what.

The Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world

Josefa de Óbidos, The Sacrifical Lamb (c. 1680)

When John the Baptist saw Jesus, he said, "Behold the Lambe of God, which taketh away the sinne of the world" (John 1:29).

The standard interpretation is that John is alluding to the sacrificial rites of the Old Testament -- particularly the "sin-offerings" detailed in Leviticus 4, in which animals were ritually slaughtered in order to obtain forgiveness for sins. Jesus, then, would be the ultimate sacrificial animal, and when the Romans executed him they were unwittingly playing the role of the Levitical priest who slits the victim's throat, sprinkles its blood about, and burns its fat and some of its internal organs on the altar, somehow effecting thereby the forgiveness of sins. On this view, the crucifixion of Christ was not merely an execution, nor even a martyrdom, but an act of ritual human sacrifice to appease the wrath of God. (Fortunately the Roman soldiers were not aware that they were participating in such a monstrous ritual. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.")

John, then, was saying, "Behold the sacrificial victim of God, whose death will bring about the forgiveness of all the sins committed in the world."

This interpretation of John is, I think, unacceptable. It makes no logical or moral sense to say that God's forgiveness can be obtained through blood sacrifice, whether animal or human -- or that a blood sacrifice "counts" when the victim only stays dead for a single weekend -- or that the greatest and most effective sacrificial ritual should be performed not by God's consecrated priests, but by the soldiers of a brutal pagan empire who didn't even realize that what they were doing had any religious significance. Suppose Genghis Khan sacked a village, killed all the livestock, and burned the place to the ground. Could we expect anyone's sins to be forgiven as a result of such an incident, on the grounds that it constituted an unwitting sin-offering? But we might as well believe that as that the blackguards and barbarians who put Christ to death were unknowingly officiating in the greatest priestly ritual of all time.

Any acceptable reading of John's words must do better than this.

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Bruce Charlton, who has made the Fourth Gospel a special object of study, resulting in an interpretation that is unique, insightful, and thought-provoking, has this to say about the passage we are considering.

A man emerges, Jesus - who is instantly recognised, on sight, by John the Baptist as being the Messiah: the Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world. When John baptises him, John perceives that the Spirit of God does not only touch and depart, as usual; but uniquely stays with this man: Jesus has become divine. 

What does it mean that Jesus would 'take away' sin? Sin seems to mean all the transitory nature of satisfaction in this world, the corruptions, the selfishness, that which contributes to the recurrent sense that life is travail and loss. Jesus will take away Mortality and all its badness, all that we know in our hearts to be intrinsically wrong about life.

I had never before considered that "the sin of the world" might mean anything other than "all the moral vices and crimes of which the people of the world are guilty," so Bruce's fresh perspective is very valuable. I think it's a very defensible reading, especially considering that John says "the sin [singular] of the world" rather than, say, "the sins of the people." A strictly literal translation of the Greek would be something like "the way in which the cosmos misses its mark" -- an apt enough description of "mortality and all its badness."

Taking away mortality and all its badness also sounds like something that Jesus could conceivably do -- a tremendous miracle, but a logically admissible one -- whereas taking away the moral shortcomings of all the people in the world does not. If I am sinful, how could anything anyone else can do, even in principle, change that fact? At best, the punishment of sins could be taken away, which is all that the sacrificial animals of the Old Testament religion were supposed to do.

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Which brings us back to John's problematic declaration. Even if we reconceptualize "taking away the sin of the world," we are still stuck with his sacrificial-animal metaphor. In what logically and morally acceptable sense can Jesus be considered the equivalent of a sacrificial victim?

Something I discovered when preparing my notes on John 1 is that male lambs -- the animals indicated by John's Greek -- were never in fact used as sin offerings.

According to the regulations laid out in Leviticus 4 for sin offerings (presumably what is being alluded to), a bullock is offered if a priest or the whole congregation has sinned; a male kid if the ruler has sinned; and a female kid or lamb if a commoner has sinned. In no case is a male lamb offered as a sin offering, and even a female lamb seems to be a sort of second option if a kid is not available. Why then did John choose a lamb? Why did he not call Jesus the Bullock of God (the closest fit for taking away the sins of the world) or the Kid of God?

In that post I merely raised the question without attempting to answer it. I think now that the answer is that, despite the bit about "taking away the sin of the world," John was not alluding to sin offerings. Instead he was (obviously!) alluding to a different sacrificial ritual -- the one that all the Gospels associate most closely with Jesus' death -- namely, the Passover (Exodus 12). The Passover victim, unlike that for a sin-offering, was a male lamb. And the blood of the Paschal lamb was shed, not to obtain forgiveness for moral misdeeds or for infractions of the Mosaic law, but to cause the destroyer to pass over. The fate of the Egyptians -- "there was not a house where there was not one dead" -- is the fate of everyone in this broken world, but the Passover made it possible to escape that fate -- to be passed over by the destroying angel, and to be delivered from that death-cursed land into a better country. This is a much better metaphor for what Jesus did than are the sin-offerings of Leviticus.