I’ve always said that three things have influenced my writing the most: Cormac McCarthy, Columbian cocaine, and the Gospel of Mark. The first two are self explanatory. The last requires a college dissertation.
The Gospel According to Mark is my favorite ancient text. It’s weird. It’s esoteric. And I believe it caused a massive shitstorm when it reached the ears of early Christians. For those who don’t know, Mark is the oldest surviving Gospel. Matthew and Luke made liberal use of it. And it is thus seen as the first ancient “biography” of Yeshua aka Jesus of Nazareth aka Jesus ‘H’ Christ. Sure, it is attributed to a guy named “Mark” but no one actually knows who wrote it and where and why it was written. At first glance, you might think it was composed poorly in Greek. Yet if you move through the text with that assumption, the author will make you look like a fool (which you are). But for ears willing to listen, Mark packs one thematic punch after another. It’s on par with any of the other shit floating around the Greco Roman world at the time.
But I think it was controversial. Like all good art, people weren’t ready for it. After all, there’s a reason why two other versions of the same story were composed 10 to 30 years later (Matthew and Luke. Plus John if you think there’s a synoptic relation). They had to explain some of the “problems” that Mark posed.
And the first problem is that of John the Baptist. John was apparently a real guy. The historian Josephus discusses him roughly 20 years after Mark. There’s a lot of academic speculation about what Jesus’s relationship to John was. Was Jesus a follower? Was he high up in John’s movement? Or was he merely passing by the Jordan River when he decided to get baptized by the preacher? It is common for scholars to declare Jesus’s baptism by John as an actual historical event. And why do they think this? The answer is something called the “criterion of embarrassment.” Mark states that John preached baptism for the repentance of sin, leading one to wonder what sins Jesus committed. Sounds like blasphemy, eh? It makes no sense. What’s funny is that Josephus states that this is specifically NOT the reason why John preached baptism. Nevertheless, John baptizes Jesus and, as Mark writes, he came up out of the water and “a Spirit” “descended” “upon” “him” “like” “a” “dove” and said “thou art my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” (or something like that). A clear reading of this would lead one to believe that Jesus was “adopted” as God’s son and his powers only activated after John’s baptism. Keep in mind, there is no birth narrative in Mark. This is literally Jesus’s first appearance and I’m assuming that this was a big ass problem because “birth narratives” were subsequently added to later canonical gospels. Therefore, theoretically, you can read in Mark that Jesus was a normal living sinner before his encounter with John.
Hence the “embarrassment”. Mind you I don’t think that criterion of embarrassment is sufficient enough to establish the baptism as a historical fact. Through this reading, it’s possible that the author of Mark (or his sources) was using John’s movement as a way to legitimize his own nascent Jesus movement.
Nevertheless, I think it’s an odd story to include. As mentioned, Mark was written in Greek. Presumably this meant it was written for a mostly gentile audience abroad and not for the Aramaic-speaking followers of Judaism in Palestine. There’s a very low chance of a Greek speaker in Thessaloniki during the 1st century CE, for example, having ever heard of John the Baptist. If one wanted to extol Jesus’s authority as the son of god, I imagine it would behove one to excise the story altogether. In fact, if you recall, baptism plays no role in the rest of Mark. Jesus baptizes no one. In my view, the best possible reason to include this story is because John’s movement was interwoven, somehow, with Jesus’s ministry and it was too big of a fact to ignore. And Mark, without the development of higher Christology by later Proto-Orthadox churches, simply didn’t see this as an “embarrassment.” I think that this is a better argument for Jesus’s baptism by John as a historical fact.