^{page 263 note 1} This may not be strictly true; for in his initial description of John it is possible that he has dropped a hint which afterwards can be seen for what it is. He has described John as wearing ‘a garment of camel's hair, and a leather belt round his waist’ (Matt. iii. = Mark i. 6). This could be an allusion to II Kings i. 8, where Elijah is recognized by his wearing ‘a garment of hair cloth (R.S.V.), with a leather belt round his waist’. But the LXX and the previous English versions are almost certainly right in taking the Hebrew to mean simply that Elijah, like Esau, was a hairy man. This is the sort of man a prophet was expected to be, and, according to Zech. xiii. 4, anyone who wished to be taken for a prophet would put on a hairy mantle. There is no suggestion that its wearer was intended to be identified specifically with Kraeling, Elijah C., John the Baptist, pp. 14f., agrees that there is no reference to Elijah in John's dress.Google Scholar

^{page 264 note 1} The Messenger and Elijah are clearly equated in Matt. xi. 10–14.Google Scholar

^{page 264 note 2} Whatever the circumstances and the environment in which this Gospel was eventually put out, there is little doubt in my mind that it rests upon oral tradition with a southern Palestinian milieu prior to AD. 70, parallel to, and independent of, the Synoptic tradition. It can also be shown, I believe, to have come through an individual or group originally within the Baptist movement. John i. 37 (‘the two disciples heard him say this’) represents accurately enough the angle from which this material is written (cf. the saying under discussion in this paragraph, which at its first appearatice in i. 15 is introduced by the words, ‘This is he of whom I spoke’). There is indeed little to set against the traditional view that the unnamed disciple of the pair was the actual source of this material—whether or not he was also the author of the Gospel. This assessment of the early chapters of St John is, I believe, strengthened, as I shall indicate, by the evide nce of the Dead Sea Scrolls.Google Scholar

^{page 264 note 3} Dr C. H. Dodd has suggested to me that this saying may originally have meant: ‘There is one among my disciples who has gained precedence over me, for he is my superior.’ This is very attractive and fits the regular use of όπίσω ρΧεσθαι for being a disciple (e.g. Mark viii. 34 and parr.; Luke xiv. 27). But the close Synoptic parallel to the saying in Mark i.7f. and parr. must have a temporal reference; cf. also Acts xiii. 25: .Google Scholar

^{page 265 note 1} Cf. II Kings ii. 9–11, where both spirit and fire are associated with Elijah's assumption; and the gloss on Luke ix. 54: ‘Shall we bid fire come down from heaven, and consume them, as Elijah did?’Google Scholar

^{page 265 note 2} Jesus, Son of Man, pp. 82–6.Google Scholar

^{page 265 note 3} See my article ‘The Baptism of John and the Qumran Community’, Harv. Theo1. Rev. L (1957), 175–91.Google Scholar

^{page 265 note 4} Cf. the same article, and the works there cited, pp. 188–91.Google Scholar

^{page 266 note 1} The Synoptists never deny that John recognized Jesus. Indeed, Matthew clearly presupposes that he did (iii. 14f.), though the passage is obviously secondary and cannot be used for interpreting the mind of John. The supposed contradiction with the fourth Gospel rests in fact upon an argument from silence.Google Scholar

^{page 266 note 2} As Kraeling maintains, op. cit. p. 127.Google Scholar

^{page 266 note 3} Cf. Manson, T. W., The Sayings of Jesus, p. 69.Google Scholar

^{page 266 note 4} In this it contrasts strongly with the view that Jesus was John the Baptist raised from the dead, which, as O. Cullmann points out in an excellent discussion (Die Christologie des neuen Testaments, pp. 30–3), could have been entertained only by those who had never known that Jesus was a contemporary of John or had been baptized by him. Mark (vi. 14–16), followed by Matthew (xiv. if.), introduces this notion, in contrast to the others, as a peculiarity of Herod's. And this could well preserve an historical reminiscence.Google Scholar Against Manson, T. W. (‘John the Baptist’, Bull. John Rylands Libr. xxxvi (1954), 399), I should accept as the original reading. The plural is readily explained by the tendency (already visible in Luke ix. 7) to assimilate this to the other estimates as a general view.Google Scholar

^{page 267 note 1} The fact that the Malachi quotation agrees neither with the LXX nor with the Hebrew but is verbally identical with its citation in Matt. xi. 10= Luke vii. 27 strongly suggests that this is where it came from. It is absent from the parallels to Mark i. 2 in both Matthew and Luke, which may indicate that it was not in their copies of Mark—though they would, of course, have had the same reasons for rejecting it as we have. The common phrase to ‘prepare the way’, would easily explain how the two quotations from Isaiah and Malachi came to be fused. The fourth Gospel carefully refuses any such assimilation: John is the voice of Isaiah (i. 23) but he is not Elijah (i. 21).Google Scholar

^{page 268 note 1} S. Matthieu, p. cxx. So also Taylor, V., St Mark, ad loc.Google Scholar

^{page 268 note 2} T.W.N.T. 11, 930–43.Google Scholar

^{page 268 note 3} The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, pp. 138–56;Google ScholarThe Quest of the Historical Jesus, PP. 371–4.Google ScholarDibelius', M. argument that this identification does not go back to Jesus (Die urchristliche Überlieferung von Johannes dem Taufer, pp. 30–2) is to me unconvincing.Google Scholar

^{page 269 note 1} There is apparently a reference to Elijah in the ‘ram’ of I Enoch XC. 31 (cf. lxxxix. 52), but no suggestion of his return to earth. According to IV Ezra vi. 26, ‘the men who have been taken up, who have not tasted death from their birth, shall appear’. They undoubtedly include Elijah, but whether they are to be regarded as forerunners of the Messiah is more questionable. In vii. 28 it is said that ‘my Son the Messiah shall be revealed, together with those who are with him’, and these are likely to be the same as those mentioned in vi. 26.Google Scholar

^{page 269 note 2} Judaism, ii, p. 358 n. 2.Google Scholar

^{page 269 note 3} Klausner, J., The Messianic Idea in Israel, p.456.Google Scholar

^{page 269 note 4} Cf. Moore, op. cit. II, 357: ‘It was the universal belief that shortly before the appearance of the Messiah Elijah should return’; and S. Mowinckel, He that Cometh, p. 299: ‘The thought of Elijah as the forerunner of the Messiah seems to have been widespread in Judaism.’ But the references they give entirely fail to substantiate this.Google ScholarFor what scanty Rabbinic evidence there is, see Strack-Billerbeck, , Kommenta, zum N. T. iv, 785–9Google Scholar and Jeremias in Kittel, T. W.N. T. ii, 933–5. There is in fact equally good Rabbinic evidence for equating Elijah with the Messiah (of the priestly line) (Strack-Billerbeck, op. ct. iv, 789–92). But again the earlier documents which specifically mention a peiestly Messiah (the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Damascus Document and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs) contain no hint of such an equation. Elijah is simply not mentioned.Google Scholar

Cullmann (op. cit. pp. 21 f.) maintains that both conceptions of Elijah (or the prophet of the end) were Current in the New Testament period, that he was the forerunner of God (the original view) and that he was the forerunner of the Messiah. But for the latter he produces no more evidence than the rest.

^{page 270 note 1} Thus, the designation ‘the coming one’, which stands by itself in Matt. xi. 3, is attached to Elijah in Matt. xi. 14, to the Prophet in John vi. 14, and to the Christ, the Son of God, in John xi. 27.Google Scholar

^{page 271 note 1} I have suggested elsewhere (op. cit., Harv. Theol. Rev. L., 184–6), that if John’s baptism had its background in the sort of thinking represented at Qumran, it may explain more easily why Jesus should have felt compelled to identify himself with it. For it enables us to envisage John’s mission as having a positive and atoning purpose, requiring repentance not merely, as the Gospels would suggest, to escape th coming judgement, but to create in Israel a pure and purifying remnant.Google Scholar

^{page 271 note 2} It is just possible that the phrase may contain an echo of Ecclus. xlviii. i, where it is said of Elijah that his word . If so, we could have the Johannine equivalent of Jesus' identification of the Baptist with Elijah: ‘He was “the burning lamp” (i.e. Elijah)’, even though he was not the Light itself to which he witnessed (John i. 8).Google Scholar

^{page 272 note 1} Au seuil de l'évangile: Jean.Baptiste, pp. 250f.; cf pp. 235–57 as a whole.Google ScholarStauffer, E. goes still further and says: ‘This early period of Jesus ministry is only a chapter in the history of the Baptist movement’ (Jesus, Gestalt und Geschichte, p. 57).Google ScholarLohmeyer, E. pointed out (Das Urcheistentum, i (Johannes der Taufer), 27 n. 2) that the saying of John iii. 30, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’, even if it reflects anti-Baptist polemic, witnesses to a previous period when their roles were reversed.Google Scholar

^{page 272 note 2} So also Taylor, St Mark, p. 461.Google ScholarCf. Edwards, H. E., The Disciple who wrote these Things, p. 191: ‘Is it likely that if John the Baptist had disappeared from public view two years before this incident it would still have been dangerous for any member of the Jerusalem aristocracy to disavow belief in him?… In fact, the pendant which St Mark attaches, to his own story of the Cleansing is the strongest argument for putting that event back to the time assigned to it in the fourth Gospel.’Google Scholar

^{page 273 note 1} With John iii. 3 and 5, cf. Matt. xviii. 3, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ (which is almost certainly independent of Mark) and Mark x. 15, 23, 25; cf. Jeremias, Hat die Urkirche die Kindertaufe geubt?, pp. 43f.Google Scholar

^{page 273 note 2} Op. cit. p. 31.Google Scholar

^{page 274 note 1} The interval involved would not in any case have been very long if there is anything behind the reminiscence of the early preaching that it was not until John was ‘finishing his course’ that he even referred to the one coming after him (Acts xiii. 25).Google Scholar

^{page 274 note 2} Macgreggor's, G. H. C. proposed emendation to ‘When the Lord realized he was making’ (‘John the Baptist and the Origins of Christianity’, E. T. XLVI (1935), 360) is quite arbitrary and unnecessary.Google Scholar

^{page 274 note 3} Preisker, H. has pointed out how all the three wilderness temptations are paralleled in historical incidents in the Gospel of John (in iv. 31–4; vi. 14f.; vii. 2–6) without the mythological setting in which the ‘Q’ narrative had already placed them. (‘Zum Charakter des Johannesevangeliums’,Google ScholarLuther, Kant, Schleiermacher in Ihrer Bedeutung für den Protestantismus. Forschungen urd Abhandlungen Georg Wobbermin dargebracht, pp. 379–84;Google Scholar quoted by Menoud, P-H., L'ivangile do Jean d'après les recherches récentes, p. 29).Google Scholar

^{page 274 note 4} Even if is not the true reading (as Jeremias argues, The Servant of God, p. 61), I believe that the φαīς conception here lies behind and interprets the title υíός, as in Mark i. ii.Google Scholar

^{page 274 note 5} viii. 3; vi. 13f.; vi. 16. See my article, ‘The Temptations’, Theology, L (1947), 43–8.Google Scholar

^{page 275 note 1} Quoted Klausner, op. cit. p. 454;Google Scholarcf. Strack-Billerbeck, op. cit. iv, 796f.Google Scholar

^{page 275 note 2} I Enoch c. if.;Google ScholarII Baruch lxx.3–7;Google ScholarII Esdras v. 9; vi. 24; cf. Micah vii. 6; Isa. xix. 2; Ezek. xxxviii. 21.Google Scholar

^{page 275 note 3} Op. cit. pp. 156f.Google Scholar

^{page 275 note 4} Cf. Mark ix. and pars with Deut. xviii. 15.

^{page 276 note 1} In his article on Elijah in Kittel (T.W.N.T. 11, 942 f., Jeremias argues that the conception that the returning Elijah must suffer would not have been strange; for it was ‘written’ in the apocalyptic tradition, of the kind that W. Bousset brought to light in his Legend of the Antichrist, pp. 203–10, and which has been preserved most notably in the Apocalypse of ElijahGoogle Scholar (tr. Steindorff, G., Texte und Untersuchungen (ed. von Gebhardt, and Harnack, ), XVII, 3a, pp. 163f.). This latter records a tradition remarkably parallel to Rev. xi. 1–12, and is, Jeremias argues, independent of it: both, he thinks, go back to a common Jewish legend in which Elijah and Enoch(?) suffer and die. He may be right; but all the documents with which we are dealing are late, and are either Christian or heavily worked over by Christian hands; and this applies strongly to the relevant section of the Apocalypse of ElijahGoogle Scholar (Steindorff, pp. 161–9), which opens with the vision of Christ coming on the clouds of heaven preceded by the sign of the Cross. Jeremias’ arguments for a tradition within Judaism of a suffering Moses (T.W.N.T. iv, 867 f.) are also, I believe, precarious.Google Scholar

^{page 276 note 2} The phrase ‘in the spirit and power of Elijah’ cannot, in view of the functions predicated of him, be interpreted as a denial that John is Elijah. For similar expressions, meaning Elijah redivivus, cf. Justin, Dial. 49, 3–7.Google Scholar

^{page 276 note 3} ‘The Most Primitive Christology of all?’ J.T.S. n.s. VII (1956), 177–89.Google Scholar

^{page 277 note 1} For Luke ‘to you first’ presumably meant ‘to the Jew first’ (cf. Acts xiii. 46), but originally it must have had a different implication.Google Scholar

^{page 277 note 2} The two functions are, of course, closely related. Cf. the Samaritan expectation of the Taëb, the Restorer, based on the promise of a prophet like Moses in Deut. xviii. 15.Google Scholar

^{page 277 note 3} ‘If all Israel together repented for a single day, redemption through the Messiah would follow’ (Pesikta 163 b); ‘If Israel practises repentance, it will be redeemed; if not, it will not be redeemed’ (Sanh. 97b); ‘Israel will not fulfil the great repentance before Elijah comes’ (Pirke R. Eliezer 43);Google Scholarcf. Strack-Billerbeck, op. cit. 1, 598.Google Scholar

^{page 277 note 4} I have suggested elsewhere (Jesus and His Coming, p. 148) that this Christology was the product of circles that entered Christianity through the movement of John the Baptist. I would go further and guess that it represents as accurately as anything the kind of sermon which Priscilla and Aquila would have heard Apollos preach in the synagogue at Ephesus (Acts xviii. 24–8). He was evidently a convinced follower of Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. If, as I assume, he stood in much the same position as the ‘disciples’ whom Paul found there subsequently (xix. 1–7), we may deduce that the two elements which this gospel lacked were the conviction that Jesus was even now the Christ (xviii. 28) and that the Holy Spirit had already been given (xix. 2), or, in other words, that the messianic age and its renewal had actually begun. It was this conviction that was embodied in the reception of the Spirit (xix. 2) through baptism into the name of Jesus as Lord (xix. 5).Google Scholar

^{page 278 note 1} Both Knox, J. (On the Meaning of Christ, pp. 53f.) and Cullmann (op. cit. pp. 22–6) assert that it was. But the evidence is extremely slender. On Luke i. 76 see below.Google Scholar

^{page 278 note 2} Op. cit. pp. 163–81.Google Scholar

^{page 279 note 1} According to Stauffer (Jerusalem und Rom, p. 101) what Apollos had in his pocket, and was bringing from Alexandria to Ephesus, was ‘the Baptist Logos-hymn’ which the fourth Evangelist was to use for his prologue!Google Scholar

^{page 279 note 2} The whole question of the existence of this Baptist sect deserves a thorough re-examination, since it is regularly taken for granted and a great deal of what passes for New Testament criticism is built upon it. Not only are half the Lucan infancy narratives attributed to it (for a recent assault on this thesis vide Benoit, P., ‘L'enfance dejean-Baptiste scion Luc’, N. T.S. iii (1957), 169–94),Google Scholar but ever since Baldensperger's, W.Der Prolog des vierten Evangeliums (1898) Johannine criticism has been dogged by the notion that the whole treatment of the Baptist in the fourth Gospel is motivated by polemic against Baptist opposition (cf. earlier, J. B. Lightfoot, Colossians (1875), pp. 163–5). The denials and disclaimers recorded of John which are supposed to prove this thesis (John i. 8, 15, 20–3, 30f.; iii. 27–30) are in fact perfectly natural, and in accord with the Synoptic tradition (Mark i. 7f. and pars; Acts xiii. 25). Even Cullmann, who argues strongly for the element of polemic, admits that they could well fit the historical situation (op. cit. p. 28). In fact, the relations between John and Jesus are represented as uniformly friendly throughout the Gospel; and there is absolutely no evidence for such a statement as that of Goguel (op. cit. p. 274)—and it is typical—that John regarded Jesus as a renegade. It is very significant that when later Jesus is forced to flee from Judaca he deliberately seeks refuge in Bethany beyond Jordan where John and he were first associated (i. 28; iii. 26) and there finds a ready following among those who recalled Johns teaching (x. 39–42). This hardly suggests the groups were at daggers drawn, either then or later. It is much easier to think that the fourth Evangelist had an eye to persuading those who, like him, were brought up in the Baptist's teaching to believe in Jesus as the one to whom John pointed.Google Scholar

Frequently the existence of this rival sect is simply deduced, by circular argument, from the supposed signs of polemic within the Gospels themselves (e.g. Goguel, op. cit. p. 104; ‘The existence of this literature [viz, the Lucan birth narratives and John iii and iv] establishes that of a Baptist group’). But after the disciples of John bury their master and tell Jesus (Matt. xiv. 12) we hear nothing more of them in the New Testament. Even if those in Acts xviii and xix who knew only the baptism of John were not Christians (as Kraeling himself admits, op. cit. p. 209; cf. Smith, B. T. D., ‘Apollos and the Twelve Disciples at Ephesus’, J. T.S. xvi (1915), 241–6), they certainly do not fulfil the necessary conditions as a rival group preaching John as Messiah. The sole direct evidence that there was such a group at any time is in fact confined to two passages in the Clementine Recognitions, namely, 1, 54: ‘Sed et ex discipulis loannis, qui videbantur esse magni, segregaverunt se a populo et magistrum suum veluti Christum praedicarunt’; and 1, 60: ‘Et ecce unus cx disciplis Ioannis affirmabat Christum Ioannem fuisse Ct non Iesum; in tantum, inquit, Ut et ipse Iesus omnibus hominibus et prophctis maiorem esse pronuntiaverit Ioannem. Si ergo, inquit, maior est omnibus, sine dubio et Moyse et ipsi Iesu maior habendus est. Quod si omnium maior est, ipse est Christus.’ Ephraim SyrusGoogle Scholar (Eu. expos. ed. G. Moesinger, p. 288) records the same tradition but evidently from the same source. At best this cannot provide evidence of anything before the second century; and since the information occurs in a list of Jewish sects (classified as the Sadducees, the Samaritans, the Scribes and Pharisees, and the Baptists) in which the Sadducees are said to have originated about the time of John and the Scribes and Pharisees to have been baptized by him, it is evidently not of very notable historical value. In addition, indirect references are claimed to be visible in other passages in the Clementines (all the evidence, such as it is, is assembled in J. Thomas, Le Mouvement Baptiste en Palestine et Syrie, pp. 114–39). But the fact remains, as Thomas admits (p. 132), that none of the Fathers mention the disciples of John in their lists of heretics, just as in the New Testament the Baptists are never among the enemies of Jesus. That there were elements of John's following which did not find their way into the Church is indeed very probable; that these elements constituted a rival group to Christianity in the first century, with a competing Christology, is, I believe, without any foundation whatever.

The attempt to use the Mandaean literature as evidence for a sect founded by John the Baptist must be judged to have collapsed. The references to the Baptist cannot be shown to belong to the earliest strata of this literature. Thomas while allowing that the Mandaeans may well be ancient and Palestinian, fails to find any connexion between them and John till the Mohammedan era (op. cit. pp. 184–267, especially 256–67). See also H. Lietzmann, Ein Beitrag zur Mandaerfrage; Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 115–30; Menoud, op. cit. pp. 33–50. But cf. Cullmann, op. cit. p. 25 n. 3.

^{page 280 note 1} This is argued convincingly by Benoit (op. cit. N. T.S. iii, 186–8), but I find no compelling reason for excepting, as he does, Luke i. 76f. It seems to me no more difficult to believe that the whole canticle was written originally of Jesus and has since been transferred to John than that Luke has added the reference to the child John and thereby made the high Christology of all the rest apply to him.Google Scholar

^{page 280 note 2} Some of the common vocabulary must certainly be ascribed to Luke, though the presence of Lucanisms does not demonstrate that he is not using sources, as the Markan material in his Gospel shows. What is significant is the common phraseology, and above all the common framework, which is peculiar to these passages.Google Scholar

^{page 280 note 3} Reading έφισκέψεται with sy³ vg sa bo arm. I see no grounds, with Benoit (op. cit. N. T.S. III, 185), for supposing that the aorist έφεσκέψατο is less likely to represent a correction. The tense is, if anything, perhaps more likely to have been assimilated to the of v. 68 than to the futures of v. 76.Google Scholar

^{page 281 note 1} The difficulty was clearly recognized by Bowen, C. R., ‘John the Baptist in the New Testament’, Amer. J. Theol. xvi (1912), 99: ‘The reference to the house of David suggests plainly that the boy John is somehow to be credited to the Davidic family, which seems to fit ill the son of a priest and a “daughter of Aaron”. No doubt historically there would be a difficulty, but that such a tradition could arise seems not impossible.’ The tortuous hypotheses to which he is then compelled (that David's line was priestly after all, and that there must have been a genealogy connecting John with David) reveal only what the judgement ‘not impossible’ can if necessary include. The supposition that the reference is not to John at all is on every count the simpler.Google Scholar

It is possible, and indeed probable, that the first half of the Benedictus (i. 68–75) is modelled on traditional material; but whoever wrote the canticle as a whole must have meant it for someone in the Davidic line.