We read of John’s beheading in Matthew 14:1–12 and Mark 6:14–29. Matthew’s account is more concise, while Mark gives us much more detail, as his consistent with Mark. He covers fewer events in Jesus’ life, but gives more details of those he does address. Christians believe what we read in our Bibles are actual historical events that happened in space and time, not mythical or fictional stories. What Christians often don’t know, however, is how extra biblical literature confirms that. John the Baptist is a good example. We learn a lot about his life and ministry from first century Jewish historian, Josephus. One thing neither Matthew nor Mark tell us is the name of Herodias’ daughter who asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and got it! Many Christians know the name, though, Solome. We only know that because of Josephus.

Apart from Josephus, John’s life and death also give us evidence of the historicity of the gospels from an Uninvented perspective. He could never have been invented because of first century Jewish Messianic expectations, something biblical critics (i.e., those in the scholarly profession of biblical criticism) ignored for two hundred years. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the Jewish nature of Jesus’ world became a topic of scholarly study. This is critically important because a Jewish Jesus would in my opinion have been impossible to make up, and the life and death of John is a good example why. No Jew at the time expected the 400-year-long awaited Messiah to be like Jesus, not his personality, or teaching, or miracles, or his life, and most certainly not his death. This is all part of the reason the Jesus we read about in the gospels confused everyone. As I call him in the book, the conundrum that was Jesus.

Right out of the gate, John gets Jesus right and wrong. In Matthew 3, prior to meeting and baptizing Jesus, John preaches these fiery words:

11 “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

In John’s first century Jewish mind the messiah was coming to pronounce judgment on Israel’s enemies    and basically wipe them out. The Jewish people had been under various oppressors’ thumbs for almost 800 years by the time of Christ, first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then various other kingdoms, and finally the Romans at the time John and Jesus came on the scene. The Messiah they expected would be a king, a military conqueror in the mold of the great King David. John is proclaiming judgment against Israel’s enemies because that’s what the Lord’s Anointed (Messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek) was coming to do. All the kings of Israel were anointed, and thus the Lord’s Messiah, which is why all first century Jews were expecting a king, not a suffering servant a la Isaiah 53. I use the word “all” intentionally. Not a single Jew in the first century connected Isaiah 53 with the coming Messiah.

There was nothing in Jewish literature of the intertestamental period (between OT and NT) that would lead anyone to think a Messiah like Jesus was coming. Jewish historian Geza Vermes says in his book, Jesus the Jew, that “neither the suffering of a Messiah, nor his death and resurrection, appear to have been part of the faith of first century Judaism.” Nineteenth century Jewish Christian Alfred Edersheim in his book, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, concurs: “There is one truth which, we are reluctantly obliged to admit, scarcely any parallel in the teaching of Rabbinism: it was that of a suffering Messiah.” In the 400 years from Malachi to John a connection of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 to a crucified Messiah never emerged. J. Gresham Machen writes, “[T]here is not the slightest evidence that the pre-Christian Jews interpreted Isaiah 53 of the vicarious sufferings of the Messiah, or had any notion of the Messiah’s vicarious death.”

Which brings us to John’s gospel to see how the Baptist got Jesus wrong and more right than he knew. In the previous passage in Matthew, John was right that Jesus was coming in judgment, just not a judgment he could have ever imagined. How Jesus would defeat sin and death, and begin to conquer all the suffering in this fallen world was inconceivable to first century Jews. Yet this passage in John 1 very much seems to relate to what we read in Isaiah’s message about the suffering servant: 

29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.”

I’ve heard this passage interpreted as related to Isaiah 53 several times over the years, recently in a sermon. The problem with that interpretation is that it’s wrong. If you read commentaries on this verse, most of them will take what I call the facile interpretation, that John is declaring Jesus as a sacrificial lamb a la Isaiah 53:7. The first time this occurred to me was in 2017 hearing the pastor at our church make this connection. Having been immersed in apologetics by this time for eight years I thought to myself, “There is no way John could have known that Jesus as the Messiah would die for our sins.” I had learned about Jewish Messianic expectations, and how unexpected Jesus was. Even after Jesus rose from the dead some of his disciples refused to believe he could be the Messiah. It is only in theological hindsight because of Jesus telling us the entire Old Testament is about him, that we know Jesus was indeed the lamb of Isaiah 53.

John, however, had the same expectations as every other Jew in the first century because when he was in prison he told his disciples to ask Jesus if he is the one to come, or should they expect someone else (Luke 7). The last thing he expected was to be in prison facing death as he proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of heaven and the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. Jesus confused him just as he confused everyone else. So his reference to Jesus as the Lamb of God needs to be explained. My first thought when I was listening to that initial sermon was that maybe John put those words in The Baptist’s mouth, but my conviction that Scripture is the inspired word of God made that a non-starter. There had to be some other explanation. It wasn’t long after that I came upon a talk by D.A. Carson explaining what John possibly thought as he was saying those words.

Carson addresses this in his commentary, The Gospel According to John. Carson spends two and a half pages discussing this, but this passages explains it best:

Whether we assume the category lay readily at hand for the Baptist to use, or that he was one of the first to think it up, the impression gleaned from the Synoptics is that he thought of the Messiah as one who would come in terrible judgment and clean up the sin in Israel. In this light, what John the Baptist meant by ‘who takes away the sin of the world’ may have had more to do judgment than with expiatory sacrifice. p. 150.

He adds John probably had in mind the apocalyptic lamb, the warrior lamb, found in some Jewish texts, and which John used in Revelation (the word lamb is used by John 31 times).

Since the Baptist couldn’t have had the Isaiah 53 lamb in mind, he likely meant the warrior lamb, and John writing in risen-Jesus hindsight knew, and knew his readers would know, who Jesus as the Lamb of God was. John also later in the gospel (chapter 11) reports Caiaphas saying to the Sanhedrin, “that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” In both cases the men spoke better than they knew.

 

Share This