On the John the Baptist's importance to fix the god Jesus in real History

[Giuseppe]

John 1:31:

I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.

This seems to be in the same time:

• a denial of what is told in Mark about Jesus having been seen/known by John;

• a reiterated claim of the role held by John: as witness of a new revelation.

The simplest solution of this evident paradox (of a John the Baptist who saw and didn't see Jesus) is that the character of the meeting between Jesus and John wasn't originally conceived as a meeting between a man and another man, but between a man and a god.
In other terms, the original claim was that the John the Baptist saw Jesus in the glory of a god.

Something happened: by mistake or by intention, this John's meeting with a celestial (Son of) Man was reduced to a mere physical meeting between two men.

When Celsus accused:

When you were bathing, says the Jew, beside John, you say that what had the appearance of a bird from the air alighted upon you. And then this same Jew of his, continuing his interrogations, asks, What credible witness beheld this appearance? Or who heard a voice from heaven declaring you to be the Son of God? What proof is there of it, save your own assertion, and the statement of another of those individuals who have been punished along with you?

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04161.htm


...Celsus, victim as he was of the reductionist view of the meeting between Jesus and John (as a mere meeting between two men), couldn't be able to explain to himself how a so minimalist event could be accompanied by such celestial prodiges. The solution of this contradiction is that the accompanied prodiges were the traces of the original view of John "seeing" (hallucinating) Jesus as the Son of Man.

Hence both the two hypotheses have to be examined, i.e.:

• What if the reduction of a revelation to a meeting was a mere mistake?

• What if the reduction of a revelation to a meeting was deliberate?

I am inclined to think about a mistake. Something of similar is already happened with Barabbas: did he abandon the Roman prison or did he abandon the "prison" of the his own body? Just as the spiritual Christ of the separationists was said to abandon the carnal Jesus on the cross?


The logion of Matthew 11:12:

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force

...seems to be a drammatic complaint by Christian mythicists about the tragical effects of the misunderstanding of the witness by John the Baptist: the truth is that he didn't witness a man but a god, and the result of the mistake was that the people believed that Jesus was appeared recently as a real man in Judea and therefore they attributed to him human "too much human" attributes or views.

[dabber]

Hi there, this passage in John 1 is simply the author rewriting the earlier gospels so that John is *not* baptising Jesus.

How can the sinless Jesus be baptised to wash away his sins? That's why the gospel writer is changing the story. He's making JC more godlike and less human.

Also there's no birth narrative or childhood, simply sent from heaven to "dwelling amongst us". I find John quite 'gnostic'. There's certainly something funny going on! Cheers

[Giuseppe]

How can the sinless Jesus be baptised to wash away his sins? That's why the gospel writer is changing the story. He's making JC more godlike and less human.

• I agree with you that the author of the Fourth Gospel was disturbed by the reductionist view of the baptism in Mark (as a mere meeting between two men).

• But I differ from you insofar you believe really (!!!) to the historical reality of this reductionist view of the baptism in Mark.

At contrary I think that the author of the Fourth Gospel helps to recover partially the original view of a such 'meeting': it was a hallucination, in religious terms a revelation.

The celestial Son of Man appearing to John was misinterpreted as a mere son of man (i.e. a man) going to be known by John (and the best occasion to be known by John was to be baptized by him).

In both the cases, the essentia of the original account was preserved: John "witnessed" Jesus.

[Giuseppe]

How much is it probable that a 'John' hallucinated a celestial 'Son of Man' ?

Judging from Revelation 14:14, it was a probable event:

And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle.

I don't claim the identity between that John and the John the Baptist. I claim only that a a meeting with the god Jesus (via hallucination) is infinitely more probable, by John the Baptist, than a meeting with the man Jesus (at the Jordan river).