John was possessed by the spiritual Christ in the gospel read by Celsus

[Giuseppe]

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 is assuming here that Christ is a spiritual being therefore he is addressing directly him: what proof is there of the fact that you (=presumed spiritual Christ) were declared son of God from heaven save the witness of the only man found during that proclamation?

Hence Celsus has found only two witnesses of the baptism of Christ:

• The spiritual Christ

• The witness of the mortal John

Clearly Celsus is not satisfied by these two witnesses because they are reduced to only one: the witness only of the man found there, when the Christ descended on himself, i.e. John.

Hence in the gospel read by Celsus, John was the only man who saw the dove and heard the voice from heaven.

[Giuseppe]

This may explain why Mark is embarrassed by the fact that John "saw" the baptism. Only, it was the baptism of himself, of the man John, not of the man Jesus.

John was the only witness of the fact that the spiritual Christ descended on himself: on John.

The precise fact despised by Celsus as a not sufficient witness.

Mark had to eclipse this fact, by making John blind before the baptism of a man distinct from John: the man Jesus.

[Giuseppe]

Hence Origen was moved to interpolate Josephus by the Baptist passage, not only for N. P. Allen's reasons, but also because in this way he could introduce John as a person distinct from the man Jesus who was posseded by the spiritual Christ.

[Giuseppe]

In the Gospel read by Celsus, the spiritual Christ descends from heaven in Galilee and only after he descends on John at the Jourdain.

The Judaizers had replaced the spiritual Christ (descended adult in Galilee) with a mere man Jesus, to make Jesus the mortal met by the spiritual Christ and not the mortal John.

[Giuseppe]

Hence the famous rivalry between John and Jesus on who has to baptize who, finds the his origin in the conflict about who was originally the man posseded by the spiritual Christ (a spirit descended from heaven): John or Jesus?

[Giuseppe]

Apollos knew only the baptism of John.

Does this mean: "the baptism by John" or only "the baptism that John received" ?

Did Apollos know only a gospel where John (and not Jesus) was the guy posseded by the spiritual Christ? And in this sense he was "corrected"?

[Giuseppe]

I realize a new thing. The dove descending on the baptized (beyond if Jesus or John) bears the mark of the Judaizer, the his signature.

It seems that in the Hebrew term for "dove", there is the name of YHWH. Hence it is evident that by the "dove" it is the spirit of the creator to descend on the guy at the Jordan river, not the spirit of an alien god distinct from the demiurge.

In the baptism episode a judaization is in action.

[Giuseppe]

The fatidic question is this: could there be separationists of the kind "John versus Christ" before the separationists of the kind "Jesus versus Christ"?

Even if there were, the important point here is that I don't see a reason to consider them as Gnostic separationists. It is true: Hegesippus talks about Gnostic separationists too. Real haters of YHWH.

I would have liked to connect the separationism with the first naive form of incipient judaization. This may be still true: afterall, what is a human recipient if not a score supporting the creature of the creator?

But the docetism is more radical as form of opposition to the demiurge. Even a child realizes that the best paradigm for an euhemerization of the god Jesus has to be the chrological sequence:

docetism --> separationism ---> adoptionism ---> incarnationism ---> ebionitism.

In addition to this, there was probably never something as a separationist gospel: even the more radical separationist scenario assumes that the man Jesus will be adopted by god (beyond if by the demiurge or by the supreme god) therefore the term is totally vain. Adoptionism is a better term.

And the Adoptionists are 100% Judaizers.

[Giuseppe]

Hostility against John the Baptist is evident in John 13:10:

Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.”

And especially in John 15:3:

You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you

There is no need of a baptism of water as the baptism of John. Hence probably John the Baptist is interpolated in the fourth gospel.

Therefore the Christ in the original gospel, aka Jesus Son of Father, was not a baptizer.

[Giuseppe]

A strong evidence of the Marcion's Gospel 's priority on our catholic Luke is obviously Luke 3:1-2:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene— 2 during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness

Where it is simply ridicolous to imagine all these "historical" details to make it precise… ...what?

Something that would have happened in the Wilderness!

Hence the original incipit talked about the descent of the Marcion's Christ, already adult, on the earth.

But then they were the Judaizers to introduce John as the "coincidential" Jewish recipient of a descending spirit (otherwise alien).

John was the only witness of the descent of the "Word" (=another judaization) for the original "Christ" or "Chrestos") on himself.

Hence Celsus was polemizing against a Judaizing gospel (who had an interpolated John in the role of the Jewish recipient of an alien spirit to judaize said spirit, in a gospel where John the Baptist was totally absent).