John the Baptist was the Kyrios mentioned in Galatians 1:19

[Giuseppe]

The reasons to think that "Mark" (author) identified (wrongly) John the Baptist (a historical person) as the Christ of the Jewish-Christians, before he reduced him to the mere precursor of the pauline Christ:

• The Pillars are in proto-Mark sons of Zebedee, and Zebedee means the same thing as John: "YHWH gives grace";

• The Kyrios of which James was brother (per Galatians 1:19) was John the Baptist;

• Just as Paul received approval (=baptism?) by James the brother of Kyrios John, the pauline Jesus received baptism by the brother of James, the Kyrios John;

• John predicted oracles in the name of the Kyrios YHWH, hence he was also known as the Kyrios.

John the Baptist was not a Christian, differently from his brother James.

[davidmartin]

i noticed the words of John the baptist in the gospel of John are quite different from those in the synoptics
In John he talks mystically and its not a straight repentance message, it's theologically more profound
this means the gospel of John knew something about the real John, whereas the synoptics didn't... suggesting the synoptics (since at least Mark was earlier than John) didn't mention him originally but later he got inserted in them.
or maybe the stock image of John the baptist is just plain inaccurate .. he seems to be portrayed as some old testament prophet, but why baptism for forgiveness of sins when the system for forgiveness was sacrifice at the temple? if however his baptism was reception of the Holy Spirit like Jesus received then it would make sense, and it wasn't a straight repentance message in the first place!

[Difflugia]

...he seems to be portrayed as some old testament prophet, but why baptism for forgiveness of sins when the system for forgiveness was sacrifice at the temple?

Since we're being wildly speculative here anyway, I think that the portrayal of John the Baptist as an Old Testament prophet was intentional, but historically inaccurate.

In a nutshell, if we treat the Pauline epistles as a glimpse into Christianity as it existed before any of the Gospels were written, then baptism is presented as a symbol of one's burial and resurrection with Christ. Whether or not John the Baptist was a real person, I think Mark fictively coopted the Baptist to create links between Christian baptism, Jewish apocalypticism, and the ministry of Jesus.

Matthew and Luke explicitly link John the Baptist with Elijah, but I think Mark's Baptist is a slightly broader character similar to the "two witnesses" of Revelation that together combine the attributes and powers of Elijah, Elisha, and Moses. Mark's scene of Baptism in the Jordan seems to me to be related to Elisha restoring Naaman in 2 Kings 5:10-14. Mark saw parallels between the Christian practice of baptism, the Jewish practice of mikveh (which a real John the Baptist may have practiced), and the Septuagint Greek of 2 Kings 5:14 in which Naaman "baptized himself" in the Jordan. The baptism scene in Mark is at once the ritual cleansing of the man Jesus prior to his elevation to divine status, the establishment of John as "the Prophet," and a connection of the Christian practice of baptism, perhaps thus far too loosely or mystically grounded for Mark's taste, to a specific event in the story of Christianity.

[Giuseppe]

Whether or not John the Baptist was a real person, I think Mark fictively coopted the Baptist to create links between Christian baptism, Jewish apocalypticism, and the ministry of Jesus.

I agree very much about this. John the Baptist was considered as Christ in some circles, hence the need of reducing him to a mere precursor of the true Christ.

I think that there is some relation beetwen the meaning of the name of John, i.e. "YHWH gives grace" and the Jesus's meaning, "YHWH gives salvation". Someway, who invented the biography for John (a kind of lost gospel about John as the first hero) wanted to emphasize friendship with the Gentiles and in the same time to reiterate the point that YHWH is the supreme universal god of love.

The replacement of "John" with "Jesus" reflects a time when the propaganda wanted to emphasize YHWH as supreme god of the Jews before, and only after of the Gentiles.

It is not that the two biographies (of John and of Jesus) were from rival fields: they shared independently the same goal (to persuade Gentiles that YHWH is the supreme god), but by using different tools. At the end, the Gospels about Jesus revealed themselves as more useful in relation to that goal.

Probably a reason of the victory of Jesus legend on John's legend is that the first made Jesus the expected Messiah, while the second made John only the True Prophet.

[Ben C. Smith]

Mark's scene of Baptism in the Jordan seems to me to be related to Elisha restoring Naaman in 2 Kings 5:10-14.

Good one. Despite having pointed out before that the Greek term for "baptize" is used for Naaman in the OG, I missed this parallel in my thread about Elijah, Elisha, John, and Jesus. I have added it to the list there. Thanks.

[davidmartin]

So in this hypothesis (that Mark co-opted the baptist), what biblical precedent is there for an announcer of the messiah's arrival?
Where did this idea come from? Moses leading to the promised land?

I'm with some of the comments above that suggest John's baptism was esoteric and the later version made it exoteric
Because Jesus himself describes John in the language of the esoteric when he says 'he was a light you chose to enjoy for a while'. That's the earlier version coming through that this gospel preserves.

The Mark community definitely wanted an exoteric, religious 'system' presumably as part of the desire to follow Judaism without having to convert to Judaism.
I will add one caveat to the above, it is quite possible the original Jesus movement already had exoteric motifs around the esoteric core that connected Old Testament themes and prophecy, but they were rather restrained and limited, these later could have got amplified by others so the core of Mark could still originate from this earlier stage

[Joseph D. L.]

So in this hypothesis (that Mark co-opted the baptist), what biblical precedent is there for an announcer of the messiah's arrival?
Where did this idea come from? Moses leading to the promised land?

Probably Isaiah 7, with the announcement of Immanuel's arrival, which happens in the next chapter.

I don't know.

[Difflugia]

So in this hypothesis (that Mark co-opted the baptist), what biblical precedent is there for an announcer of the messiah's arrival?
Where did this idea come from? Moses leading to the promised land?

I think Mark tells us himself. Malachi 3 (Mark 1:2) and Isaiah 40 (1:3) are both heralding prophets (Malachi and Isaiah respectively) announcing a coming restoration. Jesus will be effecting the restoration, but Mark is saying that, as before, there needs to be a prophet to explain the restoration now. John is metaphorically the new Malachi and Isaiah, but is also Elijah (2 Kings 1:8) and Elisha (the aforementioned baptism).

Oddly (to me, anyway), it seems important to Mark that there simply is a prophet, but he didn't care about the the prophetic message as such. In Mark, John's entire prophetic output is limited to, "One comes after me that is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bend and unfasten." This may be related to Mark 9:1, "And they questioned him [Jesus], asking, 'So, the scribes say that Elijah must come first?'" This says to me that there was a contemporary expectation that Elijah would precede the messianic restoration and Mark had Jesus explain that John was the new Elijah. The new Elijah apparently didn't have to say anything particularly profound, though.

Off-topic, but related to Mark 1:2 is something that I find puzzling. The Gospel of Mark is (according to commentators like Maurice Casey) so chock-full of Semitic Greek and Aramaisms that the author was almost certainly a Palestinian Jew, but it looks to me like 1:3 includes a weird mistranslation of Malachi 3:1. The first half of Malachi 3:1 is translated this way in the ESV:

“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me."

Malachi 3:1 is one of those verses where Hebrew wordplay takes precedence over readable grammar, so we get "he will turn (pinā) the way to [my] face (pānāy)." It's strangely worded in order to get some alliteration and Mark incorrectly reads it as:

"Behold! I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way."

Now, the "my" in "to my face" is implicit, so it's maybe an understandable mistake, but the same "to [my] face" almost always, literally hundreds of times, means "before me" in the Old Testament. The Septuagint doesn't make that mistake, so he didn't get it from there. Is Mark a Palestinian Jew that isn't familiar with the Hebrew scriptures?

[Ben C. Smith]

Off-topic, but related to Mark 1:2 is something that I find puzzling. The Gospel of Mark is (according to commentators like Maurice Casey) so chock-full of Semitic Greek and Aramaisms that the author was almost certainly a Palestinian Jew, but it looks to me like 1:3 includes a weird mistranslation of Malachi 3:1. The first half of Malachi 3:1 is translated this way in the ESV:

“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me."

Malachi 3:1 is one of those verses where Hebrew wordplay takes precedence over readable grammar, so we get "he will turn (pinā) the way to [my] face (pānāy)." It's strangely worded in order to get some alliteration and Mark incorrectly reads it as:

"Behold! I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way."

Now, the "my" in "to my face" is implicit, so it's maybe an understandable mistake, but the same "to [my] face" almost always, literally hundreds of times, means "before me" in the Old Testament. The Septuagint doesn't make that mistake, so he didn't get it from there. Is Mark a Palestinian Jew that isn't familiar with the Hebrew scriptures?

Good question, but I think there are actually three source texts in play, not two:

Mark 1.2-3:

2 As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“Behold, I send my angel before your face [ἀποστέλλω τὸν ἄγγελόν μου πρὸ προσώπου σου],
Who will prepare Your way [ὃς κατασκευάσει τὴν ὁδόν σου];
3 The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make His paths straight.’”

Exodus 23.20: 20 “Behold, I send my angel before your face [ἐγὼ ἀποστέλλω τὸν ἄγγελόν μου πρὸ προσώπου σου] to guard you along the way and to bring you into the land which I have prepared [ἣν ἡτοίμασά σοι].”

Malachi 3.1a: 1a “Behold, I am going to send My angel, and he will prepare the way before My face [καὶ ἐπιβλέψεται ὁδὸν πρὸ προσώπου μου].”

Isaiah 40.3: 3 A voice of one calling, “Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness; make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.”

Once the author had committed to the second person singular from Exodus 23.20, what was he or she to do with the first person singular of Malachi 3.1a? The combination would have been confusing. So maybe changing the first person in Malachi 3.1a to the second person is just an assimilation to Exodus 23.20.

[Difflugia]

Good question, but I think there are actually three source texts in play, not two:

I never caught the connection to Exodus! As far as I'm concerned, combining Exodus and Malachi in Greek offers a satisfactory answer to the question without even requiring Mark to have looked at the Hebrew. The funny Hebrew wording of Malachi was just a red herring.

It actually looks like the Malachi verse is itself referring to Exodus. The "turn/face" parallel does seem kind of strained, but Exodus 23:20-21 has a more natural "to your face, to keep/keep from his face" parallel (which I notice is lost in the Greek) that it looks like Malachi struggled to preserve, even as a kind of vestige.