That John historically baptized in the wilderness (Mk 1:4-5) is clearly early tradition, Mark’s account citing a geographical situation (the narrow Jordan Valley in the wilderness) that obtained only in Palestine.14 The meaning of John’s location would not be lost on Syro-Palestinian Jews. Israel’s prophets had predicted a new exodus in the wilderness.15 Many of John’s Jewish contemporaries acknowledged this as the appropriate place not only for renewal movements16 but for prophets and Messiahs.17
Further, even the verse that the Gospels use to justify John’s mission in the wilderness (Is 40:3) could reflect the self-identity of John’s own early renewal movement in Palestine.18 The Qumran sectarians, also located in the wilderness, already applied this very Isaiah text to their own mission in the wilderness. 19 Despite this similarity, however, John was not, at least at this time, part of the Qumran community. Rather than separating himself totally from Israel as the Qumran community did,20 he preached directly to the crowds that came to him there (Mk 1:4-5; cf. Jos. Ant. 18.118).21
No less important to John’s mission, the wilderness was likewise a natural place for fugitives from a hostile society,22 including prophets like Elijah (1 Kgs 17:2-6; 2 Kgs 6:1-2). John could have safely drawn crowds there as he could have nowhere else (cf. Jos. Ant. 18.118), and it provided him the best accommodations for public baptisms that symbolically challenged the hegemony of establishment leaders (see Jos. Ant. 18.117).
Josephus confirms the image of John as a wilderness reformer, who sought to purify those who had first purified their souls (Ant. 18.117). This portrait fits the Gospels’ picture of a baptism “of repentance”; Josephus merely employs more hellenistic (hence less likely original) language than the Gospels do.23 That Josephus speaks favorably of John — in contrast to his condemnation of wilderness “prophets” urging insurrection against Rome — suggests that he knew the difference.24 John’s renewal movement was designed to bring Israel to repentance so that God would act on their behalf, not to challenge the authorities directly or militarily.
It is even plausible that some of John’s more specific words in the “Q” tradition preserved in the Gospels reflect some of his original message, remembered by many of his followers who afterward joined Jesus’ movement.25 Thus God raising up stones for Abraham’s children (Matt 3:9//Lk 3:8) may reflect a wordplay that worked only in John’s Aramaic, not the later church’s Greek.26 That a prophet of renewal would challenge individual Jewish people’s special status in order to secure their repentance fits earlier biblical expectations.27
That a prophet of the kingdom could speak of God’s imminent judgment (as earlier prophets often did) is also not surprising.28 The specific imagery John employs in “Q” fits his likely audience in rural Palestine better than that of the Gospels’ likely urban Diaspora audiences, though it was probably intelligible to everyone.29 “Q”’s John shares with earlier biblical writers the natural agricultural image of harvest and threshing-floor (Matt 3:12//Lk 3:17) as judgment and/or the end-time.30 This image is also consistent with the rest of the Jesus tradition (Mk 4:29; cf. Mk 12:2; Matt 9:38//Lk 10:2; Matt 13:39) and early Judaism; 31 the wicked are destroyed “like straw in fire”32 or like chaff.33 Fire naturally symbolized future judgment (e.g., Is 26:11; 66:15-16, 24).34
John’s imagery of threshing35 and harvest fits agricultural practice, although he graphically extends the metaphor. But where the imagery departs from realism, it most starkly underlines the point. Chaff did not burn eternally (or even long),36 yet John depicts the wicked’s fire as “unquenchable.” John does not simply echo the Jewish consensus of his day, because opinions divided on the character of hell.37 Some believed that it was eternal for at least the worst sinners;38 but some others believed that most sinners would endure hell only temporarily and would then be destroyed39 or (on some views) released.40 Thus John specifically affirmed the harshest image of his day: divine judgment involved eternal torment. Again, however, teaching about “Gehinnom” (hell), whether eternal or temporary, fits especially a Palestinian milieu (even linguistically), not the environment of the later Gospel writers.41
