Chapter 146 of 404

John as the Source of Baptism for the Jesus Movement

If Jesus followed John, and Jesus’ disciples baptized, the most probable connection between these facts is a line of continuity running through Jesus himself, as in our opening quotation from Joan Taylor above.¹¹² This practice seems likely even though the Gospels make little of it, perhaps because for them it was only Jesus’ anticipated Spirit baptism that would radically transform John’s water baptism. The Fourth Gospel’s portrait of baptism by Jesus’ disciples (Jn 3:26) thus makes sense. Because Christian baptism is presupposed in our earliest sources (Paul, e.g., Rom 6:3-4; 1 Cor 1:14-17) and our depictions of the earliest events (Jesus’ postresurrection commission in Matt 28:19; the first Christian sermon in Acts 2:38), it seems more likely that Jesus, who moved in the Baptist’s circle, actually urged on his followers the rite, than that later urban Jerusalem Christians or Galilean Christians more chronologically and geographically distant from the Baptist would have done so.

The Synoptic tradition does omit mention of the practice. Whether the Synoptics deemphasize it to avoid comparisons with the Baptist, or whether Christian baptism represents a postresurrection mandate, is unclear. At the same time, the Fourth Gospel appears to have more reason to downplay it than the Synoptics do, yet reports it. This Gospel thus may report accurate historical tradition that in the earliest stage of Jesus’ ministry, which overlapped with John in a comparable region, Jesus’ disciples supervised others’ baptisms under his instruction. The author is careful to report that Jesus himself did not practice baptism (Jn 4:2), which might help explain why it does not appear in Synoptic tradition. Further, to outsiders the baptism of Jesus’ followers at this stage would have appeared as merely a continuation of the Baptist’s practice by one of his former disciples.¹¹³ Even in baptism, the context of John and the subsequent Jesus movement sheds light on Jesus.

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