Tractates on the Gospel of John (continued)
TRACTATE 5 113 their fellow servant needed to be baptized by the baptism of the Lord; but they who are baptized by the baptism of the Lord have no need of the baptism of the fellow servant.
6. Now whereas John had received a baptism that would properly be called John's, the Lord, Jesus Christ, however did not wish to give his baptism to anyone, not that no one might be baptized with the Lord's baptism, but that the Lord himself might always be baptizing. This was done so that the Lord might baptize also through ministers, that is, that those whom the Lord's ministers were going to baptize, the Lord, not they, would be baptizing. For it is one thing to baptize in the role of a minister; another to baptize with power.
(2) For the quality of the baptism is commensurate with the quality of the person by whose power it is given, not with the quality of the person through whose ministry it is given. As John was, such was the quality of John's baptism; [his] baptism was in accord with justice as that of a just man, yet still of a [mere] man, but one who had received this grace from the Lord, and a grace so great that he was worthy to precede the judge, and to point him out with his fingers, and to fulfill the words of that prophecy: "The voice of one crying out in the desert, prepare the way for the Lord."'^ (3) On the other hand as the Lord is, such is the quahty of baptism; therefore the baptism of the Lord is divine because the Lord is God.
7. But the Lord, Jesus Christ, could, if he willed, have given power to any servant of his that he might give his baptism in his place, so to speak; and he could have transferred the power of baptizing from himself and have established it in any servant of his and have given to the baptism transferred to the servant as great a power as the baptism given by the Lord had. He did not wish this for the reason that the hope of the baptized might then reside in the one by whom they acknowledged that they had been baptized. He did not, then, wish a servant to put hope in a servant. And for this very reason the
13. Cf. Mt 3.3, Mk 1.2, and Lk 3.4. Augustine here uses a slight variant of the text from the Synoptic Gospels rather than the text from J n 1.23 upon which he has already commented in Tractate 4.7.