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Why Was Jesus Baptized? A Reader’s Guide to GodBlog

Why would Jesus be baptized by John if baptism was connected with repentance?

This guide brings together several discussions already found across GodBlog. Rather than treating the question as a separate, simplified explanation of Jesus, it points readers toward the larger questions explored throughout the blog: what we can historically know about Jesus, how the Gospel writers shaped his story, how early Christians understood his identity, and how later Christian belief developed.

In this guide:

- Jesus and John the Baptist
- What historians think we can know about Jesus
- How the Gospels present Jesus differently
- The difference between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith
- How ideas about Jesus developed in early Christianity

Related GodBlog reading is linked throughout the guide below.

Jesus and John the Baptist

The baptism of Jesus is an interesting place to begin because it belongs to both history and theology.

The Gospels give the event religious meaning, but historians also take Jesus’ connection with John the Baptist seriously.

In How Much Do We Know About the Historical Jesus?, GodBlog considers how little can be established with confidence about Jesus as a historical person. One of the events that receives relatively broad scholarly acceptance is that Jesus was baptized by John.

That makes the baptism especially useful for thinking about Jesus.

The event may be historically probable, but what it means depends upon how it is interpreted.

For Christian readers, it can mark the beginning of Jesus’ public mission. For historians, it is evidence that Jesus was connected with the religious world represented by John. For the Gospel writers, it becomes part of a much larger story about Jesus’ identity.

Related reading:
→ How Much Do We Know About the Historical Jesus?

How much can we really know about Jesus?

Questions about the baptism quickly lead to a larger problem.

How much do we actually know about Jesus himself?

GodBlog returns to this question in Do We Really Know Anything About Jesus?.

There is an important difference between asking what Christians believe about Jesus and asking what historians can establish about him.

Christian faith makes claims about Jesus as the Son of God, Messiah, teacher, healer, crucified savior, and risen Christ. Historical investigation works differently. It asks what can reasonably be established from surviving evidence.

The baptism is therefore useful because it sits near the meeting point of these two approaches.

Something may have happened historically, while its religious significance developed through the way followers remembered and interpreted it.

Continue exploring:
→ Do We Really Know Anything About Jesus?

The Jesus of history and the Jesus of interpretation

There has never been only one scholarly picture of Jesus.

Some writers emphasize Jesus as a Jewish teacher. Others understand him primarily as an apocalyptic prophet. Still others focus on his ethics, politics, religious message, or effect upon his followers.

GodBlog examines this problem more closely in The Quest for the Historical Jesus.

That discussion matters when reading the baptism story.

If Jesus is understood primarily as an apocalyptic Jewish preacher, his association with John may take on one meaning. If readers begin with later Christian doctrines about Jesus, the same event may take on another.

The event remains the same, but our interpretation of it can change according to the Jesus we believe we are looking for.

Related discussion:
→ The Quest for the Historical Jesus

The Gospels are not identical accounts

Another reason the baptism deserves careful reading is that the Gospels do not simply provide four identical biographies.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John developed traditions about Jesus in different ways.

GodBlog discusses this larger issue in A History of the Bible. The article considers how the New Testament writings developed and why having four Gospels gives readers several perspectives rather than one perfectly uniform account.

This is important when interpreting any event in Jesus’ life.

Instead of combining every Gospel into a single version immediately, readers can first ask what each writer is trying to communicate.

Why does one writer emphasize a particular detail?

Why does another tell the story differently?

What does each version reveal about how early Christians were thinking about Jesus?

The baptism is not only an event to explain. It is also an opportunity to see how the Gospel tradition works.

For more background:
→ A History of the Bible

Who did early Christians believe Jesus was?

The question becomes even larger when we move from what Jesus did to who Christians believed he was.

GodBlog explores the development of these ideas in How New Is the New Testament?.

Different New Testament writings emphasize different things about Jesus. Later Christian theology brought these ideas together into doctrines that became central to Christianity.

This matters to the baptism story because readers often approach the event with later beliefs already in mind.

If Jesus is understood from the beginning as divine and without sin, his baptism naturally creates a question:

Why participate in a practice associated with repentance?

The Gospel story can then be understood in several ways—as identification with others, acceptance of a mission, connection with John, or a public revelation of Jesus’ role.

But the larger issue remains worth exploring: how did early followers move from memories of a Jewish teacher to the theological understanding of Christ that later Christianity inherited?

Explore that question:
→ How New Is the New Testament?

Guide Summary

The baptism of Jesus is more than an isolated Bible question.

It opens the door to several of the larger subjects explored throughout GodBlog:

What can history tell us about Jesus?
How Much Do We Know About the Historical Jesus?

How certain can we be about what we know?
Do We Really Know Anything About Jesus?

Which historical Jesus are we looking for?
The Quest for the Historical Jesus

How did the Gospel accounts develop?
A History of the Bible

How did early Christian ideas about Jesus develop?
How New Is the New Testament?

These articles approach Jesus from different directions. Read together, they provide a broader picture than any short summary could offer.

About This Reader Guide

This page is intended as a guide to existing GodBlog discussions, not as a replacement for the original posts.

The short explanations introduce the questions. The linked articles contain the fuller arguments, sources, interpretations, and personal reflections.

Readers can therefore use this page as a starting point and follow whichever question interests them most.

Does Spinoza believe in God?

Baruch Spinoza is experiencing something of a Renaissance, not his first. He goes in and out of fashion. I attribute the recent rebirth to Gilles Deleuze’s book, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988), but so much has been written about Spinoza in the last several decades, and from such different perspectives, including neuroscience and feminism, that Deleuze could just be a part of a periodic eruption of interest. /1/ I return to Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza as a theorist of joy later. A lot depends on how one translates the Latin word for “joy.”

My argument doesn’t always fit together neatly. One might attribute this to my deficient rhetoric. Or, one might attribute it to the different interpretations of Spinoza that are offered, for example, by Carlisle contra Nadler. I attribute it to Spinoza himself; he is simply unable to hold to the assumptions about God that his argument requires.

Continue reading Does Spinoza believe in God?

Do we really know anything about Jesus?

Chagall & Christ Do we really know anything about what Jesus said? Do we even know that Jesus existed?

Elaine Pagels recently published what is likely her final work. Certainly it reads like a career summary, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (2025). We understand her argument better when we recognize that we know virtually nothing of the historical Jesus beyond two facts. It is almost certain that he existed, and that he was crucified following the orders of Pontius Pilate, Roman prefect (governor) of Judaea during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, probably in the year 30 CE.

Other than the New Testament, there is no historical mention of Jesus until Josephus, who wrote about 80 CE, and whose references to Jesus are suspect, since a Jewish warrior who fought the Romans was unlikely to characterize Jesus as a wise man who performed amazing deeds and so forth. Yet, among scholars there seems almost universal agreement (I’m not quite sure why) that Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (c. 18), constitutes independent if late historical evidence for Jesus’ existence and crucifixion. Those of a sceptical cast of mind wonder how such an important historical figure as Jesus could have escaped mention from any independent source for over fifty years. The recently discovered Gospels of Thomas and Peter don’t add much, since they seem to be be second-century creations. /1/

Scholars have been remarkably inventive in finding additional sources by parsing the synoptic Gospels and Paul. While Matthew and Luke borrowed extensively from Mark, the earliest Gospel, scholars posit a hypothetical document called Q, containing material shared by each but absent in Mark. In addition, scholars posit additional documents, called M and L. That is, material contained neither in Q nor Mark, but unique to Matthew or Luke. Of course, all this could be more economically explained by arguing that Matthew and Luke draw upon undiscovered passages of Mark, but scholars want many sources out of three.

In addition, there are a few passages in Aramaic, such as Jesus’ well-known last words from the cross in Mark and Matthew, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). /2/ Also in Aramaic is Jesus’ command to Jairus’ daughter, “Talitha cumi,” which roughly means “Little girl, stand up and walk.” (Mark 5:41). There are a couple of other phrases in Aramaic, suggesting that the text is recalling a genuine oral tradition, but this is far from clear.

Even more creative, scholars have found passages in Paul that read like little creeds or poems that don’t fit Paul’s usage or style, and so are presumed to lead directly back to an oral tradition. The passages don’t fit Paul because they have a ritualistic quality, and because they contain what are called Semitisms, a grammatical form not found in Greek, but only in Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic (Ehrman 2015, loc 3305).

The existence of these separate sources is strictly hypothetical. All we really know is that the synoptic Gospels were written no earlier than 40 years after the death of Jesus, in the case of Mark, by well-educated Greek speaking men who had no direct contact with Jesus or his disciples. Paul wrote earlier, and might have known James, the brother of Jesus. Or might not. Mark and Luke likely wrote in Rome, Matthew possibly in Judea, or possibly not. We know so little the tendency to guess is overwhelming.

Continue reading Do we really know anything about Jesus?

The Book of Revelation Does Not Belong in the Bible

The last book in the New Testament, Revelation, is remarkably popular today. Few people read Revelation itself, but millions have read a book series called Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Books seven and eight in the series (The Indwelling and The Mark) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. The Remnant began at number one on the Times best-seller list (2002). Roughly 65 million copies have been sold in over forty languages, though only in America has it become a publishing phenomenon.

Rapture

Left Behind assumes an evangelical doctrine called “rapture.” The term nowhere appears in the Bible, but is the relatively recent creation of John Nelson Darby, an evangelical Protestant who came up with the term in the 1830’s. Popularized by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, and books that followed, The Late Great was the best-selling nonfiction book of the nineteen-seventies. While the Book of Revelation is not widely read, the attraction of end of the world thinking remains remarkably real even in a secular age. Dorian Lynskey’s recent Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, suggests some reasons why. I’ll return to one of these reasons at the end.

Rapture claims that at the end of days, all Christians will rise “in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” First Thessalonians 4:17 is an often-cited Biblical source, but its meaning is obscure. /1/ The word “rapture” never appears in the Bible. Nor does the Book of Revelation say anything about the followers of Jesus being taken out of the world before it all goes up in flames.

Like all apocalypses, the rapture fantasy can be dangerous. Older readers may remember Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who stated in testimony before Congress that while it’s essential to preserve our resources for future generations, he remarked that he wasn’t sure how many future generations there would be before the Apocalypse and Christ’s subsequent return. Casper Weinberger, then Secretary of Defense, agreed. /2/ When you think this way, everything from nuclear war to climate change becomes less significant.

The Left Behind series loves violence. In this respect, it is true to Revelation, the bloodiest book in the Bible. This, though, is not why there was so much debate over whether to include it in the canon we call the Bible, a book of books. One thing that troubled the early church leaders was that the book was too bound to what Christians call the Old Testament. Revelation’s God was a God of power and might, with no hint of God’s willingness to become weak and vulnerable in the person of the son (2 Corinthians 12:9). For many Christians, not Revelation, but the Gospels teach the true lesson of Christianity: non-violence and love of neighbor in the face of hatred (Matthew 22:36-40). Barely a hint of this remains in Revelation.

Continue reading The Book of Revelation Does Not Belong in the Bible

Alternative histories of Jesus: four novels

Alternative histories of Jesus: four novels

Each of the 4 stories challenges the divinity of Jesus. Each imagines Jesus as merely mortal; one isn’t sure but wishes he were. The Last Temptation of Christ, probably the most well-known, I read in college. The novel has Jesus imagining that he was a man who chose life over sacrifice. This fantasy turns out to be the Devil’s work. I believe this misses the point of Christ’s dual nature.

The other three imagine that Jesus was fully and only human. Judas betrays Christ because he forgets his earthly revolutionary mission and begins to imagine that he really is divine. All miracles are explained away. D. H. Lawrence’s Jesus is a version of the gardener in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In it too miracles are either explained away or ignored. The fourth book, The Testament of Mary, is in some ways the odd book out. Originally written as a screen play, it is elegant in its simplicity. Mary looks back on her life as Christ’s mother, and regrets that he chose the to save the world. Better to have lived his own life, a man so talented he could have done anything. She is skeptical about the miracles, especially his resurrection, but does not outright deny them. They just get in the way.

All but The Last Temptation are short, novellas really. I believe that even the most devout would benefit from reading them, for if Christ was fully man as well as fully God, then one has to say that the man side generally gets short shrift. If he were not the son of God, the conflict between his two sides (not parts, but aspects of a whole) would have torn him apart. It should tear us about when we think about it, but we generally don’t let it. Each novel is fascinating reading; they were well worth my time, and I believe yours.

I’ll tell you about each book, and conclude by elaborating on the great value of the Gospels, as well as thinking about Christ as simply man, even if you believe he is more. Here I’ll consider Ernest Renan’s influential The Life of Jesus (original 1863), which purports to be a historical, rather than Gospel based, account of the life of Jesus. It’s not; it’s as fictional as any of the novels we examine. I’ll explain why this is, and must be, the case.

The Books

The plot of The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis (1960) is a little confusing. Just as gypsies are about to nail him to the cross, Christ’s guardian angel (actually an agent of Satan) steals him away and transports him to marriage with Mary Magdalene, who is stoned to death shortly after. The widower Jesus ends up with two sisters, Mary and Hannah, with whom he enjoys a rich family life, including fathering children (pp 445-446).

Judas and other disciples confront him. Jesus lied; he did not live up to his word to die to save the world. Christ is torn with guilt, and at the very end awakens from his dream, accepts his mission from God, and dies with the famous words “It is accomplished” on his lips (p 496).

It is clear in the text, and clearer still in the author’s introduction, that Christ’s dying dream of living a normal human life is inspired by Satan. His guardian angel who saves him from the cross (all illusion) is an agent of Satan. Jesus’ experience of everyday life as deeply satisfying was a fantasy, sent by the devil.

This doesn’t seem right. If Christ was truly all man, as well as all God, then the man part would have naturally wanted a family life, a sexual life, a normal human life. That would be the temptation that the all-God part of him would have to overcome to fulfill his mission. Not Satan, but Christ himself, is the tempter and the tempted. That the last temptation is a dying delusion inspired by Satan fails as a full or honest vision of the duality of Christ’s nature. Kazantzakis may think he is saving Christ’s authentic nature as God, but he sacrifices the mystery of the duality of Christ, the enigma that makes him so fascinating: that he is as fully human we are, while remaining God.*

Continue reading Alternative histories of Jesus: four novels

How new is the New Testament?

How is it that the Old Testament (OT) seems to predict the coming of Christ? Was the OT inspired by the God revealed in the New Testament (NT)? Could be, but an answer internal to the Bible itself is persuasive. The Gospel writers looked backward more than they looked forward, reinterpreting the experience of Jesus, which none had firsthand, as the fulfillment of OT prophecy. Almost any statement about a good man who suffered, such as the suffering servant songs of Isaiah 52-53, was put to this use.

The Gospels were written no earlier than 40 years after the death of Christ. Mark was written in about 70 CE, John about 100 CE. Educated men wrote them in Greek. The apostles were uneducated, probably illiterate, who spoke Aramaic. The Gospels were written to make sense of the fact that the Messiah, who was supposed to be a mighty warrior who would liberate the Jews, died a miserable and degrading death by crucifixion.

Even that seems to have been predicted by the OT, which says that if a man is guilty of a capital crime “you hang him on a tree.” (Deuteronomy 21:22-23) Acts refers to this passage three times (5.30; 10.39; 13.29). The principal goal of the NT was to transform a humiliating death into the liberation of humankind from the grip of death. The OT provides plenty of evidence for this reinterpretation.

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53.5)

It certainly sounds like the prophet Isaiah was talking about Jesus. But was he?

Hardly any passage of the Hebrew Bible is and has been of such fundamental importance in the history of Jewish-Christian debate . . . or has played such a central role in it, as has the fourth Servant Song of Second Isaiah. Nor has any other passage experienced such different and sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations as this one. (Schreiner, p 419)

Continue reading How new is the New Testament?

Wild Gods: Barbara Ehrenreich and William James

Wild Gods: Barbara Ehrenreich and William James.

Better known for her books on low-wage workers, such as Nickled and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote her dissertation on cellular immunology, and had always considered herself a scientist, even as she began to write on social issues.

Author of about twenty books, the one that breaks the pattern is among her last, Living with a Wild God, in which she writes about an encounter with god, an event for which she was unprepared. “I saw God,” she says about an encounter years earlier in which she experienced the world alight with what the traditionally religious might call glory, “where God or gods or at least a living Presence” appeared to her (pp 127, 215). Previously imperceptible “conscious beings . . . . that normally elude our senses” seems to be the expression she is most comfortable with, but she freely employs the terms God and gods.

This does not lead her to say “I believe in God.” Rather, she says she knows God because she has encountered him in a wilderness called Lone Pine. But if she knows God, her god is nothing like the traditional theistic God, for he (or it) has no interest in our welfare.

As Eckhart . . . had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as “God,” the religious seeker must set aside “any idea about God as being good, wise, [ or ] compassionate.” This of course poses a nearly insoluble problem: Mysticism often reveals a wild amoral Other, while religion insists on conventional codes of ethics enforced by an ethical supernatural being. (p 226)

If this wild god has a purpose, then it is to keep us company. Since Descartes, we have made ourselves the center of reality, creating a lonely world, the result of the “collective solipsism” of our species.* While the wild gods are unconcerned with humans’ need for cosmic company, she makes the surprising suggestion that they may be seeking us out (p 237).

The suggestion is surprising not only because nothing else in the book prepares us for it, but also because it faintly reflects the traditional Judeo-Christian view of God as intensely involved with his people, first rescuing them from Pharaoh, and then saving them from the obliteration of death.

Ehrenreich’s gods are more modest, seeking only companionship. Or perhaps this experience of an invisible companion is how we put together our chaotic experience of the world when we are in a mystical state. Or a psychotic one (p 215). Ehrenreich is certain there is a difference, but not always certain which one prevails at the moment, and she is wise to hesitate. She does not hesitate in her assertion that these gods are other than human, other than ourselves. We may experience them in a mystical state, but their existence is independent of human desires.

William James: “Something really wild in the universe”

In his 1895 essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” William James concluded that human life is either a “real fight in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success” or it is a trivial game from which “one may withdraw at will.” With the latter phrase, he is referring to suicide. As evidence for the first possibility, he stated that

it feels like a real fight, as if there were something really wild in the universe which we . . . are needed to redeem. (paragraphs 61-63)

Ehrenreich reveled in this wildness, which reached out to grab her and might even need her. James would redeem it. But what does that mean, and does nature need redeeming? Theodor Adorno (1984) answered that anything that looks like the redemption of nature is bound to be domination in disguise. What James seems to mean is that we need to “redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears.”

Continue reading Wild Gods: Barbara Ehrenreich and William James

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

The quest for the historical Jesus

Is Jesus Christ best understood as a prophet of the apocalypse? Yes, argued Albert Schweitzer in 1906 in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Moderns, said Schweitzer, tend to miss this reality, turning Jesus into a wise and pacific God-man. Schweitzer’s claim has been renewed and popularized by Bart Ehrman in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.*

It’s a strong argument, though a complicated one, for there exists no history of Jesus without its own theological agenda. The first Gospel, Mark, as well as the hypothetical source called Q, are filled with apocalyptic sayings of Jesus, many emphasizing that the end of the age would fall within the lifetime of his followers. “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the Kingdom of God has come in power.” (Mark 9:1).

The problem, of course, is that Jesus was wrong. The Kingdom did not come within the lifetime of his followers. It has yet to arrive. Though the revision of the message is present in all the Gospels after Mark, it was most clearly changed in John. The Kingdom was in heaven. It was not coming to earth, at least not for some time. Jesus was telling us how to live now, not how to prepare for the apocalypse.

“Already but not yet” makes it complicated

The complexity is best captured by what is called inaugurated eschatology, and reflected in the phrase “already but not yet.” There is much in the New Testament, virtually our only historical source, that says that the Kingdom of Heaven is already at work among the followers of Jesus. The Beatitudes (blessed are the poor in spirit . . . ) or the antitheses, also in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (5:21–48), are exemplary.** There is virtually no way to read them but as advice for how to live in this world now. It is a stretch to argue that the Beatitudes are a statement about the reversal that will occur when God’s Kingdom is realized on earth. About the antitheses, Ehrman argues simply that they are not independently attested, an especially weak argument about a Gospel he relies on heavily (p 171).

Continue reading The Quest for the Historical Jesus