The Baptism of Our Lord—A Study of St. Mark 1.9–11

Abstract

Both the construction ('And it came to pass… that Jesus came’) and the expression ‘in those days’ have a distinctly OT flavour (cf. e.g. Exod. 2.11). As neither is frequent in Mark, we might perhaps venture the suggestion that either consciously or unconsciously he is giving to his narrative a special touch of solemnity at the point at which he introduces Jesus for the first time.That Jesus was baptised by John1 can scarcely be doubted. The fact that the submission of Jesus to a baptism of repentance caused the early Church embarrassment, as may be seen in Matt. 3.14 f and in the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Gospel according to the Hebrews (see Huck, Synopsis, 9th edit., p. 12), makes it extremely unlikely that the Church would ever have invented the incident.2To the question why He submitted to baptism various answers have been given. Some have suggested that it was because He was conscious of sin and felt the need to repent3; but this seems to be ruled out by what Dr Taylor has called ‘the entire absence of the consciousness of sin in His personality, as it is revealed in the Gospels’.4 Others have suggested that Jesus was simply availing Himself of John's baptism ‘as a means of expressing the will to live a pure life’5 or that He submitted to it merely in order to show His personal approval of the Baptist's movement.