The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist by Rivka Nir

Abstract

Reviewed by: The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist by Rivka Nir Ian Werrett rivka nir, The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist (New Testament Monographs 38; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2019). Pp. xv + 324. $90. To say that Rivka Nir’s book The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist is an ambitious publication would be a massive understatement. Starting from the premise that the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity occurred sometime [End Page 520] between the destruction of the Jewish temple (70 c.e.) and the end of the Bar Kokhba Revolt (136 c.e.), N. asserts that the entirety of our source material on John the Baptist, from the Gospels to the Pseudo-Clementines, has been intentionally and aggressively filtered through the lens of Christian theology. “Whatever we are told about John,” claims N., “how he looked, the baptism he instituted, the geographical arena of his activity, the speeches he made, the account of his birth and death, become understandable, in all their isolated details and their integration into a whole picture, only against the background of Christian theology and its Christology” (p. 28). Said another way, since the presentations of John the Baptist in the Gospels and Acts, not to mention Josephus’s report on John, were written during or after the “parting of the ways,” they are, according to N., concerned not with the historical figure of John, but with his role in the sacred history of Christianity. Readers familiar with the source material on John the Baptist will likely grouse at N.’s. conclusion, which is no doubt why she opens her “search” for a Christian John with an analysis of the least Christian source at our disposal: Josephus’s report about John the Baptist in the Antiquities of the Jews. Concentrating specifically on the description of John’s baptism, which is described by Josephus not as a “pardon for some sins but rather the cleansing of their bodies, inasmuch as it was taken for granted that their souls had already been purified by justice” (Ant. 18.5.2 §117), N. notes that the historian’s report employs terms for John’s baptism that are not used elsewhere when talking about Jewish ritual bathing and that John’s baptism, as described by Josephus, appears to be a communal activity administered by a single person for those seeking entry into a community of believers—a position that would have been at odds with the solitary lustrations of the Pharisees and other Torah-observant Jews. More significant for N., however, is Josephus’s insistence that the ritual cleansing of John’s baptism can be effected only through a participant’s prior moral purification, thereby paralleling the positions espoused by Hebrews and the Pseudo-Clementines, which understand Christian baptism as negating the necessity for the sacrificial system of the Jewish temple. Based on these and other arguments too numerous to recount here, N. concludes that “Josephus’s testimony about John the Baptist is not from the hand of the Jewish historian but a late interpolation written by a Christian or Jewish Christian” (p. 259). While it is certainly possible that Josephus’s report about John the Baptist has been altered in a manner similar to that of his testimony about Jesus (Ant. 18.3.3 §63), a passage that displays clear signs of Christian interpolation, the argument for the former being a non-Josephan creation is less convincing. It goes without saying that there are many places in the primary sources where the figure of John the Baptist “has been filtered through a Christian prism” (p. 258), but it is also true that there are numerous examples of dissimilarity in the source material, thereby calling into question the force of N.’s assertions. Primary among these challenges is the willingness of Jesus, a man purportedly without sin (Heb 4:15; 1 Pet 2:22; 1 John 3:5), to participate in a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4; Luke 3:3)—a challenge to Christian theology so great that its absence in N.’s volume can hardly be believed! Moreover, the...