Dueling Messiahs

The gospels attempt to draw a picture of John the Baptist for us that places him in a position of insignificance in comparison to Jesus. They go so far as to put the following words in John’s own mouth:

Mark 1:7 – “There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and loose.”

According to the Christian authors of the gospels, John’s sole mission in life was to prepare a way for the one true Messiah, Jesus. Yet somehow I don’t expect that we would be seeing that attitude portrayed by John’s disciples if their gospels had survived.

John did have disciples and from the tone of certain gospel passages it would seem they were no supporters of Jesus:

Mat. 9:14 – Then came the disciples of John, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but thy disciples fast not?’

What we have here is not a question from a group seeking religious guidance. This is strictly a “We’re holier than you” challenge. “We fast. You don’t. We’re better than you.” And the mere fact that John even had disciples begs the question; why would John have disciples if it was his job to win recruits for Jesus? Wouldn’t he have told them to go follow the true Messiah? What we need to do in order to get to the bottom of this mystery is change our focus and look beneath the surface of the gospels to see what John and Jesus were really all about.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that John the Baptist was 6 months older than Jesus (1:36). The intention in telling us this is for the reader to understand that John’s ministry began before Jesus’. More importantly it implies that John also died before Jesus, which agrees with the general theme of the gospels. If we assume that John was not a supporter but a competitor of Jesus we see that the timing of their ministries would have had certain advantages and disadvantages. John’s being first would have given him a head start on creating his following, while John’s dying first would have left Jesus without competition until his own death. These two factors appear, then, to cancel one another out.

But, of course, there were other advantages to being the first Messiah on the scene. One of the major one’s was that John’s disciples got to determine which O.T. passage was going to be used to prophecy the Messiah’s birthplace. Naturally they chose one that cited Bethlehem, John’s native home. That created a problem that gave all the gospel writers fits since their Messiah was known to have been called Jesus of Nazareth.

But the fact that John died first carried with it the difficult challenge of justifying the death of their supposed Messiah when no prophecy could be found predicting that the Messiah would die. How did John’s followers overcome that obstacle? I’m convinced that they drew the parallel of the sacrifice of Isaac. John died as a sacrifice from God to ratify the Covenant that He had not signed when Abraham sacrificed Isaac. Then God raised John from the dead as He had Isaac:

Matt. 14:2 – This is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead…
Mark 6:16 – But when Herod heard {of Jesus} he said, It is John whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead.
Luke 9:7 - …it was said of some, that John was risen from the dead.

I am not taking these verses out of context. I am offering them as an insight into the situation faced by the first Christians and the gospel writers of a half century later. Two groups of disciples were faced off trying to win the crown for their respective deceased Messiahs. John’s followers were first to face the loss of their Messiah. They salvaged their movement by claiming that John had risen from the dead. Some time later Jesus’ disciples faced the same loss and salvaged their movement by copying the strategy used by John’s disciples. The three verses cited above were designed to discount the claim by John’s disciples that their Messiah had literally risen from the dead. Instead John’s resurrection was a mere figment of Herod’s imagination brought on by guilt.

*If you are new to this blog (Nobullthinker) this post may not make much sense to you. That’s because it is part of a series that is best understood by following it from the beginning. I hope you will take the opportunity to read through this series of articles and to pass this information on if you find it interesting.