Lexical and Cultural Contact in Hebrew Bible

Abstract

demonstrates that whatever we know about John is better understood against the background of early Christian theologies, particularly early Christologies, rather than in the search for an historical John the Baptist, who is as elusive as the historical Jesus. Instead, Nir seeks after the literary character of John: a key figure in the Gospels, the forerunner of Jesus, the founder of the baptismal rite and witness par excellence. Nir lays out her argument in seven chapters. The first chapter looks to Josephus’s take on John (Ant. 18.116–19) and concludes it to be an interpolation reflecting the voice of an intra-Christian polemic about the efficacy of baptism that substantiates her claim regarding the influence of Christian beliefs in the casting of the Baptist. Nir’s second chapter focusses on the identification of John with Elijah. Here Nir’s scholarship is especially noteworthy in rooting the Elijah tradition in Christian, rather than Second Temple Jewish tradition. This leads to her third chapter wherein Nir considers the geographical areas of John’s activity. She notes the two common elements in the Gospels, namely the wilderness and the Jordon, as serving theological rather than historical aims insofar as they link the origins of Christian baptism with Israel’s foundation narrative in Exodus. The fourth chapter looks to John in the Synoptics, where John replaces allegiance to Torah and Temple with faith in Jesus as conduit to eschatological redemption. In the fifth chapter, considering the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel, Nir illustrates how the Baptist’s primary role is that of witness to Jesus, both God and human. The sixth chapter lends careful consideration to Luke 1 and 2 in tracing the Baptist’s birth as the dawn of (Christian) salvation in direct continuity with Judaism, yet oriented to and inclusive of the Greco-Roman world. The seventh chapter shows John’s martyrdom to be a distinctively Christian one: ‘John is depicted as a figure in conflict with rulers at his own initiative, whom he confronts in public on his own, who is persecuted but fears not death, who is identified as the suffering Elijah and as prophet, and whose burial carries the promise of resurrection’ (p. 257). The First Christian Believer is a model of clear writing, careful structuring and thoroughness in establishing John as the earliest model of Christian martyrdom. Nir has the knack of sticking to primary sources, whilst making good use of secondary sources, to describe how the figure of the Baptist has been forged on the anvil of Christian tradition. Researchers of Second Temple Judaism and the origins of Christianity, especially those who seek an historical John behind the John of the New Testament, will find much to whet appetites and challenge positions in Nir’s erudite work.