Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. Read Online Free PDF Page A

Zealots, advocated. They were eventually to get the upper hand in Jewish opinion a generation after Jesus’s death, leading to the Great Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem. The alternative was a spiritual revolution, the replacement of the unreformed law of Moses by a New Testament based on love and neighborliness, which could be embraced by all classes and all peoples.
    That was the idea toward which Jesus’s cousin John, son of Elizabeth, was moving. He had seen a vision in youth, and he knew that he had a special task to perform. To prepare himself he had lived for many years in the desert and adapted to it. He “was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey” (Mk 1: 6). All four evangelists knew a lot about John, recognized his importance in the life of Jesus, and gave space to his mission accordingly. It is likely they had a common source briefed either by John himself or by one of his closest disciples (Mk 1:2-9ff.; Mt 3:1-15; Lk 3:2-22; Jn 1: 6-34). John was essentially a humble man. He knew he was not the Christ, who the prophets foretold would come as a savior and a redeemer. He repeated many times the words of Isaiah: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.” He knew that the Christ was coming: “He it is,” he said, “who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.”
    John preached that in order to prepare for the Christ and the New Order all must come to him by the banks of the Jordan River and be immersed in it. This act of baptism, as he called it, was necessary to wash off the sins and habits of the past and thereby become a new man. But he recognized that his action was more symbolic than real, and that it required the godly power of the Christ himself to effect the inner transformation. John always insisted on this and made no miraculous claims for himself. All the same, he attracted huge crowds, and the attention of the authorities. According to the Gospel of John (1 : 19-27), they “sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. . . . I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not.” He then expressed his image of humility—“whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.”
    The closeness of the various evangelical descriptions to one another, and the repetition of the Baptist’s words, make it clear we are dealing with eyewitness accounts, probably more than one. The Gospel of John continues even more dramatically: “The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith: Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (1:29). According to the account the eyewitness gave to Matthew (3:14-17), John said to Jesus: “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering him said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” John then baptized Jesus, and when he came out of the water, “lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” According to Luke, one eyewitness reported, “the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him” (3:22). Whether the dove was real or figurative, all four accounts agree on the essentials, that the baptism of Jesus was an extraordinary event, in which the presence of God was visual and audible, and witnessed by large crowds of men and women.
    It may be asked: Why did Jesus need baptism? Was not the Son of God already prepared, in all respects, for his mission? This was John’s own view, clearly. But Jesus was adamant that he must go through the ceremony of renewal. He was stressing the universality of the sacrament—the