Doudna would agree with Stuart about the origin of the Johannine John...

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Giuseppe
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Re: Doudna would agree with Stuart about the origin of the Johannine John...

Post by Giuseppe »

I mean: the Johannine John the Baptist.

Did he start as a marcionite or anti-marcionite icon in Ephesus?
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Doudna would agree with Stuart about the origin of the Johannine John...

Post by Giuseppe »

Doudna explains what he means by "John of Ephesus":

In currently prevailing scholarly view the Gospel of Mark, with its Josephus-like John the Baptist, predates 93 CE in composition and is the evidence that the Josephus JB reflects Christian tradition. However that dating of the Gospel of Mark, however commonly understood, never was securely established as distinguished from hypothesized and is not stronger than argument from plausibility (as you recognize). The alternative argument is that the Gospel of Mark is later than and draws from Antiquities as a literary source for its John the Baptist material. But if there is no certainty of a pre-93 CE Gospel of Mark, and if John the Baptist in the Gospel of Mark is well explained as created from use of Antiquities as a literary source, what evidence is there of the Josephus JB figure current in Christian circles prior to when the Gospel of Mark was written? Paul’s letters do not know of a Josephus John the Baptist. Acts has a reference to “disciples of John” in Ephesus, also to an Apollos from Alexandria in Ephesus who is a Jesus-Christian who knows “the baptism of John”, but (a) Luke-Acts is second-century CE and Acts is widely understood to be filled with anachronisms and tendentious story-telling; but even more to the point, (b) is the John of the “baptism of John” of Ephesus, implied to be an adversary of Paul according to both Acts and Rev 2-3, the Josephus JB, or is it the Johannine John figure of Asia Minor associated with the Johannine writings of the New Testament known to Papias? I say the latter.

In this light there is no evidence the JB figure in Antiquities had anything to do with anything Christian at the time it was written.

Doudna talks of rivalry between John and Paul in Acts. But this rivalry doesn't say the identity of the Paul who is meant: the Catholic Paul or the marcionite Paul?

The connection with Apollos/Apelles makes it slightly more probable that the original Johannine John was in the marcionite camp, since Apelles himself was a disciple of Marcion.

(In addition, the Pentecoste episode in Acts is based on the descent of spirit on the followers of the "baptism of John").

Then his name and legacy were both catholicized by before connecting his name with the Jewish Book of Revelation and after by catholicizing his epistles and the Fourth Gospel.

Note en passant that for Earl Doherty the "Jesus masked as angel of light" (cursed by Paul) was the same Jesus hallucinated by Apollos. Not coincidentially, Apelles also talked about a Jesus of light who masked continually himself during his descent in the lower heavens.


Stantibus sic rebus, the enigma of John in the Fourth Gospel is sufficiently resolved.

Where I am less persuaded is about the authenticity of the Baptist passage in Josephus.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Doudna would agree with Stuart about the origin of the Johannine John...

Post by Giuseppe »

A balance:
  • The Baptist Passage is a Jewish-Christian interpolation (per Rivka Nir 2019)
  • The Synoptical John the Baptist is a Mark's invention
  • The John the Baptist of the Fourth Gospel is a fusion of John of Ephesus and the Synoptical John the Baptist
  • The John the Baptist of the Fourth Gospel is an anti-YHWH figure
  • Apollos is Apelles
  • John of Ephesus is follower of Apollos
  • Apelles is an anti-YHWH figure
  • John of Ephesus is an anti-YHWH figure
  • John "son of Zebedee" was used later to catholicize John of Ephesus.
The points above explain perfectly the John the Baptist of the Fourth Gospel, his genesis and development.

But what was the origin of the synoptical John the Baptist, once recognized the fact that Mark didn't find him in Josephus, pace Doudna?

A distinction is necessary, between proto-Mark and Mark.
  • Proto-Mark is anti-YHWH (per Hermann Raschke 1928)
  • Mark is pro-YHWH.
That is the hermeneutical way to be followed.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Doudna would agree with Stuart about the origin of the Johannine John...

Post by Giuseppe »

John the Baptist is a negative figure in proto-Mark:

Giuseppe wrote: Sun Apr 05, 2020 6:17 am I have found another evidence that John the Baptist was an agent of the demiurge, so proving the Cathars were correct:

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

(Genesis 3:21)

The giving of garments by YHWH to Adam and Eve was interpreted by the Gnostics as the act by which the demiurge buries/imprisons the humanity in the evil matter. Hence, a John the Baptist with "garments of skin" is by definition a creature of the evil demiurge. Despite of his being Elijah redivivus.

Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Doudna would agree with Stuart about the origin of the Johannine John...

Post by Giuseppe »

So Doudna has answered to my question:

Giuseppe, you always bring up interesting bibliography and I have not previously seen the Leon Herrmann reference, but based on your description: yes the John passage in Antiquities was interpolated into its present position in the preexisting Wars source–by Josephus.

Where my proposal differs from prevailing conceptions is in understanding the Antiquities passage as coming from a Jewish source telling a story of an undated John killed by an undated Herod, a tradition of the death of Hyrcanus II at the hands of Herod the Great, mistakenly dated by Josephus to the wrong Herod–and the Antiquities story generates the stories of the Gospel of Mark re John the Baptist rather than vice versa. Herrmann assumes like practically all discussions that composition of the John story of Antiquities postdates and is derivative from the Christian John the Baptist stories of the Gospel of Mark, but that premise needs to be questioned. There needs to be consideration given to an inversion of that premise, in which literary influence operated in the reverse direction from what has been assumed.

In this light, references to what the Gospels say of their John figures are of no relevance to understanding the Antiquities John passage. There is no beheading of John in the story in Antiquities, and therefore beheading has nothing to do with understanding Josephus’s John passage.

The suggestion that the Machaerus cross-reference played a role in Josephus’s choice of dating his Jewish story of John killed by Herod, of his source, to the time of Herod Antipas where Josephus positioned it, is possible.

Either Josephus’s source telling the John story, or Josephus himself, contrasts John’s teaching concerning purification (= of first-century BCE high priest and diaspora ethnarch Hyrcanus II) with either a contemporary gentile misunderstanding or rival Jewish interpretation, whichever it was. Inter-Jewish differences in interpretation from the first century BCE forward are clear from texts such as 4QMMT, also 1QS whose ideology of purification by immersion is in agreement with that of Josephus’s John—the texts of Qumran from separate argument reflecting a former mainstream of Jewish thought and practice from the first century BCE. In any case the purification by immersion practice and ideology taught by Antiquities’ John appears to allude to what Adele Berlin calls the emergence of “household Judaism” or popular practices of purification, Jewish use of mikvehs, starting in the first century BCE. So those are my tentative responses to what you raise.

(my bold)

Note my answer:

I see your reasons and I may be persuaded in any moment by your view. My perplexity about the authenticity of the Baptist passage is about Machaerus.
  • What need Herod had to kill John just there, an obvious pointer to the last apparition of the Aretas’s daughter in Antiquites (accordingly, a pointer working easily as a not so implicit – Christian? – allusion to the moral corruption of Antipas in matter of women).
  • The need to kill John the Baptist in the enclosure of a fortress, and not on the place, assumes that the author of the Baptist Passage had crystallized in his mind in advance the (Gospel?) view of John the Baptist as a man constantly surrounded by large masses in public places (hence one who could be killed only away from prying eyes).

Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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