Bernard Muller wrote:Then if you can imagine any such thing, anything goes. That's definitively this kind of scholarly speculation that I abhor.
I wanted to comment further on this topic, since it seems to be an important one for interpreting the gospels. There seems to be a rather large element of subjectivity in how persuasive someone is going to find suggestions of the nature we are discussing, in which one scene is thought to have been inspired wholesale by previous literature or whatnot. I know from experience that such suggestions exist which I find extremely — as you would put it, Bernard — farfetched: Richard Carrier's take on Alexander and Rufus springs to mind; and, while Peter Kirby's rival suggestion was an improvement on Carrier's, I myself would still classify it as fairly farfetched. And there are plenty of others. So I understand your reaction, Bernard; but apparently my tolerance for such scenarios is a bit up the scale from where yours is, even if nowhere near where Carrier's must be. And I do agree that the composition of the baptism itself from the Elijah/Elisha cycle is not as secure a suggestion as, say, the invention of some of the healings from those same materials; but no, I do not regard the composition of the baptism from those materials as farfetched.
Perhaps breaking the thought process down into steps might make it seem less so to you. We can start with a statement of yours, as it happens:
Well I put as little weight as you do on the baptism, even if I think there is a good chance Jesus did get the immersion in the water as probably most visitors of John did.
This sort of reasoning may be all that is needed to get the ball rolling. If John was known as a baptizer, and if it has already been established in the tradition (whether historical or not) that Jesus' movement and John's movement were connected somehow and that Jesus even met or spent time with John in person, then it is easy to assume that Jesus was baptized by John, just as you surmise above (if you can do it, then surely the early Christians could have done it). Once the brute "fact" of the baptism is assumed, all that remains is to invest it with meaning:
why was Jesus baptized? And here, even
without anything specifically taken from the Elijah/Elisha cycle, we can both agree (I hope) that one of the answers given was that the baptism was the event which marked the theophanic beginning of Jesus' ministry as Son of God. To me, the connection to Elisha receiving a double portion of Elijah's spirit is implicitly of a piece with the kind of enthronement material already explicitly present in the pericope, especially if the tradition was already accumulating connections to Elijah and Elisha at the time (IOW, I do not need to suppose that 2 Kings 2.9 was the inspiration for the entire pattern of connection between the gospels and Elijah/Elisha!). The tradent would be thinking, "Ah, the baptism must have been like Elijah handing over the reins to Elisha." Elisha's double portion of the spirit may have inspired Jesus' receipt of the spirit. Josephus never names the Jordan as the venue for John's activity;
perhaps even that venue was suggested in the gospels by the site of Elisha's request (of course, the Jordan resonates with all kinds of ancient meaning even on its own merits).
I have no idea whether this gives a bit more body to the suggestion from your point of view or not, but I thought it might be worth a try.
Ben.
