Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

They [the Essenes] think that oil is a defilement; and if any one of them be anointed, without his own approbation, it is wiped off his body;

On which account he [John of Gischala] emptied the vessels of that sacred wine and oil, which the priests kept to be poured on the burnt offerings, and which lay in the inner court of the temple: and distributed it among the multitude. Who in their anointing themselves, and drinking, used [each of them] above an hin of them

Giuseppe I would like to follow up on your suggestion, which I find quite interesting, that the baptism of John by Jesus of the Gospels may reflect a context in the Jewish Revolt when Jesus of Galilee (Jesus ben Saphat) joined under John (“vassalage” as you term it) who had already fled to Jerusalem. To that suggestion can be added this:

If you had a John collecting warriors and purifying them en masse upon enlistment–such that they were all pure and could eat together–then you would have a baptizing John, by definition. According to Josippon, John after taking power in Jerusalem led an army outside of Jerusalem establishing control over towns of the surrounding region. This is ca. spring 68:


(from The Abbreviated English Josippon)

There is John in the vicinity of the Jordan, said by Josippon to be with his warriors present and active on the occasion of the slaughter of the Gadarenes told in Josephus’s Gr War. At War 4.420-421 “the fugitives” pursued by Placidus from Gadara–that is John and his men in Josippon–

How curious it is that the Fourth Gospel locates the activity of its baptizing John who opens that Gospel, whom you and I identify with this very John of the First Revolt, at what appears to be the identical location:

(Jn 1:28)

Bethannibris = Bethabara; John = John; baptized warriors = baptized warriors; “beyond Jordan”. The location of John’s baptizing at Bethabara, of Jn 1, appears to be a variant version of the story of John enlisting warriors at Bethannibris in 68 CE, of Josippon.

I forgot to add reason to suppose Jesus was present in the vicinity and at the same time John was at Bethannibris/Bethabara ca. spring 68 ce, in support of the argument for that being a context for situating the John baptism of Jesus.

I have mentioned before that I think the writing of Galatians as well as the other authentic letters of Paul should be dated ca. early 80s or so, 14 years forward from ca. 68 or 70, based on a chronological reconstruction of Galatians. To recap briefly, I am certain, based upon present understanding, that Gal 1-2 reflects two versions of a single visit of Paul to Jerusalem, which I suspect was with representatives of the government of Jerusalem during the Revolt. (With attention to idiom at 2:1 involving gr. “dia” with sense “during”, e.g. “then, during [these] fourteen years I went up to Jerusalem (again)”, not “after” as usually rendered. Compare Acts 5:19. There is also a textual issue concerning the presence or omission of “palin”, “again”; its presence is believed favored by the mss but Marcion’s text supposedly did not have that word. Also compare Gal 2:1 and 2 Cor 12:2 for indirect argument that the endpoint of the fourteen-year timespan of Gal 2:1 is the date of authorship of Galatians. The startpoint of the fourteen years is debated but probably is the call or “conversion” of 1:15-17, parallel to 2 Cor 12:2 read as another version of the same call/conversion and startpoint for fourteen years there.)

Version #1 of the visit in Gal 1 is Paul’s longstanding story. Version #2 in Gal 2 is Paul’s response to a different, more recently publicized, version of the same event critical of Paul, told by opponents of Paul claiming their source was the Jerusalem apostles. Although the two stories were actually conflicting versions of the same visit, Paul does not repudiate his original story but addresses the opponents’ version giving the impression it is a second visit. That is, he acknowledges the unavoidable truth of the opponents’ version in key specifics but does not retract the truth of his own different version, by rhetorically casting them to the reader as distinct visits. Paul’s opponents are aligned with the “pillars” of Gal 2:9 whom the Paulinist Gospel of Mark discredits. Simon Peter is discredited by GMk (he failed to understand Jesus and denied him). James, brother of Jesus (that identity of the pillar James of 2:9 is clear from that figure’s introduction at 1:19) is discredited by GMk (Jesus’s kin failed to understand). But GMk discredits John (not otherwise identified at Gal 2:9, the identity presumably recognizeable to the ancient addressees) somewhat differently, not by criticizing John but presenting John as prior to and superceded by the Paulinist Jesus.

Paul and Barnabas meeting with the pillars reads to me as part of an attempted diplomacy or negotiation with the governing authorities of Jerusalem during the Revolt, perhaps in 70. I think Barnabas was Josephus, with the nickname perhaps “bar-naba”, “son of the prophet” or prophet, applied to Josephus.

Paul’s conversion story as told by Paul–whether the concise version of Gal 1:15-17 or the longer version in the Acts Damascus-road story–I suggest should be situated in the very context of the Placidus Gadara massacre episode which appears in the Gospels as the Gadarene demoniac episode of Mark 5:1-20. That the episode of the Gadarene demoniac and the 2000 pigs rushing to drown in the sea alludes to the story of the Placidus massacre of March 68 of War 4.419-436 has been recognized in some commentaries. Going beyond the usual interpretation that the parallels are explained as added anachronistic items to a kernel earlier Jesus context, instead read the stories as simply variant versions of the same context in the spring of 68 with Jesus situated in that date context.

In the story in the Gospel of Mark, a terrified prisoner is brought before Jesus and pleads with Jesus not to torture him (Mk 5:7). Jesus spares his life whereupon that man goes on to become an apostle of Jesus throughout the Decapolis (Mk 5:20).

The road-to-Damascus story of Acts, meanwhile, read that as a story of an ambush and being taken prisoner, an encounter of Paul with hostile warriors and Jesus–and meaning here the pre-resurrection not post-resurrection Jesus as Acts secondarily portrays it–in keeping with the excellent and underappreciated argument of Stanley Porter, When Paul Met Jesus: How an Idea Got Lost in History (Cambridge U. Press, 2016). To be clear, Stanley Porter does not suggest, as I am, reading the Damascus road story as a story of Paul encountering Jesus. Porter shows that the widespread scholarly notion or assumption that Paul never knew Jesus has no sound basis and is counterindicated.

In other words, what originally was some traumatic encounter with Jesus experienced by Paul in the Jewish Revolt, Paul came to cite as his foundation-legend or legitimization-legend in Galatians: how he was made an apostle not by any human (the criticism leveled against Paul) but by Jesus himself (Paul’s rejoinder). Paul could show he bore even to the present day marks of having been tortured in that experience, “marks of Jesus” in his flesh (6:17). Paul’s captors’ release of Paul instead of killing him is in accord with a terror tactic attributed to John, as told in Josippon: “Then Johochanan and Eleazar issued with 1,500 good men of War (…) and overthrew the Gentiles of [Titus’s] host (…) the Jews brought forth the 3,000 Nobles and Gentlemen that they had taken prisoners and plucked out of every one of them an eye, and cut off every man the one hand, after sent them back with shame and reproach to Titus’s Camp”. This same tactic, of releasing mutilated prisoners to be sent back alive and free to their former associates “to be a witness”, also was used by Josephus in Galilee and by Simon bar Giora, indicating it was a known practice (Life 30; War 2.212-213; 4.542); what happened to Paul in his Damascus road experience story reads as one more.

Compare Paul’s allusion in Galatians to having an “infirmity in the flesh … for I bear you record, that if it had been possible, you would have plucked out your own eyes, and have given them to me” (4:13-15). Paul had bodily impairment as a result of his encounter with warriors associated with Jesus; it does not read as purely psychological nor as an experience wholly fabricated by Paul. In the Mark 5 account, the prisoner, who according to the story already has been cut in his body in numerous places although the text says those wounds were all self-inflicted, runs toward Jesus falling on his knees and begging Jesus not to torture him. A story comment: the direction of running is the behavior of a prisoner, otherwise he would be running the other direction.

The man’s self-identification as “Legion” reads as a double-entendre underlying the text consistent with a story of a prisoner captured from a Roman legion in the vicinity, suggestive of a relationship with Vespasian and his forces on the part of Paul.

Therefore the Gadarene massacre episode in Josephus of spring 68 ce is where John is present, per Josippon and Jn 1:28/War 4.421, and where Jesus is present, both according to a version of that story in the Gospels (Mk 5:1-13) and according to the Paul Damascus road story (Acts 9) which itself appears in a different form in the Gospels’ Gadarene demoniac story (Mk 5:7, 19-20). Then there are the traditions of Jesus being baptized by John of the Gospels, and John’s baptizing location at Jn 1:28 is the specific location at which Josephus’s War has Jewish fighters–commanded by John according to Josippon–enroll new warriors under John’s command in early 68. Therefore, significant supporting context argument for putting Jesus and John in the same location at the same time, and this would be a reasonable context for when Jesus was baptized by John and the circumstances by which that happened, when Jesus and his men came under the command of John.