This one in whom was life and light, this Word who was with God, in fact was God, took on human existence: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). In a terse sentence or two the evangelist records the reaction to this Word having entered the world: “The world did not know him. He came to what as his own, and his own people did not accept him.” John 1:10, 11). And those who did receive him did not do so by summoning up a response from within : (“They) were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God”) John 1:13).
To this taking on of flesh, this Incarnation, the author is witness: “We have seen his glory as of a father’s only son” (John 1:14), a “grace” and a “truth” to put the greatest figure of aviation history till then in the shade—Moses and his law—a Revealer to make known what had all the time been hidden with the hidden God: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18).
If these verses are a Prologue, they are also a synopsis. They sum up, encapsulate, the life and career of Christ, how it all began, and how it ended. And perhaps to the point of controlling or harnessing the entire Gospel narrative, the signs and the discourses, the passion and its sequel in the resurrection appearances. This Prologue would raise alarm in almost every quarter of the early Church, but its author has harsh words for whomever suggests the event merely seemed to be as he describes it, that God and “flesh,” God and matter cannot mix. (I John 4:2–3: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist.”)
The Boyhood of Jesus
With the exception of Luke, the canonical Gospels Matthew, Mark, and John record nothing of Jesus’ boyhood or growing up years. There are, however, narratives concerning Jesus’ childhood which did not find their way into the canonical texts, but in one way or another answered to the Church’s appetite for stories of his early life. In The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for example, the boy Jesus is described as modeling sparrows from clay and summoning them to take flight, or is told of raising from the dead a child who had fallen from a second-story roof. One of these so-called “apocryphal” Gospels furnished the Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky with lyrics that describe Jesus’ treatment at the hands of tormentors who saw him weaving garlands of roses:
Do you bind roses in your hair?” They cried, in scorn, to Jesus there. The Boy said humbly: “Take, I pray, All but the naked thorns away.” Then of the thorns they made a crown, And with rough fingers press’d it down, Till on his forehead fair and young, Red drops of blood, like roses sprung.5
The evangelist Luke furnishes the exception. In the same chapter in which he records the birth and naming of Jesus, he tells of his traveling to Jerusalem with his parents for the festival of Passover, of their concern at his disappearance, he all the while remaining behind in the temple, sitting among its teachers, listening and asking questions Virtually the same narrative appears in the apocryphal Gospel cited above. The narrative continues with the teachers’ amazement at the young boy’s wisdom, and with his response to his mother’s irritation at his three-day absence: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” What it was about which Jesus was listening and asking questions, thus produced the teachers’ amazement at his wisdom, Luke gives no clue. At the same time, his reference to the amazement of the shepherds’ audience at their story of the angelic host heralding Messiah’s arrival, the amazement of the child’s parents at what the ancients, Simeon and Anna, had to say of the child at his presentation in the temple, the amazement of the temple academics at his wisdom, and that of his parents at finding him in the sanctuary, suggest a context calculated to accent the event of this child as removed from the ordinary and natural. Luke, concerned with setting his Jesus-story within a world-wide setting, as signaled, for example, in the reference to a decree having gone out “from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered,” as well as in the subsequent tracing of Jesus’ genealogy to Adam, may have structured his narrative in a form analogous to the ancient hierophanies and legends of Greece and Rome. I do not take this feature as pleading for dependence, since, as the French have it, “similarity does not spell identity.” Further, this will be the one and only instance in which those attached to the temple will treat Jesus with deference, thus for some interpreters belonging to a “Galilean spring” supposedly marking the first portion of the third Gospel, and in stark contrast to Matthew’s opening his narrative with the threat of violence against the “King of the Jews.”
The Forerunner
Gospel tradition connects Jesus’ first public appearance with the activity of John the Baptist, according to Luke the child of Zechariah and Elizabeth, a relative of Jesus’ mother. Origins of the movement of the Baptist are subject to speculation, some suggesting that John had at one time been an adherent of the Qumran community, a sect (Essene?) located near the Dead Sea, established in the second century BC and with interruptions, continuing till Roman occupation in the early third century AD The adherents of this sect practiced ablutions or lustrations reminiscent of Old Testament washings required of persons cured of leprosy (cf. Leviticus 14: 8–9), or of personal uncleanness (Leviticus 15: 11, 13, 16, 18). In Qumran these baths, besides allowing for admittance or re-admittance to the community after a falling away, may actually have been practiced daily by the devout.6 If John indeed belonged to the Dead Sea community, he drew from it the significance of baptism as a moral washing, but restricted it to single use.
The context into which Mark sets his narrative of the Baptist is markedly different from that of his fellow evangelists. If Matthew and the others first point to the figure and activity of the Baptist, and from that point conclude that they fulfill the prophetic word, Mark begins with the prophetic word and to it wraps the narrative of the Baptist. The result is that the Baptist’s activity does not relate to the Old Testament word as fulfillment to prophecy, but rather the Old Testament word gives definition to the figure and activity of the Baptist. As to his figure, since the angel of the covenant must appear before the end (Exodus 23:20), John appears as forerunner. Because the messenger, Elijah, must prepare the way (Malachi 3:1), John preaches. Because a voice will cry (Isaiah 40:3), John is in the wilderness. Because the last days will see a pilgrimage, an exodus of pilgrims free of sin, all Judea and all Jerusalem flock to John confessing their sins. And, because the prophet’s fare and diet must be unlike that of any other (Elijah wore a leather girdle), John eats locusts and wild honey, and because the angel-Elijah-forerunner must appear before the end of days, John is the angel-Elijah-forerunner. As to function or activity, the Baptist’s historical appearance is of course characterized by his baptizing with water, but the presupposition for his activity is the prophetic word. John thus does what according to the prophetic word only God can do—effect a baptism of repentance leading to forgiveness. But this gives to Mark’s portrait of the Baptist a Christological cast, since it is God as