Mt. 3:13 Then Yeshua came from Galilee to Yochanan at the Jordan to be baptized by him. (Mk. 1:9; Lk. 3:21a)
Mk. 1:9 It came to pass in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan.
Lk. 3:21a Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also was baptized;
Messianic baptism is different from convert’s baptism because with it we are identifying ourselves with the death, burial and resurrection of the Messiah. The meaning of the act is identification. But the type of identification is determined on what kind of baptism it is. Proselyte baptism is identification with Judaism. Yochanan’s baptism was identification with his “back to God” movement. Yeshua’s baptism is till yet another identification. The basic meaning of the word baptism is immersion. Any other kind of baptism is not Biblical baptism. Immersion was the Jewish mode and also the mode of the early church. Later in church history it was changed to pouring and then later to sprinkling. These two modes are not Biblical. At the end of this segment we have included an article titled “The Jewish Background of Christian Baptism” by Dr. Ron Moseley. It is probably one of the best articles ever written on this subject.
Mt. 3:14 And Yochanan tried to prevent Him, saying, “I have need to be baptized by You, and You are coming to me?”
Mt. 3:15 Then Yeshua answered and said to him, “Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”
The purpose of baptism (ritual immersion), according to Jewish Law even to this day, was for the forgiveness of sins and spiritual cleansing into a right relationship with God. Yeshua had a need to be baptized, but it was not because He had sin in His life. In Malachi 4:2 the Messiah is called “the sun of righteousness who would come with healing in His wings.” According to Ezekiel 34:11-16, the salvation that Messiah would bring was in four ways: (1) He would seek out the lost: (2) return them to the fold; (3) heal the sick; and (4) strengthen the weak. In other words, He would usher in the Kingdom of God. The reason that Yeshua was so insistent on being baptized was “to fulfill all righteousness” so that He might be the “sun of righteousness.” The importance of this will be demonstrated later on in another segment.
Mt. 3:16a Then Yeshua, when He had been baptized, came up immediately from the water;
Mk. 1:10a And immediately, coming up from the water,
The mode of baptism as explained in the Mishnah shows the candidate squatted down alone without anyone touching him and then coming straightway out of the water. Ancient sages taught that the word mikveh has the same root in the Hebrew as the word for “rising” or “standing tall,” as we see in the term “straightway as used in the N.T. The earliest drawing of Christian baptism was found on the wall of a Roman catacomb in the second century showing Yochanan standing on the bank of the Jordan helping Yeshua back to the shore after self-immersion.
Mt. 3:16b And behold, the heavens opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on Him.
Mk. 1:10b He saw the heavens parting and the Spirit descending upon Him like a dove.
Lk. 3:21b And while He prayed, the heaven was opened.
Lk. 3:22a And the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form like a dove upon Him,
In Jewish literature the dove is a symbol of the Holy Spirit. The BT:Chagigah 15a commentary on Genesis 1:2, where the Spirit of the Lord moved upon the waters, says the Spirit of God hovered like a dove over her young without touching them. The BT:Berachoth 3b connects the Bat Kol from heaven with the Holy Spirit.
Source: Genesis 1:2; BT:Chagigah 15a; BT:Berachoth 3b;
Mt. 3:17 And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Mk. 1:11 Then a voice came from heaven, “You are My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Luke 3:22b And a voice came from heaven which said, “You are My beloved Son; in whom I am well pleased.”
In Rabbinic literature a reference is made to a voice from heaven called Bat Kol, which literally means a “daughter of a voice.” This is understood to be an oracle, a declaration of the Divine Will. These verses are used by many people to establish the doctrine of the Trinity, but this has absolutely nothing to do with that. Perhaps an over simplification of its description is to say that the Bat Kol is heaven’s public address system. It is important to remember that the people witnessing these events were Jews, and things were being done so that they would understand what was happening. It was not written for our Hellenistic mind set. If we want to understand these things, we have to learn to think like a first century Jew.
There is considerable evidence during the second and third centuries for the existence of a variety of Christian groups with various viewpoints concerning who Jesus was. Opposition to them sometimes led orthodox scribes to modify their texts of Scripture. We’ll take a quick look at two of them here. Groups called Adoptionists believed that Yeshua was a full flesh and blood human being who was neither pre-existent nor (for most adoptionists) born of a virgin. He was born and lived as all other humans. But at some point of His existence, usually His baptism, Yeshua was adopted by God to stand in a special relationship with Himself and to mediate His will on earth. Only in this sense was He the “Son of God.” Yeshua was not divine by nature, but was human in every sense of the term.
Other Christians agreed with the adoptionists that Yeshua was a full flesh and blood human and that something significant had happened to Him at His baptism. For them, however, it was not that He was adopted to be the God’s son; instead, at His baptism Yeshua came to be indwelt by God. It was then that an emissary from the divine realm, one of the deities of the Godhead named “Christ” entered into Yeshua to empower Him for His ministry. Again, at some time prior to His crucifixion, the divine Christ departed from Yeshua to return to the Pleroma, the divine realm, leaving Him to suffer His fate alone. This type of Christology is labeled Separationist, because it points a division between the man Yeshua and the divine Christ. Both of these are heretical trains of thought that have no Scriptural basis.
Source: “Orthodox Corruption of Scripture”
For Christians, books eighteen and twenty of Josephus’ “Antiquities” are far and away the most important sections in all of Josephus’ writings, since they provide a rich background for the entire New Testament era. Happily, they are also the most authoritative chapters in the “Antiquities” since at long last Josephus is either an eyewitness or direct contemporary of the events he is reporting. His paragraphs on John the Baptist show Jesus’ forerunner from a fresh vantage point while his portrayal of crucial events in the career of Pontius Pilate help explain that governor’s pressured performance at the trial of Jesus. In the case of Jesus’ brother James, he even provides crucial addenda to the New Testament which does not tell us how James died. Josephus does!
His two celebrated references to Jesus – “Antiquities 18:63 and 20:200 – have provoked an enormous quantity of scholarly literature. They constitute the largest block of first-century evidence of Jesus outside of Biblical or Christian sources and may well be the reason that the vast works of Josephus survived manuscript transmission across the centuries almost intact when other great works, like those of Nicolaus of Damascus, were totally lost.
But are the Jesus references authentic? Scholars fall into three main camps on the first and longer paragraph on Jesus (18:63), which occurs amid events during Pilate’s administration: (1) it is entirely authentic; (2) it is entirely a Christian forgery; or (3) it contains Christian interpolations in what was Josephus’ authentic material about Jesus. The first option, held by very few, would seem hopeless. No Jew could have claimed Jesus as the Messiah who rose from the dead without converting to Christianity, and Josephus did not convert. The second position, popular in the late nineteenth century skeptical scholarship, has some minor current support. A large majority of scholars today, however, share the third position, particularly in view of the newly discovered “Agapian Text” which shows no signs of interpolation. We now quote from the text in “Antiquities.” “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man: for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him are not extinct at this day.”
Source: Jos. Ant. 18.3.3 63
