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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
In Mark 1:2-3, the author of Mark put the Jesus Story on its largest stage, Israel and Israel's prophetic tradition. This next passage, Mark 1:4-8, sets the more immediate stage, the prophetic ministry of John the Baptist. Passages from the Gospels and the Book of the Acts suggest that Jesus may have been connected with John before his baptism and may even have been a disciple of John's. Jesus held John in the highest respect and only began his public ministry after John was imprisoned. Jesus associated himself with John's message of repentance and forgiveness.
Jesus didn't come onto the Jewish stage out of nowhere. He was linked to a contemporary prophetic tradition. It's probable that John had a deep influence on Jesus. If Luke 1:36 is correct, Jesus and John were relatives. Jesus could well have had a long association with John, who was only a few months older. Something, in any event, happened between John and Jesus that brought Jesus to the Jordan River for baptism. I think that John had some kind of direct spiritual impact on Jesus. It may well have been formative. Perhaps it was John who first awakened Jesus' deep religious concerns and faith. Or, again, perhaps John first helped Jesus articulate such concerns, wherever they may have originated. This all isn't quite pure speculation, because all four of the Gospels and Acts point to a special relationship between Jesus and John. It does help us, furthermore, to appreciate more fully the human side of Jesus. He, like the rest of us, was influenced by his culture, society, and particular individuals he knew. Mark's attempts to put Jesus in his religious context also increases the historical credibility of his gospel portrait of Jesus. If Mark had claimed that Jesus came out of the sky and was without human antecedents, his gospel would have been diminished in value for the historian. This way, we have a sense that there was an actual person who was born into a real world of complex historical associations. We know distressingly little about those associations, but Mark at least informs us that they existed and that they're associated with Israel's prophetic tradition and with John.
