III. CHAP. eminence, may show that the jealousy of the rulers was not groundless; and indicate, as will hereafter appear, under what unfavourable impressions with the existing authorities, on account of his coming from Galilee, Jesus was about to enter on his public John the career. Towards the close of this period of thirty years, though we have no evidence to fix a precise date, while Jesus was growing up in the ordinary course of nature, in the obscurity of the Galilean town of Nazareth, which lay to the north of Jerusalem, at much the same distance to the south John had arrived at maturity, and suddenly appeared as a public teacher, at first in the desert country in the neighbourhood of Hebron; but speedily removed, no doubt for the facility of administering the characteristic rite, from which he was called the Baptist, at all seasons, and with the utmost publicity and effect. * In the southern desert of Judæa the streams are few and scanty, probably in the summer entirely dried up. The nearest large body of water was the Dead Sea. Besides that the western banks of this great lake are mostly rugged and precipitous, natural feeling, and still more the religious awe of the people, would have shrunk from performing sacred ablutions in those fetid, unwholesome, and accursed waters.† But the banks of the great national stream, the scene of so many * Matt. iii. 1—12. Mark, i. 28. Luke, iii. 1-18. + The Aulon, or Valley of the Jordan, is mostly desert. Diariμra τὴν Γεννήσαρ μέσην, ἔπειτα πολλὴν αναμετρούμενος ἐρημίαν εἰς τὴν Αστ paλritivo Xinv. Joseph. B. T. iii. 10. 7. III. miracles, offered many situations, in every respect CHAP. admirably calculated for this purpose. The Baptist's usual station was near the place, Bethabara, the ford of the Jordan, which tradition pointed out as that where the waters divided before the ark, that the chosen people might enter into the promised land. Here, though the adjacent region towards Jerusalem is wild and desert, the immediate shores of the river offer spots of great picturesque beauty. The Jordan has a kind of double channel. In its summer course, the shelving banks, to the top of which the waters reach at its period of flood, are covered with acacias and other trees of great luxuriance; and amid the rich vegetation and grateful shade afforded by these scenes, the Italian painters, with no less truth than effect, have delighted to represent the Baptist surrounded by listening multitudes, or performing the solemn rite of initiation. The teacher himself partook of the ascetic character of the more solitary of the Essenes, all of whom retired from the tumult and license of the city, some dwelt alone in remote hermitages, and not rarely pretended to a prophetic character. His raiment was of the coarsest texture, of camel's hair; his girdle (an ornament often of the greatest richness in Oriental costume, of the finest linen or cotton, and embroidered with silver or gold,) was of untanned leather; his food the locusts *, and wild That locusts are no uncommon food is so well known from all travellers in the East, that it is unnecessary to quote any single authority. There is a kind of bean, called in that country the locust III. CHAP. honey, of which there is a copious supply both in the open and the wooded regions, in which he had taken up his abode. Baptism. No question has been more strenuously debated than the origin of the rite of baptism. The practice of the external washing of the body, as emblematic of the inward purification of the soul, is almost universal. The sacred Ganges cleanses all moral pollution from the Indian; among the Greeks and Romans even the murderer might, it was supposed, wash the blood "clean from his hands* ;" and in many of their religious rites, lustrations or oblations, either in the running stream or in the sea, purified the candidate for divine favour, and made him fit to approach the shrines of the gods. The perpetual similitude and connection between the uncleanness of the body and of the soul, which ran through the Mosaic law, and had become completely interwoven with the common language and sentiment, the formal enactment of ablutions in many cases, which either required the cleansing of some unhealthy taint, or more than usual purity, must have familiarised the mind with the mysterious effects attributed to such a rite: and of all the Jewish sects, that of the Essenes, to which no doubt popular opinion associated the Baptist, were most frequent and scrupulous in their ceremonial ablutions. It is strongly asserted on the one hand, and denied with equal confidence on the other, that baptism was in general use among the Jews as a distinct and formal rite; and that it was * Ah nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina cædis by this ceremony that the Gentile proselytes, who were not yet thought worthy of circumcision, or perhaps refused to submit to it, were imperfectly initiated into the family of Israel.* Though there does not seem very conclusive evidence in the earlier rabbinical writings to the antiquity, yet there are perpetual allusions to the existence of this rite, at least at a later period; and the argument, that after irreconcilable hostility had been declared between the two religions, the Jews would be little likely to borrow their distinctive ceremony from the Christians, applies with more than ordinary force. Nor, if we may fairly judge from the very rapid and concise narrative of the Evangelists, does the public administration of baptism by John appear to have excited astonishment as a new and unprecedented rite. CHAP. ' III. his preach For, from every quarter, all ranks and sects Multitudes crowded to the teaching and to partake in the who attend mystic ablutions performed by the Baptist. The ing. stream of the Jordan reflected the wondering multitudes of every class and character, which thronged around him with that deep interest and high-wrought curiosity, which could not fail to be excited, especially at such a crisis, by one who assumed the tone and authority of a divine commission, and seemed, even if he were not hereafter to break forth in a higher character, to renew in his person the long silent and interrupted race of the ancient prophets. Of all those prophets Elijah * Lightfoot, Harmony of Evang. iii. 38. iv. 407, &c. Danzius, in Meuschen, Talmudica, &c. Scho- CHAP. was held in the most profound reverence by the descendants of Israel.* He was the representative of their great race of moral instructors and interpreters of the Divine Will, whose writings (though of Elijah nothing remained) had been admitted to almost equal authority with the law itself, were read in the public synagogues, and with the other sacred books formed the canon of their Scripture. A mysterious intimation had closed this hallowed volume of the prophetic writings, announcing, as from the lips of Malachi, on which the fire of prophecy expired, a second coming of Elijah, which it should seem popular belief had construed into the personal re-appearance of him who had ascended into heaven in a car of fire. And where, and at what time, and in what form was he so likely to appear, as in the desert, by the shore of the Jordan, at so fearful a crisis in the national destinies, and in the wild garb and with the mortified demeanour so frequent among the ancient seers? * Some of the strange notions about Elias may be found in Lightfoot, Harm. of Evang. iv. 399. Compare Ecclesiast. xlviii. 10, 11. "Elias, who is written of for reproofs in these times, to appease the anger of him that is ready for wrath (or before wrath, προθύμου, or προ pov,) to turn the heart of the father to the son, and to restore the tribes of Jacob. Blessed are they that see thee, and are adorned with love; for we too shall live the life." In the English translation the traditionary allusion is obscured. "In that day, when the Lord shall deliver Israel, three days before the coming of the Messiah, Elias shall come, and shall stand on the |
