“Shining brightly, Agni flashes forth far and wide,
He makes everything plain in splendour.”[75]
A complete understanding of the baptism in the Jordan can only be attained if here, too, we take into consideration the translation of the baptism into astrological terms. In other words, it appears that John the Baptist, as we meet him in the Gospels, was not an historical personage. Apart from the Gospels he is mentioned by Josephus only,[76] and this passage, although it was known to Origen[77] in early days, is exposed to a strong suspicion of being a forgery by some Christian hand.[78] Again, the account in the Gospels of the relations between John and Jesus is full of obscurities and contradictions, as has been pointed out by Strauss. These, however, disappear as soon as we recognise that under the name John, which in Hebrew means “pleasing to God,” is concealed the Babylonian Water-God, Oannes (Ea). Baptism is connected with his worship, and the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan represents the reflection upon earth of what originally took place among the stars. That is to say, the sun begins its yearly course with a baptism, entering as it does, immediately after its birth, the constellations of the Water-carrier and the Fishes. But this celestial Water Kingdom, in which each year the day-star is purified and born again, is the Eridanus, the heavenly Jordan or Year-Stream (Egyptian, iaro or iero, the river), wherein the original baptism of the divine Saviour of the world takes place.[79] On this account it is said in the hymn of Ephrem on the Epiphany of the divine Son: “John stepped forward and adored the Son, whose form was enveloped in a strange light,” and “when Jesus had received the baptism he immediately ascended, and his light shone over the world.”[80] In the Syrian Baptismal Liturgy, preserved to us under the name of Severus, we read the words: “I, he said, baptize with water, but he who comes, with Fire and Spirit, that spirit, namely, which descended from on high upon his head in the shape of a dove, who has been baptized and has arisen from the midst of the waters, whose light has gone up over the earth.” According to the Fourth Gospel, John was not himself the light; but he gave testimony of the light, “that true light which lighteth every man coming into the world,” by whom the world was made and of whose fulness we have all received grace.[81] In this the reference to the sun is unmistakable, while the story of John’s birth[82] is copied from that of the Sun-Gods Isaac[83] and Samson.[84] In John, the Baptist himself is called by Jesus “a burning and shining lamp,”[85] and he himself remarks, when he hears of the numerous following of Jesus, “he must increase but I must decrease,”[86] a speech which probably at first referred to the summer solstice, when the sun, having reached the highest point in its course, enters the winter hemisphere and loses strength day by day. John is said to have been born six months before Jesus.[87] This, too, points to the fact that both are essentially identical, that they are only the different halves of the year, representing the sun as rising and setting, these two phases being related to one another as Caleb and Joshua, Nergal and Tammuz, &c. John the Baptist is represented as wearing a cloak of camel-hair, with a leathern girdle about his loins.[88] This brings to mind the garb of the prophet Elijah,[89] to whom Jesus himself likened him.[90] But Elijah, who passed among the Jews for a forerunner of the Messiah, is a form of Sun-God transferred to history. In other words, he is the same as the Greek Helios, the German Heljas, and Ossetic Ilia, with whom he coincides in most important points, or at any rate characteristics of this God have been transferred to the figure of the prophet.[91]
According to Babylonian ideas corresponding to the “baptism of water” at the commencement of the efficacious power of the sun, was the “baptism of fire,” when it was at the height of its annual course, at the time of the summer solstice, and its passage was again inclined downwards.[92] This idea, too, is found in the Gospels, in the story of the transfiguration of Jesus upon the mountain.[93] It takes precisely the same place in the context of his life-year, as depicted by the Evangelists, as the Sun’s “baptism of fire” in the Babylonian world system, since it too marks the highest and turning-point in the life of the Christian Saviour. On this occasion Moses and Elijah appeared with the Saviour, who shone like a pillar of fire, “and his garments became glistening, exceeding white, like unto snow, so as no fuller on earth can whiten them.” And there came a cloud which overshadowed the three disciples whom Jesus had taken with him on to the mountain. And a voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my beloved Son, hear ye him.” As at the baptism, so here, too, was Jesus proclaimed by a heavenly voice as the Son or beloved of God, or rather of the Holy Spirit. As the latter is in Hebrew of the feminine gender, it consequently appears that in this passage we have before us a parallel to the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. The incident is generally looked upon as though by it was emphasised the higher significance of Jesus in comparison with the two chief representatives of the old order, and as though Jesus was extolled before Moses and Elijah by the transfiguration. Here too, however, the Sun-God, Helios, is obviously concealed beneath the form of the Israelite Elijah. On this account Christianity changed the old places of worship of Zeus and Helios upon eminences into chapels of Elijah; and Moses is no other than the Moon-God, the Mēn of Asia Minor. And he has been introduced into the story because the divine lawgivers in almost all mythologies are the same as the moon, the measurer of time and regulator of all that happens (cf. Manu among the Indians, Minos among the Greeks, Men (Min) among the Egyptians).[94] According to Justin,[95] David is supposed to have made the prophecy that Christ would be born “before the sun and the moon.” The sun and moon often appear upon the pictures of the Nearer Asiatic Redeemer, God (e.g., Mithras), paling before the splendour of the young Light-God, as we have seen in the case of Buddha,[96] and as, according to the narrative of the Rigveda, also happened at the birth of the Child Agni. Accordingly we have before us in the story of the transfiguration in the Gospels only another view of the story of the birth of the Light-God or Fire-God, such as lies at the root of the story of the baptism of the Christian Saviour.[97] And with the thought of the new birth of the Saviour is associated that of the baptism of Jesus, and particularly that of the fire-baptism, of which the sun partakes at the height of its power.[98]
[2] “Zum religionsgesch. Verst. d. N.T.,” 54. [↑]
[3] “L’origine de tous les cultes,” 1795, v. 133. [↑]
[5] Cf. regarding the mythical nature of Moses, who is to be looked upon as an offshoot of Jahwe and Tammuz, Winckler, op. cit., 86–95. [↑]