[Footnote 5: 2 Macc. v. 13, and following.]
[Footnote 6: Texts cited by Anquetil-Duperron, Zend-Avesta, i. 2d part, p. 46, corrected by Spiegel, in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, i. 261, and following; extracts from the Jamasp-Nameh, in the Avesta of Spiegel, i., p. 34. None of the Parsee texts, which truly imply the idea of resuscitated prophets and of precursors, are ancient; but the ideas contained in them appear to be much anterior to the time of the compilation itself.]
[Footnote 7: Rev. xi. 3, and following.]
It will be seen that, with these ideas, Jesus and his disciples could not hesitate about the mission of John the Baptist. When the scribes raised the objection that the Messiah could not have come because Elias had not yet appeared,[1] they replied that Elias was come, that John was Elias raised from the dead.[2] By his manner of life, by his opposition to the established political authorities, John in fact recalled that strange figure in the ancient history of Israel.[3] Jesus was not silent on the merits and excellencies of his forerunner. He said that none greater was born among the children of men. He energetically blamed the Pharisees and the doctors for not having accepted his baptism, and for not being converted at his voice.[4]
[Footnote 1: Mark ix. 10.]
[Footnote 2: Matt. xi. 14, xvii. 10-13; Mark vi. 15, ix. 10-12; Luke ix. 8; John i. 21-25.]
[Footnote 3: Luke i. 17.]
[Footnote 4: Matt. xxi. 32; Luke vii. 29, 30.]
The disciples of Jesus were faithful to these principles of their master. This respect for John continued during the whole of the first Christian generation.[1] He was supposed to be a relative of Jesus.[2] In order to establish the mission of the latter upon testimony admitted by all, it was declared that John, at the first sight of Jesus, proclaimed him the Messiah; that he recognized himself his inferior, unworthy to unloose the latchets of his shoes; that he refused at first to baptize him, and maintained that it was he who ought to be baptized by Jesus.[3] These were exaggerations, which are sufficiently refuted by the doubtful form of John's last message.[4] But, in a more general sense, John remains in the Christian legend that which he was in reality—the austere forerunner, the gloomy preacher of repentance before the joy on the arrival of the bridegroom, the prophet who announces the kingdom of God and dies before beholding it. This giant in the early history of Christianity, this eater of locusts and wild honey, this rough redresser of wrongs, was the bitter which prepared the lip for the sweetness of the kingdom of God. His beheading by Herodias inaugurated the era of Christian martyrs; he was the first witness for the new faith. The worldly, who recognized in him their true enemy, could not permit him to live; his mutilated corpse, extended on the threshold of Christianity, traced the bloody path in which so many others were to follow.
[Footnote 1: Acts xix. 4.]