Luke 3:21-22 and John 1:29-34
“Notice what you notice.” Again today we have Jesus’ baptism, Luke’s and John’s accounts. Luke is quite short; he only adds in verse 21 that Jesus was praying at the time of His baptism. John, however, is (again) quite different from the Synoptics. First, he has his verse 29 greeting, Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! My Study Bible says that this “Lamb of God” phrase occurs in the Bible only in verses 29 and 36. That was surprising to me.
But what I really noticed was a time frame confusion. John writes in verse 29, The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God…, presumably before Jesus was baptized since Jesus was coming toward him. It is then at Jesus’ actual baptism that John sees the Spirit descending (v. 33) and receives the confirmation? that Jesus is in fact …He Who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. So how did John know that Jesus was the Lamb of God before He was baptized? John says twice, I myself did not know Him… (vv. 31, 33). Again, my Study Bible suggests that John was referring to knowing Jesus “as the Messiah”.
My thought is that John probably knew Jesus from childhood – Mary and Elizabeth had their own spiritual relationship, plus Mary and Joseph may well have gone beyond Jerusalem to the “hill country of Judea” on some of their trips to the Temple. Then again, Elizabeth and Zacharias were advanced in years, so John may have been orphaned in his early years to the Essenes. That’s something I never thought about before! Always more reading between the lines and more questions!
Slava Bohu!
There is another way to avoid “time frame confusion.” Notice that in John’s Gospel we do not have a “current narrative” of Jesus’ baptism. Rather, we have the Baptist’s bearing witness that he previously “saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove…” (John 1:32) We have no direct indication in this Gospel when Jesus was baptized other than that it must have been sometime before John the Baptist made that statement. In John 1:29, all we know is that Jesus was coming toward him, which may have occurred a number of times after Jesus’ baptism and before John’s imprisonment.
Like you, I wonder about John’s statement that “I myself did not know Him.” Yet he did know Him (in some fashion) while still in the womb! Perhaps 30 years of familiarity with the Son of Man caused him to lose sight of the Son of God (much as Jesus’ brothers did not believe in Him — John 7:5). But John didn’t end there, of course. Rather, he boldly concludes that “this is the Son of God!” (John 1:34)
“Perhaps 30 years of familiarity . . . caused him to lose sight of the Son of God . . .” May we not be so familiar!