No. 11 on Doherty's list is the absence of John the Baptist from any Christian document that is known to predate the gospels:
In Christian mythology there is hardly a more commanding figure short of Jesus himself. The forerunner, the herald, the scourge of the unrepentant, the voice crying aloud in the wilderness. Until the Gospels appear, John is truly lost in the wilderness, for no Christian writer ever refers to him. Even as late as the turn of the 2nd century, the writer of 1 Clement is silent on John when he says (17:1): "Let us take pattern by those who went about in sheepskins and goatskins heralding the Messiah's coming; that is to say, Elijah, Elisha and Ezekiel among the prophets, and other famous names besides."
For Doherty, though, the smoking gun is not in Clement's writings but Paul's. He quotes from Romans 6:
2We died to sin: how can we live in it any longer? 3Have you forgotten that when we were baptized into union with Christ Jesus we were baptized into his death? 4By baptism we were buried with him, and lay dead, in order that, as Christ was raised from the dead in the splendour of the Father, so also we might set one foot upon the new path of life. [NEB]
Doherty finds it incredible that Paul found no occasion, here or anyplace else where he discusses baptism, to mention Jesus' own baptism. Now, if I were a historicist, I think I might infer from Paul's silence that Jesus had never actually met John the Baptist, that this was yet another of the legends about him, like the virgin birth, that developed sometime after Paul's heyday. For some reason, though, most historicists apparently suppose that next to his crucifixion by Pilate, the most certainly known fact about Jesus of Nazareth is that he was baptized by John the Baptist. But in that case, why didn't Paul or any other first-century Christian writer, except gospel authors, have anything to say about it?
Ted begins his answer by noting that according to Paul, in Doherty's words, "Through baptism, the convert dies to his old, sinful life and rises to a new one." And since Paul believed that Jesus was without sin, any reference to his baptism would have confused the issue. Well, it has been confusing the issue for Christians for nigh on 2,000 years, ever since they starting thinking the gospels were factual history, but that hasn't stopped them from making a big deal of it. If it was common knowledge in Paul's day that Jesus had undergone baptism, and if it was generally presumed, as Paul presumed, that Jesus had led a sinless life, then every Christian congregation Paul wrote to would have craved an explanation for the contradiction, and he could not have gotten away with pretending that there was no contradiction.
Besides Clement, Doherty cites the author of Hebrews for omitting John the Baptist from his list of heroes of the faith in chapter 11. Ted accounts for both by noting their emphasis on Old Testament heroes. But that was Doherty's point. Why were those heroes of Judaism the best role models that early Christians could come up with? If, within the first-century Christian world view, John the Baptist had occupied the role assigned to him by the gospel authors, how could he not have been on a par with the very greatest of the Old Testament heroes?
Under the section "Related information in other early writings," Ted offers some rambling musings on the general thinking of early Christians about baptism. His overall point is not clear, but he seems to be suggesting that although early Christians considered baptism very important, they didn't spend much time (or ink) discussing it among themselves. But from a historicist standpoint, the anomaly is not in how much or how little they discuss it. The anomaly is in what they omit from the discussions on those occasions when they have the discussions.
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This page last updated on June 15, 2015.