Bible Review

Paul Hollenbach, “The Conversion of Jesus: From Jesus the Baptizer to Jesus the Healer,” in Aufsreig und Niedergand der romischen Welt II, 25/1, ed. W. Hasse (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982), p. 199.

For example, Raymond A. Martin, Studies in the Life and Ministry of the Historical Jesus (Lanham: University Press of America, 1995), p. 25.

See Robert L. Webb, “John the Baptist and His Relationship with Jesus,” in Studying the Historical Jesus. Evaluations of the State of Current Research, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, New Testament Tools and Studies 19 (Brill: Leiden, 1994), pp. 179–229, particularly p. 216.

The theoretical possibility that the testing of Jesus ended the very day that John was taken into custody is excluded by John 3:22–24, which implies that Jesus had been recruited by the Baptist as his collaborator and exercised a baptizing mission in Judea. I shall return to this text after we have looked at the account of the baptism of Jesus by John because it is indispensable for a correct understanding of the relationship between the two figures.

I published an earlier version of this hypothesis as “John the Baptist and Jesus: History and Hypotheses,” New Testament Studies 37(1990), pp. 359–374.

In the next editorial column, I plan to deal with God’s sovereignty and human freedom.

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). “To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being,” Prologue, p. 5.

See the essay by Hermann Gunkel, “The Influence of Babylonian Mythology upon the Biblical Creation Story,” a translation and abridgment of his classic work, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit, in Creation in the Old Testament, ed. by Bernhard W. Anderson (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 25–52.

Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988).

Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation Series (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982).