The Baptism and Temptation of Jesus

Mark tells the event in three verses. Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptised by John the Baptist in the Jordan. As he came up from the water he saw the heavens opening and the Spirit coming down on him like a dove, and a voice said, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:9–11).

The other Gospels tell it with differences. In Matthew, John at first refuses, saying that he ought to be baptised by Jesus, and Jesus answers that it is fitting “to fulfill all righteousness”; the voice speaks of Jesus in the third person: “This is my beloved Son” (Matthew 3:13–17). Luke mentions the baptism in passing and adds that Jesus was praying and that the Spirit came down “in a bodily form” (Luke 3:21–22). The Gospel of John does not narrate the baptism. There the Baptist testifies that he saw the Spirit descend and remain on Jesus, and calls him “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29–34). That Gospel places John’s work at “Bethany beyond the Jordan”, a place it does not further describe (John 1:28); the others name only the river. The words of the voice echo a royal psalm and the servant in the book of Isaiah on whom God puts his Spirit (Psalm 2:7) (Isaiah 42:1).

All three Synoptic Gospels follow the baptism with a time of testing. Mark says only that the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan for forty days, was with the wild animals, and was served by angels (Mark 1:12–13). Matthew and Luke relate three temptations: to turn stones into bread after his fast, to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple, and to gain all the kingdoms of the world by worshipping the devil. Jesus answers each with a sentence from Deuteronomy (Matthew 4:1–11) (Luke 4:1–13) (Deuteronomy 8:3; 6:13, 16). The two Gospels give the second and third temptations in opposite order. None of them says where in the wilderness this took place.

The book of Acts counts the public life of Jesus from this point. Peter’s preaching there begins the story “after the baptism which John preached”, when God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit, and the replacement for Judas must be someone who had been with them “beginning from the baptism of John” (Acts 10:37–38) (Acts 1:21–22). The letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus as one “who has been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

How this is dated

Estimated date. A scholarly estimate from primary evidence, with a margin of years.

The Gospels give no date for the baptism itself. Luke puts it after John began to preach in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, AD 28–29 by the usual count, and says that Jesus was then “about thirty” (Luke 3:1–3, 21–23); see the dating note of John the Baptist Preaches at the Jordan. John’s Gospel offers a second indication. At the first Passover after the baptism, people in Jerusalem say that the temple has been forty-six years in building (John 2:13, 20). Josephus dates the start of Herod’s rebuilding to the eighteenth year of his reign, about 20–19 BC (Josephus, Antiquities 15.380), which brings that Passover to AD 27 or 28. Scholars therefore place the baptism between AD 26 and 29: see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (revised edition, 1998), and John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1 (1991), chapter 11.

That Jesus was baptised by John is among the facts of his life most widely accepted by historians, partly because the Gospels themselves treat it as needing explanation (Matthew 3:14–15): see Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2 (1994), chapters 12–13. The vision and the voice, and the temptation, which has no human witness in the story, are reported only by the Gospels.

The Baptism and Temptation of Jesus

How this is dated

Primary sources

Scripture

Jewish Antiquities

In context

Grows out of

Leads to

Along the threads