Bill Arnal and Leif E. Vaage are not the only scholars who have
published doubts about the historicity of the baptism of Jesus
by John the Baptist. I mentioned them back in January this year.
Another was Burton Mack in Myth of Innocence. (The evidence
against historicity is in my view overwhelming. I have shown the
weakness of the arguments by E. P. Sanders for its historicity
and posted before on how the scene’s can be explained entirely
in terms of literary function and artifice without any need to
resort to assumptions of extraneous events outside the text.)
But for sake of completeness here is Burton Mack’s argument for
treating it as entirely mythical. I highlight in bold type the
reasons he sees evident for the need or wish of early Christians
to invent the episode. Far from the scene being an embarrassment
to the first Christians to have heard the story, it was surely
welcomed. Only later evangelists reading Mark’s gospel felt
embarrassment over Mark’s account because they had quite
different views of