As the great New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann once put it, John’s Gospel is “all theology served up in the language of myth.” Mark, the earliest Gospel, has been described as a collection of loosely knit anecdotes intended not as history but for edification and general evangelizing. Its mystery or the “secret” it reveals on the surface, literal reading is that Jesus is the long-expected Messiah and that the Kingdom of God will soon be a reality in the here and now. At a deeper, esoteric level, however, its message, as we have said earlier, is an allegory of the evolution of the soul in matter, the soul of every one of us. The Gospel begins with Jesus’ baptism, which symbolizes the fact that to incarnate in the watery condition of the body is to be wholly immersed in the realm of matter. Just as Jesus descends into the waters of Jordan, so the soul of every one of us has descended into life in the body. The human body, as we know, is two-thirds water.
The Baptism
Few things, however, have been more distorted and misunderstood in the Christian religion because of a literal approach to the Bible than the ritual known as the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. In the past, indeed, many have died because of bitter differences over how, when and how often it should be administered, to whom and by whom. Today, even the fast-growing crowds of the unchurched—those whom the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, John Spong, usually refers to as “church alumni”—still want their infant children “done,” that is, christened or baptized. It is traditionally the key mark doctrinally of full membership in the Church; but, at the popular level, it is now commonly, for a growing number, little more than a social rite of passage and an occasion for a party.
Long ago, when I was a parish minister myself in the late fifties and early sixties, I baptized hundreds of babies and older children at my quickly growing suburban church, the majority of whom in all likelihood now belong to those swelling numbers who tell the census taker “no religion” when asked. I still vividly remember how weird it seemed at the time to be gazing down into the innocent faces of the tiny infant baptizands while reading from the prayer book service about their sinfulness and need for total regeneration. It seemed a poor way to welcome these young “souls” into Holy Mother Church, or into the world in general for that matter.
I am reminded here of Joseph Campbell’s anecdote in program 2 of The Power of Myth. There, in his commentary upon the way in which the Eden myth in Genesis shows nature as an enemy and God as opposed to nature, while man is seen as a disobedient sinner cast out of the Garden, Campbell told the story of the Zen Buddhist he once encountered in Japan. Remarking on this Genesis story, the monk said: “God against man—man against God; God against nature—nature against God. Funny religion!” Campbell noted that in the Japanese approach to religion there was no talk of depravity, a Fall from innocence, or original sin. They had a “mythology that includes all of life.” He found it all a strangely liberating environment in which to reflect upon religion and its impact on our daily lives.
In the Gospels, the very first mention of baptism comes at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark’s account. Without any of the preliminaries of the other Gospels, the drama commences with a quote from the Septuagint version (Greek translation) of the Old Testament: “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you . . . ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” Then John the Baptist appears in the wilderness “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” It is clear that Mark deliberately took the Greek version of the quote, which is from Isaiah, chapter 40, rather than cite the actual Hebrew text, because it suited his purpose much better. He actually twists the original—which is about the return of the children of Israel from exile—and makes it into what it is not, a Messianic prophecy.
As one reads on, however, it is readily apparent that the personage Jesus presents at the Jordan does not proclaim himself as Messiah, or the Son of God; he announces instead the nearness of the Kingdom of God as being “the Good News [Euangelion] of God.”2 It’s worth observing that “the Gospel” about which one hears so much in evangelical and other circles has nothing at this point to do with the kind of message that conservative preachers constantly proclaim. It’s not about “the blood of Jesus,” the Cross or even being “born again.” The Mark text explicitly says the Good News is the reality of the Kingdom, the reality of God’s presence in power in the world and intimately in one’s life.
Before going any further, we should notice that earlier, in Luke’s Gospel, he tells the mythical story of how Mary, upon learning that she is with child, goes to visit her relative Elizabeth. Though of advanced years and well beyond child-bearing age, Elizabeth has also conceived a son and is already in her sixth month.3 Thus, we learn that John and Jesus were six months apart in age. From the point of view of the astronomical allegory, this is of crucial importance:
1) Elizabeth is yet one more example of the many women throughout the whole of the Bible who conceive in a miraculous fashion in their senior years. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, the mother of Ishmael and Isaac, is one. You may remember she laughed at the angel’s message. “So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’” In Hebrew, the name Isaac means “he laughs.”4 The mother of Samson is another, as is Hannah, the mother of Samuel. The meaning is clear to those who understand the esoteric sense of it. We must return here to the belief of the ancients in several accounts that there were three evolutionary stages before the emergence on the scene of the human animal soul and finally the Christly or spiritual soul. First came the mineral, then the vegetative, then the animal, and finally, after “ages of ages,” the dawning of self-reflective consciousness and the flame of divine fire within. The aged women reflect or portray this fourth or “late in time behold him come” theme, as the familiar Christmas carol puts it so well. We will see later also how the story of Jesus coming across the water “in the fourth” watch of the night—just before the dawn—makes the same point.
2) The sixth-months-apart aspect is making the significant point that, in the earlier astronomical allegory, the natural man, who rises under the sign of Virgo on the eastern horizon, gives way six months later to the spiritual man or Christ, who is born on that same horizon in the sign of Pisces, the fish. Eventually, as the evolution of our soul continues, the natural man is surpassed by the spiritual. This is the meaning behind the Baptist’s words in John’s Gospel: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”5
Baptism Means Claiming Our Divinity, Not Removal of Sin
In Mark we read:
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:9–12)
That such a baptism had nothing whatever to do with sin is transparent from both the text itself and from the fact that the sinlessness of the Jesus character in the drama is vigorously maintained in all of the New Testament.6 In John’s Gospel, the Evangelist is in fact obviously embarrassed by this whole event from that point of view and tries to explain it all away or at least to downplay it. Water, as we have seen, symbolizes a number of things, but principally it is the symbol of matter. Since our bodies are made up largely of water, the soul was thought of as held fast in a watery dungeon. It was a kind of death. When Jesus goes down into the water, representing the divinity in every one of us, his immersion symbolizes this central fact of Incarnation. The soul accepts the lot and the struggle of being human—a blending of spirit and matter—in order to expand through experience on this plane. Those who believe in reincarnation hold that it may take several or even many lifetimes to gain all the experience necessary for winning full spiritual maturity. My own view inclines
