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Part XXXVI Matthew
The Execution of John the Baptist: History, Myth or Midrash?
Salome was a dancer, she danced before the king.
She wiggled and she wobbled and she shook most everything.
The king said, “Salome, there’ll be no scandal here!”
Salome said, “To heck with that” and kicked the chandelier!
That bit of doggerel is from a song sung at church camp in my youth. It claimed to be made up of Bible stories that one had “never heard before.” Among its many verses were a few that had a salacious quality about them. They were, of course the most popular ones of all. This verse was one of those. In this column I originally skipped this story, but later felt it too good to miss, so I double back today to focus on the narrative of the execution of John the Baptist.
The story of John’s beheading at the order of King Herod is a familiar one, even outside religious circles. It has attracted to itself a number of mythological additions. For example, in no place in the Bible is the dancing daughter of the Queen named Salome. The only mention of someone named Salome in the New Testament is found in Mark (15:40 and 16:1), where she is one of the women that Mark identifies as present at both the crucifixion and among those who brought spices to the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning. She disappears from the biblical narrative after Mark, when both Matthew and Luke, who have Mark before them when they write, edit her out of their gospels. So the name of the young woman, who danced before the king and his courtiers at a great banquet, is “Salome” only in the developing tradition, never in the Bible itself. That might come as a surprise to the great German composer, Richard Strauss, who named the opera he wrote on this biblical episode, “Salome.” That opera was considered scandalous when it was first produced in Dresden, Germany in 1905. So for the sake of accuracy we drop the name of the dancer before we can begin to determine the meaning of this biblical story.
Second, in the Bible the dance she performed was never called “The Dance of the Seven Veils.” That expansion of the text was developed much later just to heighten the sensual quality of the story and to increase the number of XXX’s in the sex and violence rating system of antiquity, designed primarily to build the audience for the reading of this biblical story. So in the Bible there is no “Salome” and there are no “seven veils.”
The third thing we need to point out is that it was a much used and familiar technique of ancient mythology to portray a king, so pleased by the service of one of his subjects, that he offers to reward the favored one by satisfying any request or desire of the favored one’s heart. Mark even used the classical mythological formula: “up to half of my kingdom.” No king ever did that except in the fantasies of story tellers.
If we are to understand this biblical story, then let us look closely at what Matthew does say in this episode. This is Matthew’s story: Herod had imprisoned John because when he married Herodias, his brother Philip’s former wife, John had publicly condemned the marriage. By doing so, John had enraged the new queen and she was quite overt in her hatred of him. The king had even wanted to execute John, but John’s popularity among the people made that a dangerous political tactic. Matthew also suggests that King Herod had a strange fascination with the Baptist, a kind of love/hate relationship. When Herod’s birthday arrived a great banquet was held to celebrate it and all his courtiers were invited. The entertainment planned for after the banquet was for the daughter of Herodias, and thus the niece and stepdaughter of King Herod, to dance for the guests. She did so in an apparently very pleasing manner. King Herod, moved by her performance, offered to grant her any request. She conferred with her mother to determine what she should ask. This was Herodias’ moment, so she told her daughter to ask for “the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” The king was distressed by this request, Matthew tells us, but he could not go back on his publicly-given word, so he ordered the execution to be carried out. The banquet apparently ended when John’s bleeding, detached head was paraded around the banquet table. Perhaps this sight killed any remaining appetites!
Is any part of this story true? Is there even a nugget of history here? The answer to both of these questions is indubitably no! No part of this described event ever happened. If that is true, then we ask why was this story created and what does it mean? The answer is clear, but the fact is that only Jewish people, familiar with the scriptures of the Hebrew people, would have understood its meaning. They alone would, based on their knowledge of the Jewish sacred story, know that it was not history. Quite simply, this story was an attempt by the followers of Jesus to cement the identification of John the Baptist with Elijah and thus to demonstrate to the Jewish audience, for which this gospel was originally written, that Jesus was indeed the expected messiah. To understand this connection, however, one must be deeply familiar with the biblical story of Elijah. To examine that story we now go back to the 18th chapter of I Kings.
In that narrative we find being described a religious standoff between Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh and the priests of the cult of Baal, championed by Queen Jezebel. This foreign-born queen has tried to turn the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel into being the worshipers of the fertility God Baal, whom she served. Elijah alone stood in her path. A contest was set on Mount Carmel to determine which God the people of Israel would serve. The deity that sent fire from heaven to consume the sacrifice, in answer to the prayers of either the priests of Baal or Elijah, would be declared the true God. It was like a dual in which only one deity would survive.
The priests of Baal, all 400 strong, went first. Laying their sacrificial animal on their newly constructed altar, they began entreating Baal to send the consuming fire. Alas, however, nothing happened. Remember it was the followers of Yahweh who wrote this story.
Elijah, who must have been a hair shirt type of a personality, taunted these Baal worshipers from the sidelines. “Pray louder,” he urged. “Maybe Baal is away on a journey or perhaps he is just asleep!” The priests of Baal prayed, shouted, danced and even cut themselves with swords and lances in this ritual, but nothing worked. No fire fell from heaven. Finally, after several hours of failed entreaty, it was Elijah’s turn.
Dramatic showoff that he was, Elijah prepared his sacrificial animal, laid its carved pieces on his altar and then proceeded to dig a trench around that altar. Next, he ordered four cisterns of water to be poured over the sacrifice. He repeated this action three times until the sacrifice was drenched and the trench around the altar overflowed with water. (One wag suggested that he did not use water, but liquefied natural gas. That would explain some aspects of this story!) Only then did Elijah entreat God to send fire from heaven to consume the sacrifice. Immediately, this story proclaimed, the fire fell from the sky and the sacrifice was burned. The smell of the roasting bull rose into the air, reaching, presumably, the nostrils of God. The fire was so intense, said this story, that it even consumed the water in the trench around the altar. The people fell back in awe. “Yahweh is God,” they shouted. Elijah, empowered by this success, then drew his sword and began to behead the 400 priests of Baal, not stopping until the last head of the last priest rolled on the ground. Jezebel’s religious initiative was clearly thwarted. Baal was revealed to be powerless, even impotent.
When this event was reported to Queen Jezebel, she was livid, and the story says, she immediately swore an oath and took this vow: “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life (Elijah) as the life of one of them (the priests of Baal) by this time tomorrow” (I Ki.19:2). On hearing of this vow, Elijah went into hiding and so it was never carried out. In time, Jezebel became a widow, but she continued to exercise authority after King Ahab’s death as the Queen Mother until a revolution, led by a man named Jehu, occurred. When Jehu rode victoriously into his new capital he ordered the Queen mother, Jezebel, to be thrown from a window in the royal palace to the street and killed. Elijah, however, was said to have escaped death altogether, when, at the end of his life, instead of dying he was simply transported directly into God’s presence by means of a fiery chariot drawn by fiery horses. The question then remained: “What happened to Jezebel’s unfulfilled vow and her solemn oath?” The answer offered by the followers of Jesus was that it was destined to remain unfulfilled until the “new Elijah” appeared to herald the arrival of the expected messiah. After all, they declared, had Malachi not written: “Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” (Mal 4:5)?
How did the followers of Jesus proclaim that Elijah had come in the person of John the Baptist, so that they could solidify the claim that Jesus was the expected messiah? In their newly written gospels they clothed John in the garments of Elijah, camel’s hair and a leather girdle. They placed John the Baptist into Elijah’s wilderness. They gave him the wilderness diet, locusts and wild honey. Now in their final John story they told of John the Baptist’s execution, in which the death vowed for Elijah by Queen Jezebel, was in fact carried out on the “New Elijah” at the order of another foreign queen, this time named Herodias. Thus, John the Baptist had to be beheaded, just as the priests of Baal had been. That is what this story is all about.
Do you not see how important it is for the understanding of the gospels, for us to learn to read them with Jewish eyes? The gospels are not history; it is a mistake for us to assume that they are. They are Jewish interpretive paintings. Biblical literalism arises out of Gentile ignorance of the Jewish Scriptures. Biblical fundamentalism is, in the last analysis, nothing but a Gentile heresy.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Mark Dickinson, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I am thoroughly enjoying your weekly study on the Gospel of Matthew. I feel it would make a wonderful Bible study in the church. Are you planning to collect these weekly reflections (series) into a printed book and, if so, when might it be published? I encourage you to consider this possibility...it would make a terrific resource for a church or college library. Thank you.
Also, I am currently reading the book The Mind Behind the Gospels: A Commentary to Matthew 1-14 by Herbert Basser. Are you familiar with this title? I am finding it a superb line-by-line commentary on Matthew.
Answer:
Dear Mark,
Thank you for your letter, your comments and your recommendation of the Herbert Basser book. It is on my list.
Yes, I have a contract with my publisher Harper-Collins to produce a manuscript on Matthew’s gospel by September 1, 2015. If that deadline is met and I am confident it will be, the book will be out by May of 2016. I will launch it with a series of lectures at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, which is tentatively set for the last week of June 2016. The title will be: Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy- Studies on the Gospel of Matthew.
Let me tell you, however, that this does not mean, as you suggest, “to collect these weekly reflections into a printed book.” These two things, a series of columns and a published book, are quite different. In a series of columns, the author seeks each week to bring his reading audience back on board so there is a good bit of repetition that marks a series of columns when they appear over a period of several years. A book, however, a book is read over a much shorter period of time and one assumes the reader is on board once the book is started. One could never be repetitious in a book without boring the reader. So, a point made more than once in a series of columns has to be eliminated from the text of a book. Readers of books will not tolerate too many sentences that begin with the words, “As I have said earlier.”
In the last several years I have been doing three things simultaneously. One is my extensive study of the resources on Matthew’s gospel available to me. The theological library at Drew University (a good Methodist University and Theological School) has most graciously made its resources available to me. Second, I am writing the weekly columns. We are now reaching the column we call the XL’s or forties; there may be as many as the Matthew LX’s or even LXX’s before the series is complete. Third, I am also writing the manuscript of the book in long hand on every other line of a legal pad. Chapters are not bound by the 1500 word limit of the weekly column. I have now well over 800 of my handwritten pages in readiness. The completed manuscript will contain up to 1000 of those handwritten pages, which will print up somewhere between 275-325 pages in the new book. After the manuscript is completed, I will edit the written material for the first time. Those parts of that finished process are now with the typist. When I have completed this process and the typist has transcribed these pages into “Windows,” then we (that “we” is Christine and I) will edit it more thoroughly, cutting out repetitions, gathering footnotes, checking biblical texts and generally tightening the content. The primary genius on this task is my wife Christine. When all of these editorial changes are placed into the typed manuscript, we will send it to my publisher, Harper-Collins. That will be by May 1st, 2015, I hope. At Harper-Collins, a team of my editor, my manuscript manager and my copy editor will work over the text once again, though the staff at Harper-Collins has learned by now that Christine is a very competent editor and normally little more work is needed on a manuscript that she has gone over in detail. Mickey Mauldlin, my editor, Lisa Zuniga, my manuscript manager, and Kathy Reigstad, my copy editor, are all incredibly gifted and talented people. It will take them between six weeks and two months to do their work. We should get the edited manuscript back by July, 1st, 2015, and then Christine and I will go over every proposed change, accepting some, rejecting some and rewriting still others. That will take about a month. Next, Harper will send the now edited manuscript out to a select group of readers for comments and fact checking. In the meantime, the cover will be designed and approved and the marketing campaign planned. We have one more shot at the manuscript when we receive the “galleys.” By this time, however, the print is set, the pages are designed, the chapter titles have been inserted, the bibliography is complete and the footnotes are on the proper page, so changes are both expensive and frowned on, so they tend to be minimal. When this editorial run through is finished and the recommended changes are incorporated, the book is almost complete. The book will normally arrive at my home about a month before the official publication date. Christine always gets the first copy off the press.
This is probably more than you wanted to know, but people who do not write professionally seldom have any idea of the process through which a book goes from its first conception to its final publication. It is exciting and laborious, fulfilling and exhausting. I love the process and I hate it, but in the end, it all seems worthwhile.
The ultimate judge of a book’s worth, however, comes finally from the readers, not from the author or the publisher. Nothing is more appreciated than a letter from a reader that says, Thank you!
My best,
John Shelby Spong
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