The Crown and the Cross: The Life of Christ by Frank G. Slaughter Page A

a fiery man whose spirit could not long be contained by the rigid rules and the intense preoccupation with the Torah characterizing the life of the Essenes. As time passed, John became more and more convinced that his mission was not, as the brethren of the Essene community held, to achieve his own salvation, but to bring to all men a warning of the impending coming of God’s kingdom on earth and the necessity to repent of their sins in preparation for it.
    Soon word began to spread that a prophet was teaching in the wilderness country at the northern end of the Sea of Judgment. A region of steep hills and black basalt boulders and caves, and of robbers who preyed on travelers, the region around what was called the “Fords of the Jordan” east of Jericho was admirably suited for the appearance of a prophet. Gaunt and fiery-eyed, John was like one of the volcanoes which had rumbled beneath this very area long ago; his turbulent spirit resembled the fires of God which had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah when the whole vast rift in which the Sea of Judgment lay had rumbled and exploded as if in agony.
    One of the most frequently traveled roads between Jerusalem and Galilee ran through this region. Near where it crossed the river, at a place called Bethabara, John began to preach from a natural pulpit among the rocks overlooking a grove of sycamores that sheltered his listeners from the burning sun of midday pouring down upon John’s own unprotected head. Although still practicing the asceticism of the nearby Essene community where he had lived, John had put aside the white garments an Essene usually wore and, like Elijah of old, wrapped his body in a roughly-woven robe of camel hair with a leather girdle about his waist. Lodging in the villages when he did not sleep beneath the open sky, he ate the food of the poor, often locusts and wild honey.
    Locusts were much liked by the villagers. Sometimes the insects, which swarmed everywhere, were simply roasted in an oven and eaten with salt. But often they were prepared more elaborately by first drying them in the sun, then grinding them into a slightly bitter powder which was mixed with honey and a little flour to make a highly prized cake.
    As word of John’s fiery preaching in the wilderness began to spread, more and more people stopped on the way to and from Jerusalem to hear him. There had not been a real prophet in Israel for hundreds of years, and word spread quickly concerning the angel who had appeared to his father at the very altar of the temple, announcing John as a prophet of God in the tradition of Elijah.
    And John did not fail to live up to that tradition. From his rocky pulpit, he preached to ever larger crowds of people, thundering at them the necessity to repent and be forgiven of their sins through the symbolic Essene rite of baptism before it was too late. Nicknamed “the Baptist,” John’s desperate urgency communicated itself to those who heard him and soon many began to say that he was indeed the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make His paths straight. Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill brought low. The crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places smooth. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’”
    Even the area where John preached seemed to fit in with the prophecy, for it was easy to see in the tumbled basalt boulders and the sulfurous fumes seeping through crevices in the rocks that God had indeed once filled valleys and brought mountains and hills low in this very region when He had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, at the southern end of the Dead Sea, because of their excessive sinfulness. This same sinfulness, John preached, would lead God to destroy the people once again unless they listened and repented.
    Unable to comply fully with the complexities of the Law, the common people were always