The Question of John the Baptist and Jesus’ Indictment of the Religious Leaders. Roberto a. Martinez

as a fully realized state. For Dibelius, a saying in which the citizenship of the kingdom is presupposed reads not as coming from Jesus but as coming from the church. Therefore, only 7:28a can be considered an original saying. Dibelius doubts that the followers of the Baptist would have used the statement to assert the primacy of the Baptist over Jesus if the actual restriction would have been present in the current form (13–19).

41. Ibid., 36–37.

42. Ibid., 38.

43. Ibid., 15.

44. Ibid., 17.

45. Ibid., 19–20.

46. Goguel, Jean-Baptiste, 63.

47. Ibid., 64.

48. Ibid., 68–69.

49. Kraeling, John the Baptist, 11–13.

50. Ibid., 127–28; 178–79.

51. Ibid., 128; Besides Luke 7:18–23 (// Matt 11:2–6), Kraeling includes in his assessment here the reported contacts between the Baptist and Jesus in Mark 1:9–11 and John 1:29, 36.

52. Ibid., 129–30.

53. Ibid., 137–40.

54. Dupont, “Jean-Baptiste,” 805–21; 943–59.

55. For Dupont (ibid., 805), the differences between Matthew and Luke are insignificant and they exist more on a literary level than in substance. Dupont is not very concerned with historical or literary remarks, some of which he considers hypercritical: “Toute notre attention peut se porter sur le sens de la question posée par Jean et celui de la réponse que Jésus lui donne” (805, see also n. 3)

56. Ibid., 806–13.

57. Ibid., 821.

58. Ibid., 945.

59. Dupont (ibid., 951) points out that the book of Isaiah has no shortage of oracles that insist on the arrival of the threatening end of time, where the wicked would suffer punishment for their sins, but Jesus only keeps the oracles of consolation, those that preach that God will take pity on his people and will send a merciful Savior.

60. Ibid., 955.

61. Ibid., 958.

62. Scobie, John the Baptist, 13–17.

63. Scobie (ibid., 17) concludes his discussion of the sources stating: “From all these considerations, it would appear that the Q source is the most reliable: it is the earliest, it contains the greatest proportion of material concerning John, it has the highest estimate of John, and it contains the clearest evidence of Semitisms.”

64. Ibid., 143–44.

65. Ibid., 144.

66. Ibid., 41, 47, 134–35, 160.

67. Ibid., 126.

68. Ibid., 157–58.

69. Wink, John the Baptist, xii.

70. Ibid., 23.

71. Ibid., 23–24.

72. Ibid., 25.

73. Ibid., 54.

74. Ibid., 82–86.

75. Sabugal, Juan el Bautista, 114, 193–94.

76. Ibid., 9–27; 141–46.

77. Ibid., 141–202, esp. 159, 191, 194. “Resumiendo los precedentes análisis, podemos decir: El relato de Q sobre la embajada mesiánica del Bautista no es composición cristiana. Ningún indicio literario objetivo favorece la interpretación contraria. Sí refleja, por el contrario, varios semitismos, algunos de ellos característicos del lenguaje de Jesús” (159).

78. Ernst, Johannes der Täufer, 55–80.

79. Ibid., 55. Ernst underscores the difficulty of the analysis, saying: “Letzte Sicherheit ist wegen der nicht eindeutig erkennbaren Redaktionstendenzen kaum zu erreichen” (56). His analysis is heavily indebted to Paul Hoffmann’s Studien zur Theologie der Logienquelle.

80. Ernst, Johannes der Täufer, 58.

81. For Ernst, Luke has exonerated the Baptist from his insecurity through the artistic construction of the pericope (ibid., 317).

82. Ibid., 59.

83. Ibid.

84.