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Beyond a Herald: John the Baptist as Narrative Forerunner of the Messiah in Matthew

The Gospels uniformly identify John the Baptist’s precursory role ahead of “the one coming after.” All four Gospel writers also emphasize John’s role as herald in this precursory role, each including the reference to Isaiah 40:3, “the voice of one calling in the wilderness.” In Matthew’s Gospel in particular, however, John’s role extends well beyond that of herald. John’s heralding work ends as abruptly as it begins in Matthew’s Gospel, but John reappears in Matthew’s narrative multiple more times. Each of these particular passages receives adequate attention from scholars, of course, but an atomistic approach to handling Matthew’s Gospel via pericopes fails to recognize a more comprehensive role that John plays in the Gospel. A narrative-critical approach shores up this deficiency by tracing John as an unfolding character in the story of the Gospel and recognizes that John’s role as the forerunner of Jesus in the narrative extended beyond John’s heralding the coming Messiah. This paper will argue that Matthew intentionally utilized John the Baptist as a character in parallel to Jesus in the narrative in order to prefigure Jesus’ own destiny. Kingsbury notes John’s role in brief and overarching terms (see Matthew as Story, 2d ed, 49-51), but does not offer a sustained view of John’s development as a character and how that development in the narrative parallels Jesus’ development. Just as Matthew’s Gospel leads the intended reader from clarity to surprise and back to clarity with regard to Jesus, the writer leads the reader on the same path with John. The introduction of John the Baptist in Matthew serves as a starting point to advance John as a central character in the unfolding narrative. John’s sudden appearance into the narrative along with his subsequent description in Mt 3:1-6 clearly and explicitly identified him with the prophetic office in general and the prophet Elijah in particular. The intended Jewish audience of Matthew would have recognized John’s role immediately based on this initial introduction—clarity. The subsequent unfolding of the narrative, however, would lead the reader in a surprising direction as the character John was developed through his own actions and the reflections of others. Essentially, the reader of the Gospel of Matthew would have struggled to make sense of John as story advanced. The final scene involving John in the Gospel, however, returned to clarity: John must be either accepted or rejected. In this way, the unfolding John served as a forerunner for Jesus narratively in Matthew’s Gospel. Hopefully, this approach to John will provide greater appreciation of Matthew as a storyteller and promote similar studies in the other Gospels.

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