“A Voice Cries Out”: Reassessing John the Baptist’s Wilderness Relationship to Qumran

The aim of this study is to challenge the nearly 70 years of attempts to identify some degree of relationship/influence between John the Baptist and the Qumran community vis-à-vis geographical proximity and the use of Isaiah 40:3. First, the confluence of traditions that the Baptist’s immersion event(s) occurred on the southern stretches of the Jordan river—near Jericho—his presumed association with the Essenes, and Khirbet Qumran’s location in the Judean wilderness, have resulted in geographical proximity’s continual enumeration among arguments for a relationship/influence between the two. Second, the use of Isaiah 40:3 in the Dead Sea Community Rule (1QS) naturally draws attention to its occurrence in the gospels to describe the Baptist’s role. Most examinations, however, of 1QS and the gospels are matter-of-factly comparisons with the Gospel of Mark. Consequently, this has hindered fruitful analysis of Luke’s employment of a longer Isaianic passage and its place in the third gospel’s mostly independent Baptist narrative. As such, this study will show: 1) there is little to no evidence from the early Roman period that warrants locating John’s event(s) near Qumran or in the Judean wilderness, and 2) the Lukan portrait of John diverges from its counterparts depicting an eschatological “herald” whose calls for interpersonal justice appear to be a catalyst for God’s—not a messiah’s—direct redemptive engagement. It distances John somewhat from the yaḥad and, importantly, relocates at least one portrayal of the Baptist in the wider landscape of early Jewish thought.