TIL why Jesus got baptized by John the Baptist and why that is such a problem.

From the book Zealot by Reza Aslan.

"John the Baptist's historical importance and his role in launching Jesus' ministry created a difficult dilemma for the gospel writers. John was a popular, well-respected, and almost universally acknowledged priest and prophet. His fame was too great to ignore, his baptism of Jesus too well known to conceal. The story had to be told. But it also had to be massaged and made safe. The two men's roles had to be reversed. Jesus had to be made superior, John inferior. Hence the steady regression of John's character from the first gospel, Mark, wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor to Jesus, to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose at all except to acknowledge Jesus's divinity."

The order that the gospels were written is Mark, then Matthew and Luke, and finally John. From reading the book I realized that the problem the early christian church had was to explain why Jesus got baptized by John and not the other way around. Jesus was one of John's disciples. He followed him until John got arrested and then he went back home.

You can see the progression of this process of making Christ the Messiah and son of God, if you read the baptism stories in all of the gospels in order.

Then I realized the double whammy that this created for TSCC. They had to explain where John got the priesthood. This also has to be done in the Book of Mormon with Alma. These passages were written before anyone had any idea that you should have an "authority" to baptize someone.

The historian Josephus wrote that John's baptism was "not for the remission of sins but for the purification of the body." That would make John's ritual more like a an initiation rite. If the man Jesus existed, he was probably started out as a disciple of John the Baptist.