John the Baptist as Angelic Elijah: An Origenist Lent Meditation

The season of Lent, in which we find ourselves temporarily lost in the wilderness, is a fitting time for meditating on the identity of that desert prophet, John the Baptist, whom Jesus described as the greatest of men (Matt 11:11) and indeed “more than a prophet” (Matt 11:9). “More” in what sense? The answer, generally overlooked, is perhaps staring back at us from Matthew 11 itself: “This is he of whom it is written, 'Behold, I send my angel before your face, who shall prepare your way before you” (Matt 11:10 [Luke 7:27, Mark 1:2], cf. Mal 3:1), a quotation Jesus then glosses by adding, “if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Matt 11:12, cf. Mal 4:5; cf. also Matt 17:11-13, Mark 9:11-13). English translations, of course, typically render Matthew’s “ἄγγελόν, angelon” in 11:10 as “messenger,” which is indeed a possible sense of the term, although this would be the only instance among Matthew’s twenty uses of the word in which he used it this way; in every other case, it unambiguously refers to angels in the supernatural sense.[1]

And indeed, Malachi 3:1, from which Jesus quotes (with some embellishment, as we will see), suggests that it is precisely an angel that the prophet has in view, albeit one who is also, in some sense, the prophet Elijah. This work of prophecy, written perhaps a century after Israel’s partial return from exile, concludes with the ominous if hopeful warning that “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (Mal 3:1) to judge his people for their disobedience and impurity (Mal 3:2-4:5). But the way for this coming will be prepared by the one whom the LORD calls “my angel (mal’achiy)”—also apparently the name of the book’s eponymous prophet (Mal 1:1)—as well as “the angel of the covenant (mal’ach ha-beriyt)” (Mal 3:1).

The first designation (mal’achiy) for this figure could just as well have referred to a human messenger as to a supernatural servant, but the second designation (mal’ach ha-beriyt) is a fairly noisy allusion to a recurring dramatis persona in the story of the Exodus in particular, in which God repeatedly tells Moses, “I will send my angel before you” (Exod 32:34, cf. Exod 14:19, 23:20, 33:2). Indeed, Jesus’s own quotation of Malachi 3:1 in Matthew 11:10 seems to have been subtly assimilated to Exodus 32:24 (substituting its “before you” in place of “before me”), which suggests that either he or whoever produced that textual variant was reading Malachi through and with Exodus.

Malachi 3 thus suggests, on its face, that the “messenger” who will presage the LORD’s return to his Temple is in fact an angel like the one who went before Israel in the wilderness. But then, surprisingly, a figure quite like this reappears in the next chapter, now identified instead as Elijah: “I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes” (Mal 4:5). It is of course possible that these are two distinct “messengers,” but we have no less an authority than our Lord in identifying them; after all, he names John both as the “angel” of Malachi 3:1 and as “Elijah who is to come” (Matt 11:10, 12).

This identification of Elijah with the LORD’s “angel” presumably drew its force, in Malachi, from the earlier tradition that Elijah did not die a natural death, but “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” after being “separated” from his disciple Elisha by “a chariot of fire and horses of fire” (2 Kgs 2:11). Malachi 3-4 seems to be the earliest surviving hint of a tradition that Elijah, having gone to heaven, in some sense became an angel.

This notion that humans might be promoted (so to speak) to angelic status became increasingly common in the Second-Temple period, as David Armstrong has nicely documented, including copious and learned references to the ancient angelification of David, Moses, and Jacob, among others. The most voluminously narrated of these human-to-angel transformations is doubtless that of Enoch, who, like Elijah, was reported to have been “taken” by God (Gen 5:24). The “Enochic” literature—notably 1 Enoch (ca. 100 BC), 2 Enoch (ca. 1st century AD?), and 3 Enoch (ca. 500 AD?)—describes what happened to Enoch following his ascension to heaven, with each book offering a progressively more dramatic account of his metamorphosis. 1 Enoch identifies Enoch as the “Son of Man” from the book of Daniel (1 En 71:14, cf. Dan 7:13-14). 2 Enoch describes how the archangel Michael dressed Enoch “in the garments of [God’s] glory,” so that he “became like one of the glorious ones” (2 En 22:8-9).

And 3 Enoch goes the furthest, describing how Enoch was transformed into the angel Metatron. God, Enoch-Metatron tells us, “left no kind of splendor, brilliance, radiance, or beauty in all the lights of the universe which he did not fix on me” (3 Enoch 9:5). Still more, he continues,

As soon as the Holy One, blessed be He, took me in His service to attend the Throne of Glory and the Wheels of the Merkaba and the needs of Shekina, forthwith my flesh was changed into flames, my sinews into flaming fire, my bones into coals of burning juniper, the light of my eye-lids into splendor of lightnings, my eye-balls into fire-brands, the hair of my head into hot flames, all my limbs into wings of burning fire and the whole of my body into glowing (3 En 15:1).

The idea of human “angelification” is arguably present in parts of the New Testament as well, including but by no means limited to Matthew 11. Some texts are suggestive rather than definitive. For example, Jesus describes the saints in heaven as “like the angels (ὡς ἄγγελοι)” in not marrying (Matt 22:30) (in Luke’s parallel passage, they are “equal to the angels (ἰσάγγελοι)” (Luke 20:36)), while Paul describes the resurrection body as “spiritual” and the resurrected Christ as “a living spirit,” who has left behind “flesh and blood” (1 Cor 15:44-45, 50), an idea which the Gospel of John echoes as well, in Jesus’s insistence that “what is born of Spirit is spirit,” and that only one born of the Spirit rather than the flesh “can enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5-6). More directly relevant to this issue is the editorial remark in the Books of Acts that the Sadducees “say that there is no resurrection, neither as an angel, nor as spirit, but the Pharisees confess them both (λέγουσιν μὴ εἶναι ἀνάστασιν μήτε ἄγγελον μήτε πνεῦμα Φαρισαῖοι δὲ ὁμολογοῦσιν τὰ ἀμφότερα)” (Acts 23:8).[2] (If the resurrection body is in some sense “angelic” or “spiritual,” that of course implies that at least some angels or spirits are in some sense bodily.) And still more striking is that the gathered church in Acts, when Peter suddenly appeared after being freed from prison, thought, “It is his angel (ὁ ἄγγελός ἐστιν αὐτοῦ)” (Acts 12:15), which strongly suggests that they imagined Peter to have died and become (if only temporarily) an angel.[3]

Malachi’s apparent identification of God’s angel with the coming Elijah would imply not only that a human might be “angelified,” but that an angel might subsequently be “humanized.” This too is reflected, if less frequently, in other Second-Temple Jewish traditions, such as the fragments of the “Book of Noah,” in which Noah’s mother remarks that he “is not like a human being, but he looks like the children of the angels of heaven to me” (v. 6), or in the apocryphal “Prayer of Joseph,” quoted by Origen in a discussion of the identity of John the Baptist, in which the patriarch Jacob declares, “I, Jacob, who speak to you, and Israel, I am an angel of God, a ruling spirit” (Commentary on John (hereafter, CJ) 2.25). (We will return below to Origen’s own views of the Forerunner.) Matthew’s (and Mark’s) Jesus seems to maintain that something similar is true of John the Baptist: having ascended to heaven and become an angel, Elijah returned to earth as the herald of the Messiah in the person of “the angel” John the Baptist.

If Matthew and Mark seem to present John as a returned (reincarnated? transmogrified?) “angelified Elijah,” the Gospels of Luke and John display considerable reluctance on this score. John is the most direct, including as it does John the Baptist’s emphatic denial that he is Elijah (John 1:21), and Jesus’s insistence that no one besides “the Son of Man” has ascended to heaven (John 3:13). Luke is subtler on this score, but consider that both his parallel to Matthew 11’s discourse on John the Baptist and his version of the Transfiguration lack Jesus’s identification of John with Elijah (Luke 7:24-30, 9:36-42), while his narrative of John’s miraculous but emphatically human birth includes the remark by Gabriel that John would “go before him [the Lord?] in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke 1:17)—not as Elijah, but in Elijah’s spirit. (Establishing the relative priority and lines of dependence among the Synoptic versions of these pericopae would take us too far afield at present; suffice it to say here that Matthew and Mark seem to offer distinctly different, and perhaps prima facie incompatible, perspectives on the Baptist from Luke and John.)

What theological sense can be made of this canonical muddle? If the historical-critical exegete can content himself with identifying apparently heterogeneous traditions within the Gospels, the theologian faces the more difficult task of understanding them as a collective—and ideally harmonious—witness to God’s work. The traditional and still-dominant approach of harmonizing these texts is to read Matthew’s and Mark’s apparently direct identification of the Baptist with Elijah through Luke’s and John’s more restrained, “typological” or “metaphorical” readings. Augustine is representative:

The Lord Jesus Christ wished in [John] to prefigure His own advent, and to say that John was in the spirit of Elias. And what John was to the first advent, that will Elias be to the second advent. As there are two advents of the Judge, so are there two heralds . . . He sent before Him His first herald; He called him Elias, because Elias will be in the second advent what John was in the first (Tractates on John 4.5).

Augustine takes John 1:21 to preclude any literal interpretation of, e.g., Matthew 11:14, and insists that the latter verse must be read as a more colorful version of Luke’s declaration about “the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke 1:17). (Notice, however, that Augustine does not deny the literal expectation of Elijah’s return, but merely defers it to the Second Coming.)

Nonetheless, in the interest of giving Matthew and Mark—and indeed, Jesus himself—their due, we might wonder if there is any way of integrating the Gospels’ portrait of the Forerunner that places the accent on (the Markan and especially Matthean) Jesus’s identification of John the Baptist with Malachi’s angelic Elijah? Initial help along these lines can be found in Sergei Bulgakov’s treatment of John in The Friend of the Bridegroom (cited as FoB). Bulgakov notes that, in the Eastern iconographic tradition, John is typically depicted with large wings, while several Orthodox liturgical texts celebrate him as an angel (FoB, 142). He notes the likely dependence of both traditions—iconographic and liturgical—on Jesus’s application to John of Malachi 3:1, and then asserts bluntly, “The Forerunner is, as it were, a humanized angel or an angelic man, a living and personal communion of the two worlds” (FoB, 143), or even “an angel-man . . . through the unification in him of the human and angelic natures” (FoB, 144-45). And, lest someone feel tempted to minimize these claims, he insists, “This human being [sc. John] became an angel, was raised to the angelic order. The angelic image was incorporated in him (and this was realized not in the sense of a mere resemblance but in some essential way)” (FoB, 168).

Bracing stuff, but Bulgakov also qualifies this account in some important ways. For one thing, he insists, earlier in the work, that John cannot straightforwardly be identified with Elijah, given John’s explicit denials of that identity (FoB, 128, cf. John 1:21). He also identifies an asymmetry between humans and angels: “a man, by virtue of the ontological fullness of his being”—i.e., by virtue of being rational spirit as well as animal—“can become an angel; but an angel, however high his elevation, cannot assume the human nature, for it is alien to the angelic nature” (FoB, 146). This might still permit an “angelification” of the human John, but not a “humanization” of the angelic Elijah as John.

Moreover, Bulgakov goes on to clarify that “the addition of the angelic image to man signifies not a change of the human nature but an emancipation of the latter from the lusts and passions of the flesh” (FoB, 168). Indeed, “by calling the Forerunner an angel, the Church attests that he attained such personal sinlessness” (FoB, 175). In other words, John is not actually an angel, but rather he lives angelically; he participates in angelhood only, to borrow Maximus the Confessor’s distinction, at the level of tropos rather than logos.

For an interpretation of John the Baptist that centers Matthew’s portrait of him, we need to go further back, to Origen’s Commentary on John, which we discussed earlier for its quotation of the “Prayer of Joseph.” Origen offers that quotation as an analogy for his preferred (if admittedly speculative) account of John, as “one of the holy angels who is sent down on this ministry as forerunner of our Savior,” and so as “surpassing [. . .] the common nature of man?” (CJ 2.25). Origen cites Jesus’s citation of Malachi 3 in defense of this view (CJ 2.25), but also aims to show that Luke’s own apparently more restrained account of John supports it as well. He quotes Elizabeth’s remark that, “when the voice of your salutation came into mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy” (Luke 1:44), and comments that “he who sedulously guards himself in his dealings with Scripture against forced, or casual, or capricious procedure, must necessarily assume that John's soul was older than his body, and subsisted by itself before it was sent on the ministry of the witness of the light” (CJ 2.24)—that is, Luke itself seems to suggest that John was somehow already acquainted with and a worshipper of Jesus even prior to his birth.

He goes on as well to connect this idea to that of John’s identity with the ascended Elijah, quoting Matthew 11:14 and remarking “if that general doctrine of the soul is to be received, namely, that it is not sown at the same time with the body, but is before it, and is then, for various causes, clothed with flesh and blood; then the words ‘sent from God’ will not appear to be applicable to John alone” (CJ 2.24). This cautious consideration of whether some version of reincarnation might solve the exegetical difficulty here—for after all, what else are we to make of the idea that a man who was born a few decades prior is also a man who lived hundreds of years earlier than that?—is Origen at his most daringly speculative.

And while he does not (so far as I know) make this inference, we might wonder if John’s declaration that he is not Elijah (John 1:21) is not a faithful record of his own awareness of this larger story. Perhaps Wordsworth was right—if only in John’s case!—that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar: [. . .] / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.” Perhaps John’s leap in the womb was inspired by those half-remembered traces of his former glory which faded to oblivion with his birth’s “sleep and forgetting.”

Or perhaps not! Origen shows small interest in ironing out these remaining wrinkles in his reading, and I am inclined to leave them as open questions as well. We are peering here, after all, into dark matters and difficult. Whatever the precise connection of John’s to Elijah’s earthly life, Origen suggests that it is small . . .

. . . wonder if, when the first-born of all creation was assuming a human body, some of them should have been filled with love to man and become admirers and followers of Christ, and thought it good to minister to his kindness towards man by having a body like that of men. And who would not be moved at the thought of his leaping for joy when yet in the belly, surpassing as he did the common nature of man? (CJ 2.25).

The dominant interpretation of John the Baptist by Christian theologians has, perhaps ironically, given greater credence to his own self-description (John 1:21) than to Jesus’s account of him (Matt 11:14 et al.). Origen represents a bold attempt at the opposite approach: what if the Forerunner were exactly who Jesus said he is, namely (somehow) an angel and Elijah at once? Christine Joynes is right that we need further “reflection about exactly how John the Baptist could be described as Elijah returned.”[4] (“The Returned Elijah?”, 467). Or, as Bulgakov puts it, “there remains a certain undeciphered mystery in this resemblance between Elias and John” (FoB, 130).

There does indeed: the mystery of this resemblance is just one of many ways in which the world depicted in the New Testament is a weirder and wilder place than Christians today are wont to allow. But then again, we must recall that the Lenten season calls us to look to a crucified Jewish peasant as also the creator of heaven and earth; are we really prepared to strain out a man-angel but swallow a God-man?