The apocalyptic continuum means that Jesus must have been apocalyptic

The argument

John the Baptist obviously and openly believed in apocalypticism; this can be seen in Bible passages such as Luke 3:7-9 and Matthew 3:10, where there is obvious dualistic imagery of the tree "that does not bear good fruit" and those that do. The imagery is apocalyptic in the technical sense: it divides people into two groups facing opposite outcomes at an imminent judgement, rather than counselling gradual improvement. Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist — we know this for certain because of the embarrassment this would have caused for the Gospel writers and so this wasn't added in. The reasoning here is a standard historical test. Writers shaping a narrative around their subject's supremacy do not invent an episode in which he submits to someone else's rite; a detail that works against the author's interest is unlikely to have been added by that author, so it is likely to have been inherited as fact. It also follows that Jesus would have consented to John the Baptist baptising him given the age he was at the time of his baptism; as this is the case, Jesus must have agreed with the message that John the Baptist was preaching. An adult undergoing a rite defined by a particular preaching is understood to be accepting what it stands for. We also know that apocalyptic views were widely held in the Early Church. This supplies the other end of the continuum. Since John the Baptist was not a member of the Early Church, the apocalyptic outlook is attested on both sides of Jesus — in the movement he came out of and in the movement that came out of him — with no plausible account of it disappearing in between and independently reappearing. Jesus must have been an apocalyptic prophet.

Context

Jesus' baptism in the bible is something that we can be very certain of. As with a few other passages in the bible, Jesus' baptism is extremely embarrassing for the Gospel writers. When someone is trying to frame someone as the Son of God, they do not want to imply that this person has sinned and therefore needs to be cleansed - exactly what a baptism was. It should also be noted that Jesus did not have the same baptism to what many people currently think of. Whilst we don't know his exact age, he was definitely sufficiently matured to have consented to his baptism instead of being baptised at his parents' orders.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The continuum is an interpolation, not evidence. Placing Jesus on a line drawn between John the Baptist and the early Church, and then reading his views off his position on that line, assumes the very continuity in question: that nothing distinctive happened between the two endpoints. A figure can differ from both his teacher and his followers, and the Gospels themselves record such divergences — the tradition contrasts John's ascetic practice with Jesus's, and has Jesus criticised precisely for not observing the fasting his predecessor's movement kept. The appeal to embarrassment carries less weight than the argument assigns it. That the baptism is unlikely to have been invented establishes that it happened; it does not establish that Jesus endorsed the whole content of John's preaching. People submit to a rite for reasons short of full doctrinal agreement, and the Gospel writers' evident discomfort with the episode suggests they did not regard Jesus as simply John's follower either. The early Church's apocalypticism is likewise ambiguous evidence, since it could as easily have arisen after the crucifixion, generated by the attempt to make sense of an unexpected death and an expected return. Scholars who read Jesus principally as a wisdom teacher take that route, treating apocalyptic expectation as something the movement acquired rather than something it inherited.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Accepting baptism establishes that the event occurred, not agreement with the whole of John's message; the Gospels themselves record Jesus diverging from John's ascetic practice. [Rejecting P2] The early Church's apocalypticism may have developed after the crucifixion in response to it, so the endpoints do not fix the middle; treating Jesus's position as read off a continuum assumes the continuity it sets out to prove.