ABSTRACT
God's decisive act had taken place in the midst of history, giving to Christian moral teaching a basis in the new age of the Spirit. The link between the teaching of Jesus and John the Baptist and its reception by the early Christians was not a simple one; this chapter explains its emerging complexity. To enter the world of John the Baptist as the Gospels portray him is to engage with the heightened eschatology evident in some of the movements within Judaism in the Roman period, and particularly with the notion of pollution and purification that characterised all the beneficiaries of the Hasidic tradition. Much in John's preaching and life-style wilderness locale, asceticism, community of goods, eschatological intensity, messianism, water baptism, contempt for conventional religiosity suggests an affinity with Qumran, though John betrays no connection with the Qumran community.
