The Baptism of Jesus
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Mark 1:9
The passage
And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan.
Mark 1:9
About this plate
Two figures standing in the river. Christ at the left with his hands crossed on his breast and his head bowed; John at the right, one arm raised over him, a slender reed cross in the other hand. Light comes down through the cloud in a single wide shaft. On the bank at the right a group of men watch. Further out, small figures stand in the water waiting their turn.
Those waiting figures are the detail worth having. Doré does not isolate the moment. There is a queue. This is a working day at the ford, and one of the men in the line happens to be the one the whole book is about.
Mark's sentence is almost aggressively plain: Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. Fourteen words, one of them a place name nobody expected anything from. No dove yet, no voice, no sky opening. Those are the next verse.
Doré lets the light arrive early, but keeps everything else at the level of Mark's sentence: two men, standing in water, one of them stooping.
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