The Room in Jerusalem

A leadership rule preserved in Acts makes presence at the Jordan under Yohanan ha-Matbil the threshold qualification for a seat among the Twelve, which means the senior cadre of Yehoshua's movement came out of the Immerser's camps rather than off the Galilean shore. Once that personnel question stands on its own evidence, the wilderness vocabulary saturating the Fourth Gospel stops looking like literary borrowing and starts looking like native speech, which makes the Johannine corpus the last surviving record of how that milieu talked.