God’s advent in salvation and judgement has taken place in Jesus. The minor changes to two of the passages noted above have been introduced in order to make them appropriate, and whereas the Hebrew of Isaiah 40 understands the wilderness as the place where the way is to be prepared (‘in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord’), Mark follows the LXX in attaching the phrase ‘in the wilderness’ to the voice, so introducing the figure of John the Baptist as a voice crying in the wilderness. The messenger
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