zerogate:

When he appeared, as Mark tells it, in his early or middle thirties, he came out of nowhere, with no past — except for a single reference to Nazareth in Galilee, his hometown. There is no birth narrative. There is no Virgin Mary, mangers, shepherds by night, or three wise men from the east. In this, the first story written about his life, he has no childhood. The only mention of kin is an early, dismissive refusal by him to see any of them — ‘Who is my mother or my brothers?’ No trade is noted, or education. He is what will become, in the culture of the West, the mysterious stranger. The implication is that his earlier life, about which we are told nothing, was inconsequential. Whether it was ordinary, wayward, or wasted, it did not contribute to who he is. His presence will be known, for as long as he remains, through his mission, which starts now.

[…]

From the outset, he is on his own. The solitariness is stark.

Many are around, but he alone sees the heavens part. He alone senses the pneuma descending over him — it, rather than the water, is the medium of his baptism. He is bathed in pneuma — his first companion. He alone hears the voice.

‘Sacred pneuma’ is traditionally translated from the Greek — pneuma hagion — as ‘Holy Spirit’ or ‘Holy Ghost’. In the original Greek it is not capitalised. The church tendency to conceptualise it as an entity loses the pneuma associations with wind, breath, and spirit — its range of Greek meanings. I shall leave ‘pneuma’ untranslated throughout.

Pneuma is ‘the wind that bloweth where it wills, and thou hearest its sound, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’. This is how John, taking Mark’s cue, will timelessly project it. It is the charged wind, the cosmic breath, the driving spectral force. It is also the directing power that drives the stranger into the wilderness. And it manifests itself in unsound forms within deranged individuals. John will refer to ‘pneuma the god’.

– John Carroll, The existential Jesus