The answer to this question is emphatically, John the baptizer. The apostle Andrew is styled by the apostle John, one of John’s disciples (John 1:35, 37, 40). This testimony is decisive as to him; but how are we to get at the certainty that the twelve were all baptized of John? We reply, that John’s baptism divided the Jews into two classes — the first class comprised “all the people that heard, and the publicans;” the other, “the Pharisees and lawyers.” The former class were very numerous; for “Jerusalem, and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan, were baptized of John in Jordan, confessing their sins.” Referring to the completion of this work, Luke says, “Now when all the people were baptised, and it came to pass that Jesus also being baptised, and praying, the heaven opened.” The other class being composed of the “upper ten thousand,” were “respectable” and few. They were “the righteous,” who, in their own estimation, needed no physician, having no occasion for repentance. As a class, they despised the people as cursed, knowing not the law. They regarded a baptism of repentance for remission of sins as quite unsuited to them; so that “they rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptised of John;” while the people, on the contrary, who thought more humbly of themselves, “justified God, being baptised with His baptism” (Luke 7:29, 30).
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One