Sunday Leftovers: Baptism at the time of Christ

Reading the gospel accounts of John the Baptist’s ministry of baptism and then considering the significant number of accounts of baptism in Acts has made some wonder about the Old Testament practice of baptism.  Was it present in the Old Testament?  And what was already known and believed by the public about baptism during the time of Christ’s ministry?

Information is minimal, at best.  The NT says nothing about the Jewish understanding of baptism directly, and the Greek translation of the OT (called the Septuagint) contains only a few references with the Greek word “baptism” (baptizw).  What can be said is this:

• The Jewish practice of ritual cleansing (alluded to in extra-Biblical sources) undoubtedly pre-dates the practice of NT, Christian baptism, since it is unimaginable that the Jews would have mimicked the Christian practice.[1]
• The Jewish practice also apparently came to be used as a means of bringing proselytes into the Jewish faith — probably because of the need to identify women converts, who could not be circumcised, as their male counterparts would be.[2]
• In the Jewish practice, “There is no thought of any natural, let alone ethical, death and regeneration.”[3]
• Evidence from the Talmud clearly indicates that the baptism practiced by the Jews was by immersion.[4]

John MacArthur provides this summary:

Where did [baptism] start?  It began back in Old Testament times.  The people of Israel had received God’s law, promises, prophets, and covenants.  They worshiped the true God.  Some of the peoples from other nations, called Gentile nations, recognized that and wanted to identify with Israel so they could worship the true God in the true way.  They wanted to become Jews — not racially, for that is impossible — but religiously or spiritually.  The system for doing so was called proselyte induction.  It had three parts:  circumcision, animal sacrifice, and baptism.

The baptism part involved being immersed in water.  It represented the Gentile as dying to the Gentile world and then rising in a new life as a member of a new family in a new relationship to God.  It was in proselyte Gentile immersion that baptism first appeared in redemptive history.

Now skip ahead to the ministry of John the Baptist.  His job as Christ’s forerunner was to prepare people for the coming of Christ.  How did he attempt to do that?  He knew Christ would be holy and demand righteousness, so he preached repentance from sin and turning toward God.  Then he baptized the people as a visible symbol of that inward turning.[5]

So MacArthur contradicts the statement in TDNT that there is no idea of death and resurrection implicit in the Jewish baptism of proselytes.  So who is right?  It seems that evidence is scant enough that it is difficult to be dogmatic about either position.  Interestingly, the historian Phillip Schaff offers this conclusion:  “The relation of this rite to the Christian sacrament of baptism has given rise to much discussion, but the present tendency to derive Christian baptism from the immersion of proselytes is incorrect…”[6]

What can probably safely be concluded is that the Jews did practice baptism prior to the 1st century A.D.  That form of baptism was a means of identification of the individual to a group and set of beliefs with which he had not previously been identified.  And that whatever the Jewish understanding of the relationship between baptism and renewed life was in the Old Testament, by the time of the inauguration of baptism in the early church, it was very clear.

[Baptism’s] origins have been variously traced to the OT purifications, the lustrations of Jewish sects, and parallel pagan washings, but there can be no doubt that baptism as we know it begins with the baptism of John.  Christ himself, by both precedent (Matt. 3:13) and precept (Mat. 28:19), gives us authority for its observance.[7]