Have you ever wondered why there’s so much disagreement about baptism? Think of all the divisive questions concerning baptism:
Is baptism required to be a Christian?
Will baptism provide grace to my unsaved kids?
Is there a right age to be baptized?
Does it matter where we get baptized?
How much water is necessary?
Do I have to be fully dunked, or should just my hair get wet?
Churches have disagreed on these questions throughout the past two millennia—sometimes to the point of martyrdom!
Baptism was a Jewish practice long before it was a Christian one.
While the New Testament provides clear and compelling answers to all of these questions, the widespread disagreement about them demonstrates how disconnected most of us are from the Jewish faith and practice in the background of the Bible. As a result, it’s easy to forget that baptism was a Jewish practice long before it was a Christian one. And though Christian baptism is distinctly different from Jewish baptisms, Christians didn’t create baptism from whole cloth.
Understanding how 1st-century Jews practiced baptism can help us answer some of these disagreements about what baptism is and why we do it.
Jewish Immersion
My imagination flairs to life when I stand on the southern steps of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Recently, archaeologists uncovered around 50 large, ritual stepped baths, or mikvot (plural for mikveh), carved into the limestone bedrock along the southern slope leading up to the steps that would usher pilgrims into the Temple in the 1st century. These are part of an extensive system of cisterns and aqueducts around Mount Moriah that fed rain and spring water into the Temple for ritual use.
Standing on those ancient steps, I can picture thousands of Jewish pilgrims joyfully walking up to the Temple for worship. They would journey from the valleys below, carrying their gifts and sacrifices. Then, before ascending the steps into the Temple, they would stop at one of the dozens of mikvot to fully immerse themselves in the water in order to purify and dedicate themselves to the Lord and His ways. It’s incredibly moving to stand there imagining the scene. Throughout the Second Temple period, mikvot were common throughout the land of Israel. Excavations reveal that many ancient synagogues had similar ritual baths for worshipers.
Jewish people in the Second Temple period would immerse themselves like this frequently, due partly to the Levitical laws for purity and washing (e.g. Leviticus 22:6). While most of these laws originally only applied to the Levitical priests, by the Second Temple period, most common people attempted to live by these purity laws in their daily lives as well (Mark 7:3–4), because they were considered to be God’s “kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6).
Ritual immersion was a common practice for symbolizing purity when entering worship and communion with God by the time of the New Testament. Under the Mosaic Law, the sacrificial system atoned for sin. The washings, whether immersive or otherwise, did not atone; they were symbolic. When the Bible (New Testament or the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint) speaks of this practice of Jewish immersion, it uses the word baptidzo, or baptize in English, to indicate it was a full body immersion.
However, baptisms of purification were not the only reason for Jewish immersion practices. Jesus did not need purification; yet He was baptized by John (Matthew 3:13–17). John’s baptism exemplifies the Jewish practice of mikveh as a way of rededication to God and His ways. Another way of describing this would be to baptize for “repentance,” the change of mind and actions away from one’s own direction and toward God. John’s was a baptism of repentance (Acts 19:4), and he taught that his baptism should inspire a change of a person’s life in preparation for the Messiah’s coming (Matthew 3:11).
Jesus’ baptism by John at the outset of His public ministry declared, in part, His dedication to the coming earthly ministry God had sent Him to perform.
The Essenes, a Jewish separatist movement, were another group who prominently practiced this baptism, frequently expecting members of their sect to repeatedly dedicate themselves to God in repentance symbolized by their immersion. The many mikvot at the Essene hermit community of Qumran near the Dead Sea, still there today, help prove how common this Jewish practice was. Many scholars speculate that John may have been influenced by the Essenes or may even have been one at some point. Jesus’ baptism by John at the outset of His public ministry declared, in part, His dedication to the coming earthly ministry God had sent Him to perform.
Christian Baptism
Today, the New Testament teaches us that baptism is the immersion of a believer into water for three significant reasons:
1. Christ commanded Christ His followers to be baptized, so it is a step of obedience in our commitment to follow Jesus (Matthew 28:19–20).
2. Baptism symbolically represents our own death, burial, and resurrection in coming to faith in Christ for our forgiveness and acceptance by God (Romans 5:1–2; 6:3–4; Colossians 2:12). By it we testify to the gospel and Jesus’ work in our lives.
3. Baptism symbolically identifies us with a local, visible gathering of the church, as well as an identification with the universal, invisible church of Jesus (Acts 2:41; 8:5–40; 19:1–7; Romans 6:4). By the symbol of our water baptism, we boldly declare our Spirit baptism into the body of Christ, as well as our physical choice of identifying with the local church.
When Jesus’ disciples heard His command to go and make disciples and baptize them (Matthew 28:19), their past experience of Jewish baptism helped inform their understanding of what Jesus was asking them to do, even if they didn’t yet fully understand how Jesus was applying it in a whole new way. Our baptism today accomplishes similar things to Jewish baptism, albeit for different reasons and pointing to different truths.
Christian baptism is a public announcement, declaring to the world our new spiritual reality and family, just as Jewish baptism symbolically illustrated a spiritual reality for the world to see.
Jesus called us to make a public profession of our repentance and dedicate ourselves wholly to God, as we “observe all things that [Jesus had] commanded” us (vv. 19–20), just as Jewish baptism was a matter of dedication and repentance. The immersion of our bodies symbolizes our Christ-earned purification before God and His death, burial, and resurrection that made it possible (Romans 6:1–11), just as the Jewish practice illustrated people’s need for purity and acceptance by God. And Christian baptism is a public announcement, declaring to the world our new spiritual reality and family, just as Jewish baptism symbolically illustrated a spiritual reality for the world to see.
Christian baptism, though, only has meaning for regenerate believers in Jesus, fully aware of the step of obedience they are taking, the growing faith they are illustrating, and their firm declaration of belonging to Him.
What an incredible picture of our life in Christ! It’s all the more beautiful when we see how Jesus instituted this ordinance out of the background of Jewish immersion practices. All of the disagreements the church has had over the centuries about baptism might have been fewer if we had allowed Jewish immersion practice to inform our understanding of what the New Testament calls us to do.
As we wrestle with our practice of our Christian faith in Messiah, we must not ignore the fact that the Bible is thoroughly Jewish, written by Jewish men who trusted the God of Israel, who ultimately sent His Son to purchase our redemption and draw us to Himself.
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Comments 2
So thankful for this article, as well as others you have offered. And so thankful for your ministry.
I just have a question. Is there anywhere in the Bible that says that a person who is discipling a new believer in to baptism, has to baptize that person?