Baptism

At the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, in the fourth verse we are introduced to John the Baptist. We are told he demanded that everyone be baptized, and that he was the baptizer, and he baptized the Judean people in the Jordan River. This scene has been captured in poetry and song, paintings and statues, plays and movies. We are witness to great lines of people waiting patiently to be dunked in a river or pool. Sometimes there is singing. Always there are witnesses.

The problem is that nobody knows what John the Baptist was doing when he was doing the baptism dance. There is no further information about it, other than indications later that followers of Christ were also baptizing people. There is nothing to indicate what kind of ritual it was, who it involved, what words were said, or what it was supposed to mean to the people going through this process. Whatever it is that we do today that is considered baptism is just what folks came up with a long time after the traditions of the church had been established.

Interestingly, this has resulted in all manner of foolishness with people coming to violence over whether baptism was legitimate with a few drops of water or only with a full body dunk, or whether baptism should happen to infants or only ever to adults, or whether it was applicable or demanded more than once. All without any referent to “baptism” as a ritual in any prior culture. It may seem surprising, but there’s no prior notion of or interest in “baptism” in Hebrew culture. Nor is this something that was found in Persian culture, or Greek culture. In fact, the only place baptism is found as a religious activity is within Christianity.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you can find nearly all of the component elements of Christian theology, ritual, and practice in the fundamental structure of 1st century Roman culture. Baptism is one of the few distinct elements of Christianity that is truly unique to it. And nobody knows what the heck it is because it was never written down, beyond those few words in the Gospels where it is mentioned.

The Rite of Baptism today is one of the fundamental initiatory practices of the modern Christian Church in nearly any of its modern forms. It represents the entrance of a person into full membership within the body of the church, and establishes someone as a member of the community. The pouring of water onto the head is a magical act, anointing a person with the water of the community and granting them authority to witness their faith. In some communities, baptism is performed with the intention of washing away “Original Sin¹”.

The Greek word βάπτισμα became the word we use as “baptism”. It was originally used to describe the specific action of dipping cloth into dye, or repeatedly dipping and removing the cloth from the dye. This is the action of dyeing, or changing the color of cloth. So that’s meaning number one.

Idiomatically, βάπτισμα was also used to indicate a sense of being overwhelmed or drowning, as though being repeatedly dipped into a vat of dye. If one were said to be “baptized by their troubles”, it would be understood to be a manner of speech that one was overwhelmed, not that one was drowning. To extend the idiom, the notion that one might be “baptized by their enemies” could indicate destruction, with blood serving as the staining dye.

So before the Gospel of Mark was written, before the stories of Jesus were told, the Greek word for baptism had a specific meaning and an idiomatic one. When Romans first read the Gospel of Mark and were first exposed to the character of John, baptizer, this is what they had to draw from. Just by saying that he baptized, the Gospel of Mark places John in Palestine, and sets him apart as the ideal representative of his land as The Baptizer. 

Then the Gospel creates a new meaning for the word βάπτισμα – much as we use colors as representative of group belonging (i.e. state flags, sports teams, etc), the Romans used the idea of color to indicate loyalty. In Mark 1:5, the word baptism is used to indicate the action of changing the loyalty of people using the metaphor of dyeing cloth to say he changed their colors (i.e. their loyalty).

But by putting people in the place of an inanimate object, like cloth, there’s an additional shade of meaning that draws from the idiomatic use of the word. Someone being baptized would be essentially waterboarded into compliance or killed by their own stubbornness. And when the four Roman legions pushed south into Galilee, they overwhelmed every town and village they encountered into immediate compliance or destruction. The legions baptized the people of Judea. 

Further, this action is said to be occurring in the Jordan River. Here, the important reference is from Josephus’ “Wars of the Jews” in which the Roman legions crushing Jewish lands was recorded: during their battles on the Sea of Galilee, so many were killed that the Jordan River turned red. Metaphorically, a very loyal color. John was culturally aligning the Judeans and people of Jerusalem both in the spirit of Rome and in their own blood. 

Those who would not be converted just made the dye darker.

What this primarily means for the modern reader is two things: when reading the Gospels, you can translate the word “baptize” to mean “convert”. Instead of a damp rite, understand it to mean a process of teaching and modeling that leads others toward a more virtuous, Roman life. This also underscores that the primary message Jesus was giving was that everyone should try harder to get along with the Romans.

More than anything else, this is a reminder that religion changes constantly, and Christianity is no exception. What it started as and the way it manifests today are very different beasts, and the tradition of a community is far more important than the history of distant, ancient communities. Baptism today is a keystone ritual that has been invested with great meaning and mystery, and as such, the modern rite of Baptism transformed the ancient words into a sacred act. While the Bible has much that is of value, the actual practice of faith is ultimately something each community decides together.

1. A relatively late idea theologically, Original Sin ties an early story in the Hebrew scriptures to the passion and death sequence that was then becoming a focus of church teachings. The Adam and Eve story in Genesis is part of a set of related stories that are told consecutively and are all related to the question of how the Hebrew people came to be. In the story, the characters defy a divine command and are punished by being forced to abandon their original home. That defiance against God is considered to be the first sin committed by humans against God, and the punishment meted out is accordingly passed along to all of the descendents of Adam and Eve – presumably all of us.
   
   The theology of Original Sin states that when Jesus Christ died, it was a sacrifice to God that cleared away all sin, including that original one. The catch is that you have to submit to becoming one with the “body of Christ” in order to cash that in. Without that, you remain tainted by the sin of Eve. It is generally a natural corollary that those who follow with the notion of Original Sin believe that people are born naturally evil and must be beaten or tormented into being good, sadness leads to virtue and pleasure away from it.
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