In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh, the One God of Israel, had declared: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God and there is no other . . . To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear (Isaiah 45:22–23). Paul quotes this precise phrase from Isaiah but now significantly adds: “At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11). Christ as the newly exalted Lord of the cosmos is the functional equivalent of Yahweh.9
As lofty and esoteric as these concepts might be, Paul and his followers believed that their experiences of Christ were real and direct. The mystical rites of baptism and eating the Lord’s Supper were their means of uniting with Christ and being possessed by his Spirit.
IMAGINING PAULINE BAPTISM
Paul invented Christian baptism. Along with the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist, it has proven to be his most enduring contribution to Christianity. For Paul these were not merely symbolic acts, but mystical rites that were efficacious in bringing about union with Christ’s Spirit.
I say Paul invented baptism because, so far as we know, none of the apostles was ever baptized in the name of Christ. They did indeed practice a form of baptism for their followers, but it was not the “baptism into Christ” that Paul taught, as we will see, but a continuation of the baptism taught by John the Baptizer.
When we first read of baptism in the New Testament it is from John the Baptizer, who told the crowds that flocked to the banks of the Jordan River to repent of their sins since the kingdom of God had drawn very near. The arrival of God’s kingdom meant God’s wrathful judgment, so John’s was a “baptism of repentance for the remission of sins” to prepare one for the impending apocalypse (Mark 1:4). John the Baptizer was considered an important enough threat that he came to the attention of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, who had him killed. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, mentions John, explaining that he was so popular with the people that Herod feared his preaching might lead to an uprising. Josephus comments on John’s practice of baptism, explaining that it was a “consecration of the body implying that the soul was already cleansed by right behavior.”10
Various rites of ritual purification requiring immersion in water were common in Judaism but John’s baptism was something different since it was connected to repentance and forgiveness of sins.11 To be baptized by John was to respond to his apocalyptic call to be part of a special group who had dedicated themselves to live righteously at the end of days. The apocalyptic community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, usually identified as the Essenes, had a similar practice of initiating members into their exclusive community through a ceremony involving water immersion.12
Jesus was baptized by John, and Christians would have difficulty explaining why he would be baptized for the “remission of sins.”13 Apparently, Peter and John, at least, had been disciples of John even before Jesus joined the baptizing movement (Acts 1:22; John 1:35–42). Jesus teamed up with John the Baptizer and began to preach the same message: that the kingdom was at hand and people should repent of their sins and be baptized (John 3:22). When John was arrested and killed by Herod Antipas, Jesus took over the leadership of this apocalyptic baptizing movement. The last week of Jesus’ life he brought up the subject of John’s baptism, indicating that it had been the litmus test of his generation. According to Jesus those who rejected John’s baptism had rejected God, because John was one of his greatest prophets (Mark 11:29–33; Luke 7:26–30).
The new idea of baptism “in the name of Christ” as practiced by Paul and by Christians today is dramatically different from John’s baptism. The book of Acts reports that Peter and the rest of the apostles began to preach this new kind of Christian baptism within weeks of Jesus’ crucifixion, telling people to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of their sins in order to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). Ironically, the author never reports that any of the Twelve were ever rebaptized in this new way, but he insists that they began to require it of others.
It is hard not to hear Paul whispering in the background here. The author of Acts is imposing Paul’s view of Christian baptism on his narrative so as to give it apostolic legitimacy decades after the deaths of James, Peter, John, and the first-generation leaders of the movement. He is not writing history but theology—and Pauline theology at that.
At one point in his narrative he unwittingly reveals this. He relates that a married couple named Priscilla and Aquila, disciples of Paul, ran into a Jewish-Christian preacher named Apollos at Ephesus. Although Apollos was a disciple of Jesus and a powerful preacher of the Christian message, he had never even heard about being baptized into Christ—and the author of Acts admits it! The year is A.D. 54—nearly twenty-five years after Jesus’ death. The way Acts describes Apollos is quite striking:
Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. (Acts 18:24–25)
This is rather telling evidence regarding an original form of baptism associated with John the Baptizer and Jesus that had nothing in common with Paul’s baptism.
Shortly thereafter Paul arrived in Ephesus, where he encountered a group of Christians of similar views to those of Apollos. Paul asks them, “Into what were you baptized?” and they reply, “Into John’s baptism.” They say they have never even heard of “receiving the Holy Spirit” (Acts 19:1–7). According to the author of Acts they were glad to be updated and Paul baptized them immediately “into Christ” and put his hands on them, at which point they received the Holy Spirit and began to speak ecstatically and utter prophecies. What the author of Acts does not say, perhaps because he did not dare make such a claim, is whether Apollos, the eloquent leader of the group, had submitted to such a rebaptism.
This becomes doubly interesting in that by the time Paul got to Ephesus, Apollos had left and gone to Corinth, where Paul had just spent the previous eighteen months, setting up a cell group of his followers. In Paul’s letter 1 Corinthians the group is hopelessly divided, with some saying “I belong to Paul” but others saying “I belong to Apollos.” It is surely no accident that the mysterious Apollos is suddenly mentioned in Paul’s letter. But even more to the point, Paul indicates that the divisions among the Corinthians were demarcated by what kind of baptism they had received (1 Corinthians 1:10–17). Paul rebukes the Corinthians from a long distance, through his letter, trying to shame them by saying he could not teach them the full mystery of his gospel because they were not yet ready, with some claiming to follow him, but others claiming to follow Apollos (1 Corinthians 3:1–4). Unfortunately we have no way of knowing Apollos’s side of the story. All we are left with is the implication in the book of Acts that he and his disciples, who knew only John’s baptism, quickly came over to Paul’s side. But apparently things were not nearly so harmonious.
For the author of Acts to admit that a form of Christianity was actively and openly operating in Asia Minor and Greece, even into the mid-50s A.D., holding loyally to the baptism of John the Baptizer, the very baptism that Jesus himself endorsed and practiced, is a valuable witness to this form of lost Christianity before Paul. He wants his readers to view this odd group as an anomaly, a kind of backwater phenomenon that quickly shifted to the new baptism “into Christ” that Paul preached. From his second-century vantage point such might have been the case, but in forty or so years following the death of Jesus the proper baptism was that practiced by John and Jesus. Paul’s innovation had barely begun to take hold.