If the picture of harmony that Acts presents between Paul and the original apostles is a fiction, this tiny glimpse we get of Apollos and his understanding of baptism is quite telling. It shows that even decades after the death of Paul, when the book of Acts was composed, the author still felt the need to counter contrary views by retroactively projecting Paul’s views of baptism as the norm to be accepted in the entire Christian movement.
Paul gives us a thorough exposition of his understanding of baptism in his letters. There are three main texts:
For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have been Christ-clothed. There is neither Jew nor Greek [i.e., Gentile], there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26–27)
For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Corinthians 12:13)
All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too walk in a new life. (Romans 6:3–4)
Through Paul’s baptism one becomes a “Son of God,” stripped of the old but reclothed in Christ. Baptism was a means of uniting oneself with the cosmic Christ, and thus becoming one spiritual body with all those who are likewise so joined. The former person is dead and buried—literally, in a kind of watery grave of baptism, but then resurrected to a new life in the Spirit. All former personal identities are obsolete—whether ethnic, social, or gender based. This kind of mystical union can come about only by the agency of the one Spirit that animates the collective divine body of Christ as a whole.
This can sound complex, abstract, and theological to us today but for Paul and his followers it was as real as the physical creation, even though the internal transformation was not externally visible. As we saw in the previous chapter, Paul believed that while the outer body of flesh was in the process of dying, the inner person, now united with Christ as one Spirit, was being renewed each day (2 Corinthians 4:16; Romans 8:10). Being “united in a death like his” opens the way for “the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead to give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). Jesus, raised from the dead as the last Adam, had become this life-giving Spirit.
It should be noted that Paul does not distinguish between “the Spirit,” “the Spirit of God,” “the Spirit of Christ,” or the “Spirit of the One who raised Jesus from the dead” (Romans 8:9–11). That is why he can say, “The Lord is the Spirit,” and that the transformation “from one degree of glory to another” comes from “the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17–18). This sounds a bit confusing unless one realizes that in Paul’s understanding the One God manifests himself in the world through the agency of the Spirit. The generic word “spirit” in Greek is pneuma. It refers to an unseen force and is the normal word for “wind.” In these contexts it refers to the unseen agency of the One God in the visible world—and that agent is the cosmic Christ—who is the Spirit. That is why it makes sense in Paul’s thinking to speak of his followers as “being in Christ” but also of “Christ being in them.” Through their baptism they have become united with Christ, in the one spiritual body of Christ, but that union comes from Christ, who is the Spirit, dwelling in each of them.
For Paul baptism is not a symbolic ritual but a powerful spiritual activity that effected real change in the cosmos. Paul, for example, refers to some who “baptized in behalf of the dead,” evidently referring to a practice of proxy baptism for loved ones who had died before experiencing their own baptism (1 Corinthians 15:29).14 Whether Paul endorsed the practice or not we cannot be sure, but it would be unlike Paul to refrain from condemning a practice he did not at least tolerate. After all, there is a sense in which all baptism is “for the dead” since it represents a “burial” of the dying mortal flesh in preparation for receiving the life-giving Spirit. Whatever the case, this practice of “baptism for the dead” shows just how efficacious the activity was understood to be as a means of invoking the Christ-Spirit—even for those who had died!
Given this conceptual framework, we can try to imagine what the baptism experience might have been like in Paul’s churches. I base the following on what we know of ancient Jewish practice, our earliest surviving Christian liturgies, reports on the early Christians made by the Romans, and the few hints that Paul gives us.
Baptism was conducted in a river or stream since Paul’s cell groups were illegal and meeting in private homes. There were, of course, no church buildings or formal places of worship.15 It is possible in some cases that a wealthier patron or host of the group might have had an inside pool or bath.
We can imagine that the candidate would have entered the water naked, leaving behind the old clothing, trampling it underfoot.16 Standing waist high in the water, accompanied by the one administering the baptism, he or she was likely asked: “Do you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, calling upon his name to save you from your sins?” Paul refers to this specific moment when this “confession of the lips” brings salvation (Romans 10:9–11). The candidate would have confessed out loud, perhaps bending the knees slightly as a gesture of submission: “I believe that Jesus is Lord!” followed by the cry in Aramaic: Maranatha!—meaning “May our Lord come!” Those observing the baptism would then likely all cry out “Amen!,” which means in Aramaic, “Let it be so!” This ritual gesture of the bowing of the knees, practiced in ancient Jewish daily prayers at the mention of God’s name, is alluded to by Paul in his letter to the Philippians: “that 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 the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11).
Paul invokes the Aramaic cry “Maranatha!” at the end of his first letter to the Corinthians (16:22). It was used as a formulaic way of summoning the Christ-Spirit, either as a curse or a blessing. According to the Didache it was also pronounced in a similar way at the end of the Eucharist meal, to separate those worthy from those unworthy (Didache 10:6). The idea was to call upon the Jesus as Lord and bid him to unite at that moment with the person being baptized. The corporate response using the Aramaic word Amen, familiar to Christians today, would have been strange and new to a Greek-speaking group. Paul had introduced it as a formal response at group gatherings (1 Corinthians 14:16).
Next, based on the Jewish practice of the mikveh or ritual bath, the candidate buckled the knees completely, submerging the body underwater until the head was covered, basically kneeling underwater. Standing up one would cry out ecstatically, “Abba, Abba!” using the Aramaic word for “father.” This was a cry of intimate recognition by the new spiritual child, signifying that the Spirit had indeed entered the candidate and possessed him or her. Paul refers to this precise moment twice in his letters and it is obvious that he is thinking of a formal cry that he connects to the moment one receives the Spirit at baptism: