John’s Baptism

As we approach the baptism of Jesus, it is important to think about how John’s baptism was viewed by his disciples and those who came to hear him.  

There had been 400 years without a prophet giving a word from God.  A messenger had been promised.  And John the Baptist arrives on the scene.  He can’t be easily ignored, wearing camel hair and preaching in the wilderness.  But John is called “the baptist” or “the baptizer”, and it is this activity that makes him stand out the most.  This baptism is something new and different, and many are coming a long way to see what is going on.

Now we don’t think baptism is odd or unusual.  We see it as a normal part of our religion that some do as an infant, some after the time of confirmation, or some at the time of making a personal decision.  But our understanding of baptism is based on the baptism as done in the book of Acts and following.  We are looking backward with our preconceptions of what baptism means in our time.  The people in John’s time had their own preconceptions about baptizing.   How did the people of his day understand John?  What did it mean to them? 

The idea of ritual bathing or immersion goes back to the time when Israel was about to leave Egypt.  They are told to “consecrate” the firstborn before Passover.  According to the Jewish Torah Commentary, the instruction to consecrate people “involves a purificatory rite …[that] requires bathing, laundering of clothes, and abstention from ritual defilement on the part of the initiate.”¹ Later, all of Israel is to consecrate themselves before their encounter with God on Sinai, and again before crossing the Jordan.  Priests also are consecrated before any service and washed in the bronze laver in the Tabernacle.

Up on Sinai, God gives Moses instructions for a tabernacle, and God tells him the purpose of the tabernacle is not for God to dwell in it, but for it to be a place God can dwell with man.  Again, this is God’s purpose for man from the beginning.  God has always sought to live in community with us.

God tells Moses that if we are going to dwell together, you have to keep yourselves pure.  He gives rules for two kinds of purity: Moral Purity and Ritual Purity.  Now we understand moral purity pretty well, including the 10 commandments given at Sinai. But ritual purity is more of a mystery for us 21st-century people.  (It is not that hard.)  Every modern culture has standards of purity and defilement.   For example, even though discrimination on the grounds of caste has been outlawed, many Hindus will not touch people of lower caste, and if they do, they must wash to remove the defilement.  Certain sicknesses are taboo to touch in many societies.  And I have witnessed it many times watching people interact with homeless people, refusing to shake hands, touch, hug, etc.  

You wouldn’t want one of my surgeon friends who just pulled a dead dog off the road, gathered up the pieces and buried it, to just walk into the operating room to do surgery without going through a process to become clean again. That would seem crazy to you.  Yet in the mid-1800s, before the idea of germ theory existed, medical residents in a hospital in Vienna would practice surgery on cadavers and then go upstairs and deliver babies without washing their hands.  It was Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered why this hospital had 3 times the maternal death rate of their sister hospital, and he saved countless lives simply by instituting handwashing there.²  Despite the decrease in maternal deaths, there was tremendous resistance to handwashing by the medical community and Semmelweis was ridiculed and eventually fired.  They had no basis to understand it in their culture.  Similarly, our modern culture has no basis to understand ritual washing (unless you read the Bible).  

Becoming ritually unclean was not a sin. It was a normal part of life to encounter bodily fluids and death.  There are just some things you don’t bring into God’s presence. If you followed the rules for cleansing before entering God’s presence, then there was no problem.  Ritual purity is totally separate from breaking moral laws.  And the Jews never believed that the water had any effect of actually washing impurity away, it was an act of obedience. It was a symbolic representation of the cleansing that God did because they were obedient.³

So God established a means for dealing with ritual impurity and with moral impurity (sin).  Dealing with ritual impurity usually involved washing.  Dealing with sin required a sacrifice.  When Israel went into exile in Babylon, they had no temple or altar and could not perform sacrifices.  So washing for ritual impurity became more important.  Philip Birnbaum in “An Encyclopedia of Jewish Concepts” noted that because it had become common to perform tevilah (immersion in a mikvah) before entering the temple, “some religious Jews began to see a greater spiritual significance to ritual purity as it embodied a state of nearness to God, as if one were truly present in the Temple.”⁴  Over 1000 mikveh (ceremonial bathing sites) have been excavated in Israel, some dating before 100 B.C.E. including many at the entrances to the temple where all Jews (including Jesus) would immerse (tevilah) before entering the temple area, just in case you carried some ritual impurity.

The Jews coming to John’s Baptism had this background of ceremonial bathing in preparation for coming into God’s presence to remove ritual impurity.  Immersion in the mikvah would represent a change of status – from ritually impure to pure.  John is taking this idea of a change of status and applying it to moral impurity. His baptism was “with water for repentance”, a symbol of repentance of a moral wrong.  Again, no one believed the water accomplished cleansing from sin.  It was a physical act demonstrating their inward repentance.  

The place where John was baptizing was very significant.  This is the same place where Israel crossed the Jordan to enter the land of promise.  They were to establish a community in this land where they would have no other gods, where they would love God completely and love their neighbor.  But the Scriptures note over and over again how they failed.  Tim Mackie said, “so John is calling Israel to start over, to go back through the river and come out rededicated to their God, ready for the new thing that God’s about to do.”⁵

With this understanding of how the Jews viewed John’s baptism, now you can consider how you view your baptism.  How is it the same?  How is it different?  We will consider this as we move along Jesus’ ministry this year.  We will also revisit the idea of ritual purity several times.  Jesus has a lot to say about ritual purity, and his actions regarding ritual purity rules shock his followers over and over.  

1. The Jewish Torah Commentary, Exodus, on Exodus 13:1.

2. The story of Ignaz Semmelweis is a fascinating read.  Probably the best book on this is 

Genius Belabored: Childbed Fever and the Tragic Life of Ignaz Semmelweis, 

by Theodore G. Obenchain (2021).

3. Though the practical benefits of washing after contact with bodily fluid are well known

  to us now, they were certainly not before Louis Pasteur and modern germ theory 

and had no impact on the understanding of people before 1850.

4. Birnbaum, Philip, An Encyclopedia of Jewish Concepts, p. 240, (1979).

5. Tim Mackie, from the Bible Project video, “The Baptism of Jesus”.