A Bible History of Baptism

by Samuel J. Baird

“Siloah’s brook that flowed

Fast by the oracle of God,”

and its outpouring by the priest upon the earth, mingled with wine. From that same fountain, during the same period of Israel’s history, it was the rule to draw all water that was used at Jerusalem for purification with the water of separation, especially for those who came to the annual feasts. To this, Zechariah alludes in his prophecy of that day when “there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness.”—Zech. xiii, 1. By her great High Priest, was to be dispensed to Israel and through her to all the earth, the Spirit’s grace, conveying to the nations of the Gentiles the virtue of the blood of Calvary. Jerusalem and the temple were to be the source of those healing waters which were to flow to the east and to the west, “toward the former sea, and toward the hinder sea,” to gladden the world. (Zech. xiv, 8.)

Section XXXVII.—The Hellenistic Greek.

After the close of Old Testament prophecy, the conquests of Alexander of Macedon, the consequent diffusion of the Greeks, and the favor which that prince and his successors showed to the Jews, introduced an intimate intercourse between them and the Greeks. By him Alexandria in Egypt was founded, designated by his own name, and intended to be the western capital of his empire. In this new Greek capital, its founder assigned the Jews an extensive section, and equal privileges with the Macedonians. After the death of Alexander, and the subdivision of his empire, the Ptolemies, the Greek kings of Egypt, continued to favor the Jews, treating them on terms of equality with the Greeks. During the same period, the persecutions suffered by the Jews of Palestine from the kings of Syria, drove multitudes into exile, many of whom were attracted to Egypt, so that the Jewish population of Alexandria was at one time estimated at nearly a million of souls, occupying two of the five districts of the city; and at least, for a time, governed by their own ethnarch, or superior magistrate. Among these Jews, and those elsewhere scattered in the Greek colonies, their own language was gradually superseded by the Greek, into which, at length, the Old Testament Scriptures were translated, in a version known as the Septuagint. Of the precise time and circumstances in which this version was made, there is no reliable information, except that it was done in Alexandria, within the first quarter of the third century before Christ. In the time of Christ, the Greek had become the language of literature and of commerce for the civilized world. Among the Jews dispersed everywhere, it was prevalent, and was extensively used even in Palestine itself, and thus became the divinely prepared channel for communicating the gospel to all nations.

But the language thus employed—the Greek of the Septuagint, the Apocrypha and the New Testament—was not what is known as classic Greek. The Jews did not learn it in the schools of Greece, nor from a study of her poets, orators, and philosophers. It was the product of social and business contact and intercourse of the one people with the other, in a land foreign to both.

Already the purity of the Attic had been lost, by the commingling of the Macedonians with the various tribes of Greece proper and her dependencies, in the armies from which Alexander’s colonists were taken; and still further by the mixed multitude which flocked to their new settlements. In the process of adaptation to the expression of Jewish thought, it was inevitably subjected to further modifications, in definition, in syntax, in order and construction—in the very tone and spirit which pervade the whole. By these modifications, the language, which had grown up as the native and coeval expression of the idolatrous religion, the arts and philosophy of pagan Greece, was adapted to become a repository for the system of divine and saving truth, contained in the Scriptures. Those Jews who resided in Alexandria and other Greek cities, who spake this Greek language, and were more or less conformed to the manners of the Gentiles among whom they lived, were known among their brethren, as Hellenists, that is, Greek Jews, and hence, the Greek dialect used by them has acquired the designation of Hellenistic Greek.

The authors of the New Testament adopted this as the language of their writings, and, in their references to the Old Testament, their quotations are mostly made, not from the Hebrew, but from the Septuagint, or Hellenistic version. It was ordinarily used by the Lord Jesus himself in his discourses. It thus appears as the source and standard of the language of the New Testament.

Together with these Greek Scriptures of the Old Testament, there have been transmitted to us several other Jewish documents of the same period, written in the same Hellenistic Greek. They are invaluable for the light which they shed upon the history, customs, and modes of thought and language of the Jews of that time; although the attempt of the church of Rome, to exalt some of them to an equal authority with the Scriptures, has tended to fix a stigma on them, as known to us under the name of Apocrypha. Incautious recourse to the rules and definitions of classic Greek is liable to deceive and mislead us in the critical study of the New Testament. But conclusions intelligently deduced from the language of the Septuagint and of the other Jewish writers of that age, are to be respected as of the highest authority on all questions of the New Testament language. On the subject of our present investigation, these authorities shed a flood of light. In them, we first find the verb, baptizo, used to designate rites of religious purifying. Once in the Septuagint, and twice in the Apocrypha, it is applied to Hebrew rites of this nature.

That the use of the word to designate religious observances is peculiar to the Hellenistic, as contradistinguished from classic Greek, is indisputable; and it is worthy of consideration, how it came to be selected from the Greek vocabulary for this purpose. The Hebrews of Egypt, in their exile from the land of their fathers, had not abandoned but rather augmented their zeal for the institutions of Moses. A circumstance in their own history, which at first might have seemed to threaten a dissolution of the ties that bound them to the temple at Jerusalem, operated in fact to renovate and strengthen them. This was, the erection by some of their number, of a temple at Onias in Egypt, in imitation of that at Jerusalem. Here, the Levitical rites were punctually observed under priests of the Aaronic line and Levites of the sacred tribe. For this they claimed warrant from the prophecy of Isaiah, xix, 19.—“In that day, shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt.” The adherents of this movement do not seem to have been numerous, and its effect was rather to increase the devotion of the people to the temple at Jerusalem, and the ordinances there maintained. Among them, was developed the same disposition which was prevalent in Judea to give undue importance to multiplied rites of purifying; and hence an increased and constant necessity of finding, in the Greek language which they were now adopting, some word suitable to designate these rites. In that language was the verb, bapto, meaning (1) to dip; (2) to wet by dipping; (3) to wet, irrespective of the manner; (4) to dye by dipping, and thence, to dye, without respect to mode—even by sprinkling. But, as we have seen, the rites in question were not dippings, nor were they dyeings, and the word was never used by the Jews to designate them. From this root, the Greeks derived the verb baptizo. (1.) Its primary meaning, as used by them, was,—to bring into the state of mersion. This meaning had no respect to the mode of action, whether by putting the subject under the fluid, pouring it over him, or in whatever manner. In other words, it expressed not immersion, but mersion,—not the mode of inducing the state, but the state induced,—that of being embosomed in the mersing element. From this primary signification, was derived a secondary use of the word. As any thing that is mersed is in the possession and control of the mersing element, the word was hence used to express the establishing of a complete possession and controlling influence. As we say that a man is drowned,—immersed,—overwhelmed, in business, in trouble, in drunkenness, or in sleep; having, in these expressions, no reference whatever to the mode in which the described condition was brought about; so the Greeks used the verb baptizo. They spoke of men as baptized with grief, with passion, with business cares. An intoxicated person was “baptized with wine,” etc. In such use of the word, the essential idea is that of the action of a pervasive potency by which the subject is brought and held in a new state or condition. On this subject, no authority could be better or more conclusive than that of the Rev. Dr. T. J. Conant, a scholar of unquestioned eminence and whose researches on this subject were undertaken at the request of the American (Baptist) Bible Union. The result of his investigations he thus states. “The word, baptizein, during the whole existence of the Greek as a spoken language, had a perfectly defined and unvarying import. In its literal use, it meant, as has been shown,—to put entirely into or under a liquid, or other penetrable substance, generally water, so that the object was wholly covered by the enclosing element. By analogy it expressed the coming into a new state of life or experience, in which one was, as it were, inclosed and swallowed up, so that temporarily or permanently, he belonged wholly to it.”[^[29]] Dr. Dale has been at the trouble to list and enumerate no less than forty different words which Dr. Conant employs in his translations of this word of “perfectly defined and unvarying import.” It is, however, enough for our present purpose, that this distinguished scholar here expressly admits with Italic emphasis, that “by analogy,” the word “expressed the coming into a new state of life or experience, in which one was, as it were, inclosed and swallowed up, so that temporarily or permanently he belonged wholly to it.”