To get rid of the force of this passage, Baptist writers have proposed an arbitrary alteration of the text, by the erasure of the entire clause (te kai—pēgēn) “with these ashes in water.” The change thus suggested is purely gratuitous. The reading which they propose is without the pretense of sanction from any manuscript of Josephus, and is sustained by no sound principles of criticism. Its only warrant is the necessities of the Baptist position. On the contrary, the rendering which we have given is, in some of the manuscripts of Josephus, enforced by the preposition (meta) with, after the word, “baptizing.” According to this version, the passage can be read no otherwise than as we have given it. “Baptizing with these ashes in water.”
In the writings of Josephus there is another and very characteristic notice as to the use of the water of separation. Speaking of the funeral rites, he says, “Our law also ordains that the house and its inhabitants shall be purified after the funeral is over, that every one may thence learn to keep at a great distance from the thought of being pure, if he hath once been guilty of murder.”[[37]] We are not to suppose that the spiritual meaning of these rites had been so utterly lost by the Jews, that Josephus, a priest, a Pharisee, a man of extensive learning and reputation, imagined this to be a true account of the nature and meaning of the ordinance. But he was speaking in defense of Judaism, against the assaults of Apion, a Greek philosopher of Alexandria, at the bar of the pagan philosophy of Greece and Rome. He affects, for himself, a profoundly philosophic style and spirit, and aims to vindicate a similar character for the laws and institutions of Moses. Knowing that the truths of God as committed to Israel would be foolishness to the wise, to whose applause he aspired, he sets them aside in favor of his own “philosophic” inventions. He seems to have taken the suggestion from certain heathen observances, of which we shall see more further on.
The foregoing extracts not only illustrate the law as to the water of separation, and the use of the word, baptizo, with reference to it, but indicate the place held by the ordinance among the observances of Israel, down to the time of Jerusalem’s desolation.
Section XLII.—Imitations of these Rites by the Greeks and Romans.
Placed as was Israel in the very center of the civilization of the ancient world, and on the direct line of communication between its peoples and empires, her influence upon the institutions and religious rites of other nations must have been very great, and is traceable in every direction. There is reason to believe that Greece and its colonies in Italy, from which sprang the republic and empire of Rome, derived from Israel the first great impulses of their civilization, as well as continual subsequent contributions to its maintenance and growth. Israel had dwelt in the land of Canaan about three hundred years before the supposed era of the siege of Troy, and seven hundred before the reputed date of the great poems of Homer, from the silence of which it is evident that to him letters were wholly unknown. According to the earliest Greek tradition, Cadmus, “the man of the east,” coming with a colony of Phœnicians settled in Greece, bringing with him the art of alphabetic writing. But at what age he lived, or whether he was not, in fact, wholly a mythical character is a matter of conjecture. The tradition, however, distinctly points to Phœnicia as the land whence the art was introduced into Greece; and the circumstances accord with this supposition. That the Greek letters were derived from those called Phœnician is an undoubted fact. The extensive commerce maintained by the ships of Phœnicia was a constant and efficient means of disseminating the seeds of her advancing civilization; and besides, the sages of Greece were accustomed to travel to Egypt, Phœnicia, and the east, in search of knowledge; and returned thence with acquisitions of which all Greece was the beneficiary. About four hundred years before Christ, Plato himself was in Egypt in search of knowledge, a student of the priests of On. At this time, Egypt was full of Jews, and it is not to be imagined that such an inquirer would wholly fail to catch some glimpses of the light which shone in the institutions and literature of Israel.
Many things concur to show that neither Egypt nor Phœnicia was the original fountain of much that was thus disseminated to Greece. In some instances, the attendant circumstances, and in others the internal evidence, unmistakably indicate an Israelite origin. Phœnicia was a strip of sea-coast, ten or twelve miles wide, lying between the northern part of the land of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. Tyre and Sidon, its two chief cities, were the only practicable sea-ports on the coast of Palestine. They were distant, the former, about one hundred and twenty miles, and the latter, one hundred, from Jerusalem. Their supplies were derived largely from the fields, the vineyards, and the olive groves of Israel. (2 Chron. ii, 10; Acts xii, 20.) Except slight provincial differences, the language of the two people was the same; and the intimacy of the relations is seen in the fact that the drift of dialect in the two closely coincided. Hiram king of Tyre, was David’s intimate friend, and Solomon’s faithful and efficient ally, in the erection of the temple and his own palace, in adorning Jerusalem, and in commercial enterprises. His relation with David, and his message of salutation to Solomon (2 Chron. ii, 12) argue him a professed worshiper of the God of Israel. Thus, whilst the Phœnician territory was a mask by which Israel was concealed from the Mediterranean countries, the Phœnicians, themselves, can not but have realized a profound impression from the wonderful system of religious rites and the testimonies of religious truth which were maintained in Israel and centered around that temple on Mount Sion, which was a monument of Phœnician skill in architecture and the mechanic arts. The ideas thus communicated and the impressions thus produced must have been borne abroad by every wind that filled a Phœnician sail, and disseminated to every land that was touched by a Phœnician prow.
The art of alphabetic writing is an illustration of this. It did not originate in Phœnicia, but, as internal evidence demonstrates,—with the Arameans, of whom Israel was a branch. The Phœnician characters were the same as the Old Hebrew. Once acquired by that maritime people, the art was diffused to Greece, to Rome, and the world. The Egyptians no less than the Phœnicians were idolaters, having lords many and gods many. When, therefore, the sages of Greece returned from their explorations, prepared to whisper to their confidential disciples the sublime doctrine of the divine unity, and even to erect an altar “To the Unknown God,”[[38]] we are justified in the conviction that at some point in the course of their travels, they had caught an echo of that voice which spake to the twelve tribes in the wilderness,—“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.”—Deut. vi, 4. To the same originals undoubtedly are to be referred many of the ceremonials of their religion. Of this, the rules of uncleanness, and rites of purifying are remarkable illustrations.
Of the various forms of purification among the Greeks, Plato makes an enumeration.—“The purifications (katharmoi) both according to medicine and vaticination, both the pharmacial drugs, (pharmakois), and the vaticinal fumigations (peritheiōseis) as also the washings (loutra) in such rites, and the sprinklings (perirrhanseis);—are not all these effectual to one end,—to render a man pure, both as to body and soul?”[[39]]
On this subject, the historian Grote makes some noteworthy statements.—“The names of Orpheus and Musaeus (as well as that of Pythagoras, looking at one side of his character), represent facts of importance in the history of the Grecian mind, ... the gradual influx of Thracian, Phrygian and Egyptian religious ceremonies and feelings, and the increasing diffusion of special mysteries, schemes for religious purification, and orgies (I venture to Anglicize the Greek word, which contains in its original meaning no implication of the ideas of excess to which it was afterward diverted), in honor of some particular god, distinct from the public solemnities, and from the gentile solemnities of primitive Greece.... During the interval between Hesiod and Onomakritus [B. C. 610-510], the revolution in the religious mind of Greece was such as to place both these deities [Dyonisus and Demeter, the Bacchus and Ceres of the Latins] in the front rank.... From all these countries [Egypt, Thrace, Phrygia and Lydia], novelties unknown to the Homeric men found their way into the Grecian worship; and there is one amongst them which deserves to be specially noticed, because it marks the generation of the new class of ideas in their theology. Homer mentions many guilty of private or involuntary homicide, and compelled either to go into exile, or to make pecuniary satisfaction; but he never once describes any of them to have either received or required purification for the crime. Now, in the times subsequent to Homer, purification for homicide comes to be indispensable. The guilty person is regarded as unfit for the society of men, or the worship of the gods, until he has received it; and special ceremonies are prescribed whereby it is to be administered. Herodotus tells us that the ceremony of purification was the same among the Lydians and the Greeks. We know that it formed no part of the early religion of the latter, and we may reasonably suspect that they borrowed from the former.... The purification of a murderer was originally operated not by the hands of any priest or specially sanctified man, but by those of a chief or king who goes through the appropriate ceremonies in the manner represented by Herodotus, in his pathetic narrative respecting Crœsus and Adrastus.[[40]] The idea of a special taint of crime, and of the necessity, as well as the sufficiency of prescribed religious ceremonies, as a means of removing it, appears thus to have got footing in Grecian practice subsequent to the time of Homer.”[[41]]
Again he says,—“Herodotus had been profoundly impressed with what he saw and heard in Egypt. The wonderful monuments, the evident antiquity, and the peculiar civilization of that country acquired such preponderance in his mind, over his own native legends, that he is disposed to trace the oldest religious names or institutions of Greece, to Egyptian or Phœnician original, setting aside, in favor of this hypothesis, the Grecian legends of Dyonisus and Pan.”[[42]]