· Isaiah 11:1-10
· Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 (7)
· Romans 15:4-13
· Matthew 3:1-12
When you think about it, this thing about John the Baptist makes no sense. "Baptism" is specifically a Christian thing. Jews don't baptise. The word "baptism" isn't anywhere in the Old Testament. And here the story of Christ begins with "John was baptising people." How can John be baptising people when baptism hadn't been invented yet?
It's one of those critical translation errors. The original text is in Greek, and it uses the Greek word "δαπτιζο", which later became "baptism" in our European languages. At the time of writing, and at the time of Jesus, "δαπτιζο" didn't mean "to baptise", it meant "to immerse". More specifically, it came from a term in the textile industry, referring to the dyeing of fabrics, and it implies that something is immersed so that it takes on qualities from that in which it is immersed.
Great. That's an excellent word for "baptism". But that doesn't explain what John was doing, because he wasn't a Greek and he wasn't into dyeing fabrics. So what he was doing was "immersing", not "baptising" people, and the reason he was immersing them was for Jewish religious reasons. In the books of Law, whenever someone becomes unclean, after his uncleanness is removed by the appropriate process, he will "wash himself." But in the Hebrew text, it's not "wash" but literally "immerse" himself.
This was a specific ritual which Jews still practice today. It requires first of all a place where "living water" is gathered. This can be a sea, a river like the Jordan, or a specially constructed pool for collecting "living water" from rain or a river. This place where the water is collected is called a mikvah, and is so important that if you can only afford one of a mikvah or a synagogue, you build the mikvah first. The ritual immersion has to be witnessed, but the witness does not actually immerse the faithful; the faithful immerses himself, completely, by sitting or assuming the fetal position under the water. And the water has to touch all parts of the skin, so the faithful can't wear something like jewelry, a bandage, much less clothing. The water, however, is not the agent of purification; rather the immersion is done after purification is achieved, and is a symbol of death of the old, impure self and rebirth as the pure new self.
Sound familiar?
Right. Our concept of being baptised in Jesus comes straight from the Jewish rite of immersion; so we took the Greek word for "immersion" and called our ritual "baptism". But that was after. After Christ died, rose on the third day, and ascended to Heaven. So John was not "baptising" people, he was "immersing" people after the Jewish practice, to formalise their rebirth after purification by repentance from sin. To translate it as "baptise" creates a circular argument.
It's also circular to translate verse 11 as "he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire." The term "Holy Spirit" does not appear in the Old Testament either. The Jews use the term "the Spirit of God", not "the Holy Spirit." Is the "Spirit of God" identical to the "Holy Spirit"? Their manifestations are actually quite different. The Spirit of God does things like sweeping over the surface of the water at Creation. The Holy Spirit animates Christians to carry on the work of Jesus. In the Old Testament, when God wants someone to do something, he sends an angel, or a dream, or a burning bush, to have a talk with them. In Christianity, the Holy Spirit lives in each of us so that our actions spring from it, not from ourselves. Are they the same? I don't really know; but it wasn't called "the Holy Spirit" until after Christ. So if John said this at all, I think he would have said "he will baptise you with the Spirit of God and fire."
And he didn't say "with", but "in". Both translations are used, but we don't say "to immerse with" but "to immerse in". And the Greek preposition that is used with "to baptise" is more like "into" than "in". Again, whatever is written is a Greek translation of something that John allegedly said in Hebrew, fifty years earlier, to someone else, so dissecting the Greek text isn't necessarily a productive endeavour. Still, the whole thing would be much more sensical if we read it like this:
"I immerse you into the water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will immerse you into the Spirit of Jehovah and fire."
Remember that to John and those who heard him, the immersion was understood as the death of the unclean old self and rebirth of a clean self. So that's what John announced: that one would come who would formalise our purification from sin by immersing us into the Spirit of God, so that our old self may die and we may be reborn as pure beings who have taken on qualities of that into which we were immersed.
Praise be to God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
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