Baptism of Jesus Christ

I wondered occasionally that if the purpose of baptism is to wash the sins off a human body, why was Jesus baptized? Don’t the Christians believe that he was not only the “Son of God” but also God Himself in some mysterious (obvious?) way. If he was God Incarnate, why would he need baptism? I pushed this thought away as soon as it would invade my mind but then I decided to find out if some other people also thought like me. I started the search on the Internet.

Sure enough, I found Reverend Gregory S. Neal thinking my thought. He (3) wrote, “If we recognize that baptism is for the remission of sins..if baptism is a means of grace through which God claims us and washes us clean from our sinful nature – then what was the purpose of Jesus’ baptism? After all, we believe Jesus to be:


God from God, Light from Light
true God from true God
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.

It doesn’t seem to me like he needed to be baptized. Certainly not for the ‘forgiveness of sins.’ He had no sins – he was perfect…hence he didn’t need baptism.” This was exactly how I felt.

Baptism is, in essence, like “Ganga Ashnaan;” have a dip in the river Ganges and all your sins are washed off as the Hindus believe. The difference is that Ganga ashnaan is more mundane without much of divine embellishments with only one exception that the water of the Ganges is regarded as holy. Hindus may take bath in the Ganges many times in their lifetime while one baptism is good enough for the Christians.

It seems that the rite of baptism is inherited from the Jewish tradition. According to Spong (4), “..the Jews followed the practice of instructing their proselytes and converts during the latter part of their liturgical year – that is, immediately prior to the celebration of the Passover. This would mean that the proselytes would complete their instruction, be circumcised, have sufficient time to allow healing to occur, and then proceed to the ceremonial cleansing bath. All of this would be done in a time sequence that would enable them to join the Jewish faith community in the Passover meal as the first act of the incorporated convert…I would suggest that the Christians, who were overwhelmingly Jewish at this time in history also followed the Jews. Christians began to observe baptism, their rite of passage, on Easter eve. Baptism was adopted from the ceremonial postcircumcision cleaning bath of the Jews. The Christians having done away with the circumcision, simply kept the ceremonial bath and developed a liturgy around it.” So Jesus’ baptism was in accord with a prevailing tradition among the Jews. There was nothing extraordinarily divine about it. “Grace” and other divine qualities are later additions to it.

It also explains one other question which baffled me from time to time. It is: Why the Christian women are not baptized? There are several explanations but none of them appealed to me. A simple and straightforward explanation is probably this: since baptism is acquired from Judaism and the Jewish males were circumcised, so only they needed to be cleansed by baptism. The women were naturally exempted from this ritual ceremony. Christians adopted this ceremonial custom and even though they stopped circumcision, they nonetheless kept baptism’s symbolism.

Jesus was a circumcised Jew and he died as a Jew. Jesus did not claim himself to be anything but man – a human being. According to Karen Armstrong (1), “Jesus used to call himself ‘the Son of Man.’ There has been much controversy about this title, but it seems that the original Aramaic phrase (bar nasha) simply stressed the weakness and mortality of the human condition. If this is so, Jesus seems to have gone out of his way to emphasize that he was a frail human being who would one day suffer and die.”

All the three Synoptic Gospels narrate the story of Jesus’ baptism. According to Mark 1: 6-11, (2),:

And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey.
And preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me; the latchet of his shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.
I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.
And it came to pass in those days. That Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan.
And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him.
And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, to whom I am well please.

Parting of heaven and a dove descending on Jesus proclaiming him the “Beloved Son” is all so melodramatic. However, such incidents were not uncommon in those days. According to Armstrong, “At the baptism he had been called the Son of God by a voice from heaven, but this was probably simply a confirmation that he was the beloved Messiah. There was nothing particularly unusual about such a proclamation from above: the Rabbis often experienced what they called a bat qol (literally, “Daughter of the Voice), a form of inspiration that had replaced the more direct prophetic revelations. Rabbi Yohannan Zakki had heard such a bat qol confirming his own mission on the occasion when the Holy Spirit had descended upon him and his disciples in the form of fire.”

Baptism before Jesus Christ was a simple act of immersion in the waters of River Jordan. Jesus was baptized in this way but an element of divine intervention was introduced in it asserting parting of the heaven, a dove descending from heaven and declaring “Thou art my beloved Son.” A whole litany of divine and supernatural elements became part of the concept of baptism later on, particularly with St. Augustine (354-450 CE) who brought the “Original Sin” into it. It was asserted that every child is born in sin and needs to be cleansed of it by baptism.

Alluding to it, Spong (5) wrote, “The baptism service of entry into the life of the Christian Church has been a liturgy so filled with theistic language of a supernatural deity as to be repugnant to an increasing number of believers today. It speaks of a cosmic fall requiring a cosmic act of redemption. In any developing liturgical rite, we must journey beyond those offensive assumptions which assert that the child was born in sin and that without this act of baptism that life is doomed. We must discover a different and more profound experience and meaning behind the act of baptism, or it cannot continue to be part of the Church of the future.”

Jesus’ deification occurred historically after three / four centuries of his death. Christianity did not exist as a separate religion in the time of Jesus. His disciples, particularly Paul, were instrumental in developing Christianity as a distinctly different religion from Judaism several decades after Jesus’ death. It kept evolving and growing for a long time. Some elements were needed to be inserted in it to make it a new religion. Christianity is an outgrowth of Judaism like Ahmadism and Baha’ism are outgrowth from traditional Islam. Islam can be considered an outgrowth from Christianity and Judaism in as much as it is claimed that it replaced both of them because their holy books had been corrupted by deliberate additions and interpolations.

Karen Armstrong asserted, “After his death, his followers decided that Jesus had been divine. This did not happen immediately… the doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalized until the fourth century. The development of Christian belief in the Incarnation was a gradual, complex process. Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God.”

So Jesus’ baptism was a traditional Jewish event; he was baptized as every one else used to be. He was deified a long time after his baptism.


References

1.Armstrong, Karen, “A History of God,” Ballantine Books, New York, 1993, pp. 82-84).
2.“Holy Bible,” Authorized King James Version, Dicksons, Bible Book Stores, The Books of the New Testament, Mark, p.24.
3.http://www.revneal.org/Writings/whyjcbapt.htm.
4.J ohn Shelby Spong, “Liberating the Gospels,” HarperSanFrancisco, A Division of Harper Collins Publishers, 1996, pp. 74-75.
5.Ibid., page 191.