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Washing Dogma off Baptismal Practices of the First Two Centuries:

A Snapshot for the Public

Hal Taussig Fall Meeting, 2017

Preface

This paper is the third in a new stage of the Christianity Seminar. This new stage—having begun in the fall of 2016 and now called a series of “snapshots” comes quite directly from the last five years of the Seminar in specific relationship to an-going diffuseness in the work of the Seminar. At least at the level of the (very active) Seminar’s Steering Committee, there is a growing sense that in the first two centuries of the common era, there is a variety of vocabularies related sometimes intensely and sometimes incidentally to the figure of Jesus. In acute awareness of the ways later Christianity pushed strongly to make these vocabularies into one language and one institution, our Seminar now on numerous fronts is collectively uneasy with both an enduring set of differences among these vocabularies of these first two centuries and the impulses in later Christianity toward unity and universalism. No matter whether in attempted efforts to connect and separate “Judaism” and “Christianity,” interests in placing some notion of proto-Christianity along a gender scale, resistance to and longing for right practice and thought, sorting out the significance of woundedness and death; our Seminar has made little headway in finding unanimity and clarity about what might eventually be called Christianity. Even trying on an overarching nomenclature of “early Christianities” (instead of orthodox and heterodox versions of Christianity), there has not been agreement on what to call the first and second century . We are then more or less ready to accept the interim and multiple character of such Jesus vocabularies in these first two centuries as a way to make peace with the variety of it all. So we now enter into what may be something like 18 months of writing portraits of different Jesus-related phenomena in these first two centuries. With these portraits, we probably mostly eschew the possibility of an emerging homogeneity and direction of this era. This has to be seen then as a rejection of the overarching assumptions that the emergence of early Christianity has to do with settling on a second century resolution of what was orthodox and heresy, even while taking seriously the multiplicity of meanings, practices, and directions of Jesus vocabularies. That is, it seems to me that at least the Seminar’s Steering Committee is not discouraged, but finds that these multiplicities in the first two centuries belong to a rewriting of the history of early Christianity.

Fall 2017 Taussig, Washing Dogma Off 50

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It is then with this sense of a more complex, yet beckoning, task that we are now beginning to work on how this direction might become a conversation with the larger (at least) American public about what texts and practices of the first two centuries may have been. So different members—hopefully as many as possible—are taking on the possibility of writing snapshots of phenomena in the first two centuries. If this works, what will emerge in our work are a set of relatively or wildly different portraits of people who use Jesus vocabularies at least sometimes. These different portraits will not clarify everything, but will begin both to call the bluff on Christianity being a unified truth from the beginning and to clarify some of the deeper causes, impulses, and contradictions of the first two centuries. We are trying then to write for the public about this larger (set of) pictures. So in the following paper of mine, I have tried to avoid scholarspeak and say within language that most people that graduate from high school can understand. We ask you as the Christianity Seminar as a whole then to test these initial attempts at several levels: 1) most straightforwardly to see where you agree and disagree with the content of this snapshot; 2) very importantly, and quite different from the #1, to see how much our attempt to write for a readership educated at least through high school work and were such an ambition harms the quality of the Seminar’s scholarship; 3) to think with each of us in terms of our kinds of writing. In other words, if these portraits seek to communicate to a larger public, what sorts of writing in each portrait help and hurt the chances of a successful engagement with the larger public. This preface then is for the Seminar audience, what follows is meant for a larger audience. Our Seminar Steering Committee has agreed to write without footnotes.

The Puzzle of “Baptism” How did baptism emerge as an early Christian practice? Hardly anyone seems

to wonder about this. Perhaps the various writings about something called “bathings” or “washings” in and around the New Testament were just too confusing. That would be understandable, since those descriptions of what baptism was and why it was done are not at all clear in either popular imagination or most scholarship. Perhaps some who asked the question of what “baptism” was and what it meant simply adopted the much later answer that these washings were the way people became Christians. A not-so-small problem with that answer, however, is that there were no Christians when something called “baptism” first happened. Perhaps the biggest question—yet rarely posed—is about the word itself. Common parlance, more or less all translations of the Bible, and almost all scholars use the English word “baptism” as self-explanatory. But—although most people today do not know this—“baptism” is really just an ancient Greek word that has been directly


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borrowed by English. The problem here is similar to the question of why the description and meanings of the early “baptisms” have not been pursued. Ironically and obviously asking the question of what the ancient Greek word meant would help. The ancient Greek word, “baptism” (baptizo, baptisma) has the common meanings of “bathing,” “washing,” “immersing,” or “thoroughly dipping.” As a word in Greek, it is an ordinary word, used to describe ordinary washing and bathing of both objects and people. By and large ordinary usage does not refer to some kind of ritual, but simply a thorough and fairly intense washing/bathing. This ordinary word is a bit more dramatic meaning of another common word (bapto). Bapto means “washing;” “baptizo” means a more thorough washing, and as such a bathing.

First and Second Century Practice of Washing and Bathing This snapshot of the ancient Mediterranean practice of bathing and washing here thoroughly changes what early Christian “baptizo-ing” meant. It does not answer all the questions, but it means to correct major misunderstanding by Christians around the world and scholars of early Christianity. This happens more or less simply by asking what the word “baptism” means in its mother language, and what those practices of washing and bathing were in the first two centuries. In order to make basic sense of the confusing and different references to “baptizo-ing” in the first and second centuries, it is best to think of the basic act of washing and bathing. It turns out that ancient Mediterranean bathing and washing for people was often and clearly discussed. Although some of the bathing pools were small enough for one or two bathers, it was often not a private, but a social, act. The Greco-Roman world was full of bath houses, with people—usually at some leisure—washing themselves to clean their bodies. Of course, some washing of one’s body took place in private. But not unlike the well-known ancient meals of a large and general public, these “bathings” were often a part of being social and were relaxed. Many such bathing happened together with others and involved lots of talking and leisure.


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Such semi-public and leisurely washing also occurred in streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes. The late second century writer, Tertullian, listed the places such bathing could happen as “in a sea or a pool, a stream or a fount, a lake or a trough.”

Following this semi-public and leisurely washing, many groups made bathing together a part of their activities. Especially, but not exclusively, Israel-based neighborhoods had small baths next to—and often almost as large as their—homes. These bathing locations have been found by archeological digs, and the pools were often found between houses in neighborhoods with houses themselves only 7-

20 feet long and wide. These make all the clearer that people from various households bathed together (with men and the women at separate times). Isis, Mithras, Bacchic, Israel-based, and Eleusian groups also did regular or occasional washings as a part of their group life. Occasionally such groups were able to have their own bathing pool, but often they went to public baths together, used neighborhood pools, or gathered at a stream or river.


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Many such ancient bathing pools have been found throughout the Mediterranean, ranging in size from not much more than seven by five fee to a good hundred feet in diameter, and located everywhere from Britain to North Africa. Archeologists and other scholars have had some difficulty deciding exactly who used what kind of baths. Some pools were highly decorated, others were fairly ordinary, some perhaps seemed to have healing practices associated with them and others not so much. In Israel many of different sizes have been found, beginning from the first century BCE on. For both the broadly public bathing and the neighborhood bathing locations, it is difficult to distinguish to what extent these normal washings in a social setting contained what modern people might call “ritual bathings.” Here it is probably best to think in similar ways to much of the rest of ancient Mediterranean life: that almost all of normal life had some ritual aspects and that much “ritual” was thought of as ordinary. So, for instance, in Israel itself it is only the size of the bathing spaces that differentiated the bathing around the Jerusalem Temple (because they were larger) from bathing in the other parts of the city or even in neighborhoods of the smaller city like Sepphoris in Galilee.

Because it was so pervasive and often social, bathing took on a wide variety of meanings, all based primarily in the basic importance of cleaning one’s self. So often bathings were signs of moral cleanness, purity of heart and mind, differentiating the bathers from corrupt government, being sorry for harm done to someone, removing closeness to other ethnic groups, washing away smells and anxieties after sex, and cleansing from sickness. People washed themselves regularly of such physical, moral, attitudinal, and social “dirtiness,” and in other cases they gathered together specially at the bathing pools or streams to clean themselves of deep soiledness in their lives.

Since many of these bathings were social, any group would include people with minor regrets and worries; those who simply needed to recuperate from dirty or humiliating work; recovery from significant pain; and those who had little thought other than to wash their bodies. So these events involved group reflection, small talk, silence, joy, ponderings, prayers, and story- telling. In these settings then, often the being together itself provided cleansing in the bathers lives. Everyday healings of neighborhood, family, and national distress, dis-ease, and confusion would not have been uncommon in the relaxion, comfort and sensuousness of the water, and social give-and-take. Relief at the end of the day, closeness to one another and God, and calming routine mixed often below the surface in the comings and goings from bathing.

A neighborhood group of women in Sepphoris could have gathered at the end of the day in a such a small pool between four small houses. A mother and her two adult daughters and two other neighbors would have made their way to the pool for at least


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20 or 30 minutes between the chores at the end of the day. And then, finally, perhaps one or two who—despite troubles and distractions—would get in the pool, even while some others would have already begun putting their clothes back on as they talked. On some days, there were songs, on others some chatter or serious talk. Now and then grief, prayers, or rationalizations at the ordinary things that went wrong in the course of a day. On other days, perhaps even early in the morning, pain or joy at how much or little sleep had come.

For women or men in different rhythms, some dramatic washings of strong, violent, or persistent offenses, complicities, or losses of integrity also were done separately by particular groups of people involved in such behaviors. In such cases, there also was social give-and-take, but also a sense of release, lamentation, and long-term resolve. The first century historian Josephus wrote of “John the Bather” washings that were “in the exercise of virtue and righteousness towards one another and piety towards God…for the sanctification of life.” (Ant. 18.117)

One somewhat special occasion within life in Israel (and perhaps in some of the new groups around the Mediterranean that came to understand themselves as belonging to new groups based in stories of the Egyptian goddess Isis and those associated with the sacred city of Eleusis) was a washing of one’s past life as a person became consciously part of a new way of life. Both non-Israel women and men bathed upon the occasion of joining the community of Israel, and its new demands and reliefs. Although men also were circumcised as a part of joining the community of Israel, the washing itself—again always with a group—was the pivotal moment for women. It is quite likely that this practice especially in larger spiritual Israel (but perhaps also Eleusis and re-established Isis groups) became a model in first and second century Christ groups.

This snapshot of the breadth of ancient Mediterranean bathings offers a chance to re-think the sinews and logic of so-called “baptism” in the first two centuries. This evocative and particular practice takes account of the role of many similar bathings around the Mediterranean basin. At the same time it makes particular use of the specific situation of such washing practices in Israel and even more specifically in Galilee where Jesus movements first existed.

It is very difficult for 21st century North Americans with so many traditional Christian assumptions, practices, and lore to understand these pictures from the ancient Mediterranean. For so many centuries of baptisms in churches and with so many assumptions about Christian practice of “baptism,” these first and second century Mediterranean bathings seem intensely foreign and/or breath-takingly appealing to North American moderns. Even though the ancient bathing practice is so different, it is not too hard to feel similar relief, freshness, and nurture while walking barefoot at the


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edge of a lapping shoreline or slipping into a jacuzzi at the end of a day. Although most North American Christians do not know about this, bathings not unlike these first and second century events still occur in Jewish synagogues and homes today.

The first step toward understanding first and second century “baptism” is to take seriously the widespread bathings in the Mediterranean and the particular exact match between the Greek word “baptize” and the ancient Mediterranean practices described here.

John, the Bather

There is more to say to make sufficient sense of the emergence of early Christian bathing practice. Although these ordinary communal first and second century bathings are indeed one pillar of understanding, these regular and social washings do not quite account for the charged, excited, and dramatic textual description of “baptizo-ing.”

Linking these common bathings with a more specialized and dramatic practice of a first-century Israel leader named “John the Bather” can help. Explaining these dramatic and special practice by John the Bather begins with two key elements. First is that John the Bather almost certainly assumed that what he was doing was a variation on the ordinary bathings described so far. There is another important element that explains why John the Bather’s washings were for the people of Israel both a meaningful cleansing and at the same time the equivalent of a protest march.

It appears that in Israel public, neighborhood, and private baths were first constructed in the first century BCE. This corresponds more or less to the period when the Roman empire conquered Israel and continued for hundreds of years. Two main connections between the beginning of this kind of bathing and Roman military and political domination over Israel probably would have been in play. Such bathing could have been a response to a sense that Roman domination wounded and dirtied the people of Israel; and the people of Israel needed to be cleansed from this humiliation, anger, and pain. The Romans’ violence and impositions on the people’s life must have been undeniable, and this corruption could have prompted Israel’s population to want wash itself clean from all that was wrong.

At the same time, the client kings of Israel under Roman rule did build Roman-like baths in that early occupation time. In particular, the building of Roman-type baths around the Jerusalem Temple as a part of Roman-style renovation of that Temple were met with protests by Temple goers. The Roman-style bathing pools around the Temple seemed especially offensive, since Roman ways were experienced by many as sullying Israel’s own sense of purity before God.


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It is in this context that John the Bather moved to an untamed desert region at the

Jordan river boundary, and encouraged many to come there to cleanse themselves. In this way his proposal was to wash one’s self clean of ordinary sulliedness, the dirty business of Roman rule, and the brokenness of Israel’s own identity. It seems that John’s appeal was followed by quite a few people making the trek of at least 25 miles, especially from Jerusalem and its surrounding countryside. In clear connection to being washed clean of social and spiritual dirtiness, John’s teaching was focused on people changing their ways. So both his teaching and washing aimed at people making a deep change in their actions and thinking, especially relative to the soiledness of Roman military occupation.

Although the few stories about John the Bather do not agree on all details, a fairly clear picture of this quirky social movement does emerge. Key to this understanding is the broad practice of semi-public washings to clean one’s self physically, morally, and socially. It seems likely that John the Bather (a nickname coming from his curious urging many people to make a long journey from the Jerusalem area into a wilder border area to dramatically cleanse themselves of what was going on in the Jerusalem environs).

It looks like John urged the Jerusalem people to cleanse themselves from their collaboration with the occupying presence of Rome. This dramatic invitation to come away from the Jerusalem cruelty and corruption, and wash one’s self clean in the legendary Jordan River was by almost all standards a meaningful and fairly widespread success. That this pilgrimage went to the Jordan where the people of Israel had long before entered into freedom from Egyptian slavery was almost certainly also meaningful. The standard ways of being close to God in the Temple and washing the


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pollution from their lives had been compromised by the Roman re-doing of the Temple and baths. John the Bather’s experimental invitation to the wild Jordan border area provided a powerful way of both protesting the Roman occupation and renewing one’s own wish to be bathed clean of both the domination of the conquering Romans and the people’s own sleazy collaboration.

So John the Bather’s lively experiment had deep roots in the more ordinary bathing practices where the stresses, failures, and tensions of daily life were washed away by the neighborhood bathing every week or so. On the other hand, John’s project was far from ordinary. Temporarily abandoning one’s home in greater Jerusalem to trudge into the desert to bathe in the fabled Jordan River was high drama and high stakes. Almost certainly when one finally arrived at the river, immersing one’s self had both the comfort of the neighborhood bath and much more physical comfort after walking for at least several days into a wild and dry environment.

Even more the drama of this bathing carried with it emotional and spiritual comfort, release, community, and perspective. Tens or maybe hundreds of people bathing together in the mother river of so much of Israel’s water brought a sense of safety, belonging, and renewal to traumatized people in greater Jerusalem. Perhaps most of all, this bathing washed away at least some humiliation, pain, and loss of these people under a relentlessly cruel and arrogant tyrant. The toll of growing poverty amidst uncaring wealth, families broken beneath random violence, and shame of both tacit and open collaboration loosened its grip on the people bathing in the Jordan. On all these levels, the bathing poured over the pilgrims as salve and at least partial healing.

John the Bather had captured the imagination of people at the end of their rope. The Gospel of Mark’s story that “the whole of Judea as well as all the inhabitants of Jerusalem…were bathed by him in the Jordan river” was certainly exaggerated. But even 1% of that population coming to these mass bathings would have captured the imagination of the captive nation, re-kindled a sense of hope for those who were washed, and renewed many who did not make it to the desert oasis. Relying on the ways the common practice of washings together in daily life and the resentment of so many that Rome had perverted that same daily practice of refreshment and accountability, John broke open a new sense of belonging for much of Israel. No wonder he became so beloved by the people of Israel and so hated by their Roman henchmen that the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus saying, “Among those born of women no one greater than John the Bather has appeared.”

The ways John’s program of bathing both depended on and—at least for a period of time—surpassed the ordinary traditions of bathing are mirrored by the way these mass bathings resulted in intense community building. Just as the ordinary neighborhood washings engendered support and companionship, the desert bathings


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produced a deep body memory of resistance and renewal. And for some years John’s bathing resulted in his followers staying for long periods at the Jordan to help bathe the people coming and indeed his followers continued even after John’s murder by the Herod Antipas.

Bathings in the Acts of the Apostles

Excluding the treatment of Jesus’s washing in the Jordan where John the Bather worked, more than half of all writing about bathings in the New Testament are in the Acts of the Apostles. In Acts, which is most likely from the second century, the picture of these bathings look a great deal like those pictured so far in this snapshot. That is, the bathing/washing was done as a part of a person being washed clean of her/his faults and failures and celebrating this major change in their lives. In at least 12 different Acts stories, after someone changes her/his way of life and resolves to lead a better life, bathing marks “the exercise of virtue and righteousness towards one another and piety towards God…for the sanctification of life.” Several Acts’ stories acknowledge John the Bather’s dramatic bathings as marking such changes in people as the model for Christ groups who experienced similar shifts in their behavior and attitude. So both the particular ways spiritual Israel’s practice of ordinary washings and the dramatic elaborations of such washings by John the Bather shaped how and why characters in Acts participate in these washings as a part of their own shift in who they are. This major connection between the majority of bathing stories in the New Testament—especially those in the second century—and the earlier Israel-based John-the-Bather base practices must be said more directly so that major traditional Christian readings and scholarly proposals can be challenged. The problem here goes back to a devastating misunderstanding in later Christian religious assertions. The problem here focuses on the same misunderstanding of the ancient Greek and contemporary English word, “baptize/baptism,” mentioned at the beginning of this snapshot. As is especially the case in the Acts of the Apostles—but also in many other first and second century texts—the word “baptism” has mistakenly taken on the meaning of “a Christian ritual associated with one becoming a ‘Christian.’” This is a huge mistake in imposing a later Christian ritual meaning on a simple, straightforward ancient Greek washing/bathing practice occurring in Acts. The many pictures and stories of washing in Acts depend thoroughly on the practices laid out here; and have little “Christian” context. They simply show stories in early Christ group contexts of people who change their way of life by practicing Israel-based and John-the-Bather-based innovations. This was not, as has been assumed, a picture of people being “baptized” into Christianity. It was rather a picture of a diverse group of people


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changing their ways of living and washing these memories, attitudes, complicities, and remorse away through a variety of Israel-based bathing practices.

Summarizing

This snapshot foregrounds a tender and widespread practice of semi-public bathing in the ancient Mediterranean. It shows the ordinary power and lasting significance of such bathing. Such common, almost subliminal yet quite meaningful, routine acts are difficult for 21st century persons to notice. Yet this snapshot has allowed these washings to be grasped for their integrity, implicitness, and contributions for many people in the ancient Mediterranean.

Similarly, the snapshot has included the quirky success of John the Bather’s public improvisation on bathing practice in order to galvanize first century Judeans’ resentment of Roman rule as well as their own renewed belonging to Israel for several seasons.

On one level, this is enough. Just to understand the courageous, internally renewing, and imaginative practice of a belabored population through a quirky re-tooling of a routine practice suffices. Just on this level alone it sparks musings for 21st century persons about how ordinary loyalties to practices hold reservoirs of creativity, resistance, and longing.

What then about questions of how early Christian baptism emerged and how the meanings of Mediterranean and late Israelites bathings do and do not relate to eventual early Christian baptism?

This snapshot clarifies much in ways that have not been recognized before. Yet it still leaves a number of questions open.

What does this snapshot about ordinary and experimental community bathing show about early Christian baptism of the third century and fourth centuries?

• On one level, one can say: There is little that the snapshot of ordinary community bathing says about Christian baptism two, three, or 19 centuries later. Such ordinary community bathing did not become an important part of Christianity in any subsequent centuries, nor did later Christian rituals of baptism resemble the practice of ordinary community bathing described in the snapshot. In addition the baptismal bathings of the third and fourth centuries by and large occurred only once in the life of a Christian rather than regularly. And, perhaps the most important difference is that the ordinary and experimental practices of John the Bather were not anything but practices of late (occupied) Israel. To think of them as a part of early Christianity is to hide the larger ordinary


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practice of community bathing in Israel and the larger Mediterranean basin as well as the ingenious creativity of John the Bather and late Israel.

• If only things were this straightforward….Without negating any of the above, this snapshot also helps re-think a wide range of assumptions about the character of early Christianity and early Christian baptism. These implications for re-thinking the character of early Christianity and early Christian baptism follow.

• Although Christian baptism of the third and fourth centuries increasingly frame baptism as the way someone becomes a Christian, that would both be a misreading of early Christian practice and a reduction of the meanings of early Christian baptism. The ways bathings helped people support one another, graciously and implicitly come to terms with one another’s mistakes and failings, and participate in repairing the breaks and tears in social belonging continued to be major parts of early Christian baptismal practice. The actual washings in baptisms were explicitly aimed at each of these components of earlier bathings. As Tertullian taught in the early third century, “in the water, under (the witness of) the angel, we are cleansed.” (VI.1) It is a much later version of baptism that reduced the Mediterranean practice of bathing to highly ritualized words about becoming a Christian and almost no water at all. As noticed above in the third century baptismal bathings happened ““in a sea…a pool, a stream or a fount, a lake or a trough.”

• This then points toward John the Bather’s bathings not uniquely but as a larger part of first and second century Christ groups as well as third century Christian groups in their resistance and re-imagination of life counter to Roman imperial violence and presumptuous claims of divine prerogatives. In both the late second century and throughout significant portions of the third century, Christ and early Christian groups claimed the bathings of “baptism” as signs of resistance and renewal over again the imperial powers.

• The Acts of the Apostles pictures the washing away of failures and in-grained mistakes by an integration of resolve, renewal, remorse, and discovery with the deep threads of Israel-based bathing practices. The drumbeat of these bathings (not baptisms) throughout its story-line of people being renewed and healed could have laid down a larger musical rhythm that integrated ordinary practices of regret, renewal, and remorse into early Christianity. It is not clear that fourth century Christianity ever heard such a possibility.

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