So I'm standing at a little tourist complex on the Jordan River
it's the site where Jesus is believed to have been baptized by John the
Baptist's, but today Christian pilgrims come by the busload to touch the water or even get baptized themselves
But it does raise the question
where did this ritual of Christian baptism come from the word itself stems from the Greek baptized Oh to
Immerse and this is probably what John the Baptist was doing dunking people in the water
You see the disciples of John and Jesus didn't develop these rituals in a cultural vacuum
Jews around this entire region
We're practicing a purification ritual by immersion and specifically cleansing in a special bath called a mikvah
what you're looking at right now are various mikvahs at Qumran where a sectarian Jewish community lived during the Second Temple period and their most
famous for writing the Dead Sea Scrolls notice the steps going down into a basin where you would immerse yourself now the
Archaeologist Jodi Magness has estimated that there are about 700
Mikvahs that were found throughout the region most of them date to the first century and they've been found
everywhere clustered around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem
And fortresses like Masada and even in fancy houses in the city of Sepphoris near the Sea of Galilee
And Jews would immerse themselves in these mikvah in accordance with the purity laws in the Hebrew Bible?
So things like touching a corpse or having certain skin diseases would put you into a state of ritual impurity
And you would need to cleanse yourself, but was this baptism?
Well one Jewish text appears to use the verb
Baptizo to refer to this ritual if a man immerses after touching a dead body and touches it again
What has he gained by his washing? But there's some really big differences between the Jewish
Mikvah and whatever ritual John was doing mostly the difference between a purification ritual and an initiation ritual
You see John the Baptist's baptism was presumably only supposed to be done
Once you would repent of your sins and then get baptized to join his apocalyptic movement
but Jewish ritual purification
almost fundamentally requires repetition
so certain things like menstruation or childbirth would repeatedly put you into a state of
ritual impurity and required
Repeated washings. So whatever John was doing was a different type of ritual than immersion in a mikveh
so do we see evidence of
one-time-only
ritual immersion in Jewish tradition of the time well
Maybe some scholars point to the conversion ritual when someone would convert to Judaism. They would have a
One-time immersion in a mikveh, but most of this evidence comes from much later
So a passage from the Babylonian Talmud rabbinic text compiled during Late Antiquity
Stipulates that all converts that Judaism must immediately be immersed
But there are a few historical problems to relate John the Baptist's baptism with proselyte immersion
first of all
The Talmud is just such a later text hundreds of years after Jesus and John would have been alive and moreover
we do have evidence of
people converting in the first century mostly from the authors Josephus and Philo and neither of these guys mention a
One-time proselyte immersion ritual moreover John's baptism functions in part as atoning for a person's sins
Which is missing from Jewish proselyte immersion
so the Gospel of Mark says that John's baptism was a
baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins
And the historian Josephus says John the Baptist baptized people after they purged their soul of sin
So it appears that sin is at the center of this ritual not
conversion or some sort of ritual impurity John appears to be mixing these metaphors about
Atonement from the Hebrew Bible with the ritual of immersion
At least this is the theory put forward by the scholar of ritual purity and Judaism. Dr
Jonathan Collins the argues that we can't ignore the idea that John the Baptist
innovated the ritual himself drawing on his local culture where ritual bathing was so popular and adapting it to a new setting a
River instead of a mikvah while at the same time adding a new interpretation from the Hebrew Bible
Atonement rather than the cleansing of ritual and purity which didn't necessarily have anything to do with
Sin, in the first place. Now, some people will want you to believe that John lifted this ritual from greco-roman
religion and the Greeks definitely practiced all sorts of water purification
Rituals more specifically there is some evidence that bathing was part of the initiation into the cult of Isis
But this evidence comes from a much later text our best evidence. Is that the Christian ritual of baptism?
Has its basis in Jewish ritual immersion of the first century, but with the new interpretation from the Hebrew Bible
atonement instead of ritual impurity
But one thing is certain is that John the Baptist had no idea that 2,000 years later
the largest religion on earth would be sending tourists to the same river to get baptized as
Always sources are in the description below and I'll see you next time