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Jewish Baptisms Prior to John?
Question: I thought that I had read somewhere that baptism was part of the Jewish rites or traditions before Christ. 1. Did baptism start with John the baptist, or did the Jews have a tradition of baptism when the baptist appeared on the scene? 2. And if the Jews had a baptism before John came along, was John the Baptist doing essentially the same thing, only with a slightly different twist?
— Dave Humphreys
Answer: It has been an established fact for a long time, now, that the Jews were immersing proselytes to their religion as late as the second century; even those who teach that baptism in the New Testament means affusion admit this much. Although I do not have the resources before me to cite, I believe that more recent archeological scholarship has shown that these proselyte baptisms were a standard practice even before the advent of our Lord. Regardless, the meaning that the Jews attached to their baptisms in the the second century are, in my opinion, extremely compelling evidence that proselyte baptisms were being practiced before John the Baptist began preaching the Kingdom of God in the wilderness. Additionally, excavations around the temple mount, in Jerusalem, have uncovered no less than 25 baptismal (immersion) fonts; however, archeologists believe these were for only the priests' purification.
For the Jews of the second century, ritual baptism (i.e., immersion) was necessary for proselytes to undergo in order that they might be joined with the nation of Israel in her exodus experience. The meaning of baptism in Judaism was that the Gentile convert was following Moses, with the rest of the Israelites, through the Red Sea, leaving his own Egypt (i.e., his bondage to Gentile ways) behind and agreeing to be led by Moses.
This theology of proselyte baptism is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament, but the concept is clearly expressed in the New Testament by the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 10:2). Since the Jews of the second century despised Christ and His disciples with a passion that was little tempered from the time when they first began to persecute the assembly of the Lord (Acts 8:1-3; 9:1-2), it is hardly likely that they would have borrowed their theology of baptism from the apostle Paul. So, it is almost certain that the apostle received this particular insight through his former association with the Jewish religion and was guided by the Holy Spirit to incorporate it in his Christian theology. Thus it is safe to conclude that Jewish immersion of Proselytes preceded the New Testament Narrative.
That being said, we can now move on to the second question of your post. The Jews' method of practicing baptism was to require that the proselyte and his family immerse themselves; thus the candidates for baptism were also their own baptists. Furthermore, any subsequent children born into the proselytes' families were not required to be baptized, just as it was not required that the descendants of natural Jews should have to cross over the Red Sea on their own two legs. The idea was that this had been done for them, either while in their mothers' wombs, or while still the seed in their fathers' loins.
When John began baptizing, the Jewish leaders were greatly offended by it, and for at least three reasons. First, he had bypassed their authority and was preaching repentance to the masses, calling them to be baptized; both features of his ministry being with a view to the kingdom of God, which he was proclaiming was at hand. The religious leaders were no doubt further enraged by the fact that he, apparently, had not made any special efforts to share this good news with them (Matt. 3:7)! Indeed, along with the fact that John was requiring confirmed Jews to be baptized, where Jewish custom only required Gentile converts to Judaism to be baptized, the Jewish leaders no doubt saw John's seeming disregard of them as a call to turn away from their teachings and authority.
Second, it was not a baptism one could perform for himself; it had to be done to you, by the baptist, thus indicating a spiritual reality that one could not enter into on his own. This, surely, must have provoked the religious leaders no end. After all, they were the "righteous" men of Israel! How contemptous! They were the spiritual leaders of Israel; and here was John, impudently calling the masses to repent and to allow themselves to be immersed by him, and impertinently calling the nation's leaders a brood of vipers (Matt. 3:7) — and worse, when some of these leaders went to be baptized by John, apparently to gain popularity with the masses who were receiving his baptism, he demanded that they bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance (Matt. 3:8), thus impugning their standard of righteousness.
Third, the religious leaders apparently reasoned within their hearts that, "Hey, we're Abraham's descendants, we crossed the Red Sea in the loins of our ancestors; what need have we to be baptized?" But John's response to them was essentially this:
You need to have a change of heart — a change of mind — about your carnal, racist notions of the kingdom of God. You think that being a descendant of Abraham puts you in God's favor, that being a part of the Jewish nation makes you special; but I'm here to tell you that, when it comes to God's ultimate purpose, when it comes to what God is really after, you are no different than the Gentiles. In fact, although the Gospel is for the descendants of Abraham, first (Acts 3:26), I've got a news flash for you: "God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham" (Luke 3:8)!
John was calling the Jews to repent, to have a change of heart and mind. But repent from what? The Gospels don't exactly spell that out. However, when one understands the spiritual meaning of the Jews' exodus from Egypt, and certainly when one realizes that the Jews required proselyte baptisms on account of the historical exodus from the physical bondage, it becomes clear that John was proclaiming the coming of a radically different sort of kingdom than that which the Jews had associated with their race and nation.
John's baptism, then, was a baptism of repentance; not from Israel's fleshly Egypt, not from "Gentiledom," per se, but from a spiritual Egypt that enslaved the heart and mind, and which seduced the Jews with the false notion that grace with God was as simple as being born a fleshly descendant of Abraham, or of being grafted into Abraham's lineage by being united to Moses through proselyte baptism. Thus, John was proclaiming a kingdom that had little to do with racial ties to the nation of Israel, and which pointed away from Moses — and away from the covenant and law mediated by him — toward One who would be like Moses, whom the people should obey (Deut. 18:15; Matt. 17:5; Mark 9:7; John 1:17; Acts 3:19-26; Rom. 3:21; Gal.3:19; Heb. 3:5-6).
So, John's baptism apparently came at a time when the Jews were already practicing proselyte baptisms. It differed from Jewish, proselyte immersion in that it:
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