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| Q: | My wife belongs to the Christian Church and, of course, I am a Lutheran. Now and then I get into conversations concerning baptism with her fellow church members. Their contention is the original Greek in the Bible was baptisma, spelling may be incorrect, and that meant immersing in water. Therefore, to follow the example in the Bible, immersion is the only true way to baptize. My desire is to have a strong, scriptually correct case to present and defend our method of baptism to counteract their case for immersion. | ||||||
| A: | In classical Greek (i.e. the Greek that was spoken up to a couple hundred years before Christ) the meaning of baptizo was basically to immerse something (such as a sunken ship). But in the koine Greek (the Greek spoken in Palestine and throughout the Roman Empire at the time of Christ) baptizo had a broader meaning. In addition to meaning to immerse in water, it also had come to mean to wash with water. The two best Greek NT Dictionaries (Bauer/Arndt/Gingrich/Danker & Louw/Nida) list both of these meanings for the word baptizo as it was used at the time of Christ. It is also evident from the use of the word baptizo in the NT that it means to wash with water. Jesus himself uses the word baptizo in Mark 7:4 to refer to the Jews washing themselves (the word used is baptizo) when they come from the marketplace, and to refer to the washing (the word used is baptizo) of cups, pitchers, kettles, and dining couches. Some of these items (e.g. cups and small pitchers) may have been immersed, but it is doubtful if kettles were because water is so precious in Palestine that to immerse the kettles would have been a rather blatant waste of water. Dining couches were so big that they would only have been washed (N.B. the omission of dining couches in some translations goes against the best manuscript evidence since the word couches is omitted only in some early manuscripts in Egypt while it is included in other early manuscripts in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Gaul and Italy.) In Acts 22:16 Paul uses the word baptizo as a synonym of apoluo which means to "wash." Those who say that immersing is necessary for a baptism to be valid say that that's what the word baptizo means and only that. They are right if they are referring to the time before Christ. But studies of the word baptizo used at Jesus' time, and the use of this word in the NT, clearly show that it meant to use water either by immersing or by washing. We must be careful not to say that immersing is wrong. Immersing certainly is one proper way of baptizing while washing is another. Luther would have preferred to do baptizing by immersion because he felt the symbolism of being immersed in water would have been a good picture of what takes place in baptism in the drowning/burying of the Old Adam, the old sinful nature in us (Romans 6: 3,4,6). We don't use immersion only because there are those who say it must be done that way. In order to witness against this wrong teaching, we choose usually to baptize by washing, thereby confessing that God's word does not bind us to using immersion. | ||||||
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