The New Testament in its Ritual World

Richard DeMaris, Richard E. DeMaris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415438261
• eBook ISBN: 9781134071579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

What was life like among the first Christians? For the last thirty years, scholars have explored the historical and social contexts of the New Testament in order to sharpen their understanding of the text itself. This interest has led scholars to focus more and more on the social features of early Christian communities and less on their theologies or doctrines.

Scholars are keen to understand what these communities were like, but the ritual life of early Christians remains largely unexplored. Studies of baptism and eucharist do exist, but they are very traditional, showing little awareness of the ritual world, let alone the broader social environment, in which Christians found themselves. Such studies make little or no use of the social sciences, Roman social history, or the archaeological record.

This book argues that ritual was central to, and definitive for, early Christian life (as it is for all social orders), and explores the New Testament through a ritual lens. By grounding the exploration in ritual theory, Greco-Roman ritual life, and the material record of the ancient Mediterranean, it offers new and insightful perspectives on early Christian communities and their cultural environment. In doing justice to a central but slighted aspect of community life, it outlines an alternative approach to the New Testament, one that reveals what the lives of the first Christians were actually like.

Part I
Entry Rites

For the last thirty-five years, scholars have directed their attention to the social context of the New Testament in order to sharpen their understanding of the text itself. This interest in finding the Sitz im Leben, setting in life, of the New Testament has led scholars to focus more and more on the social features of early Christian communities, and less and less on their theologies or beliefs. This new direction in New Testament studies has fostered interest beyond scholarly circles, for it addresses a question of general import: What was life like among the first Christians?

There are many ways to situate the New Testament documents in their social context and to determine the contours of the early Christian communities that produced them. Close attention to Roman society, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean, has done much to contextualize the text. Likewise, use of the social sciences, especially anthropological studies of Mediterranean culture and cross-cultural studies of advanced agrarian societies, has helped scholars recreate the world in which the church emerged.

Still, the important interpretive task of locating the New Testament in its culture is far from complete. Perhaps the largest and most striking deficiency in contemporary New Testament studies is this: for a field keen on recovering what early Christian communities were like, it has left their ritual life largely unexplored. Studies of baptism and eucharist do exist, but they show limited awareness of the larger ritual world in which the early church found itself. Also, such studies make little or no use of ritual theory. Nor do they make any use of the ancient Mediterranean’s archaeological record, a vast source of information about life in that world.

The best remedy to New Testament studies’ neglect of ritual is a book that makes ritual its focal point. This study starts from the premise that ritual was central to, and definitive for, early Christian life (as it is for all social orders), and it explores the New Testament through a ritual lens. By grounding the exploration in ritual theory, Greco-Roman ritual life, and the material record of the ancient Mediterranean, it seeks to discover new and insightful perspectives on early Christian communities and their cultural environment. In doing justice to a salient but slighted aspect of community life, it outlines an alternative approach to the New Testament, one that reveals what the lives of the first Christians were actually like.

Situating the New Testament in the ritual world of the ancient Mediterranean could be accomplished in many ways. Since we are after a better understanding of early Christianity and because boundaries are key to defining both individuals and groups, boundaries and the rites that attend them are as good a starting place as any. In the case of individuals, rites of boundary-crossing mark the various stages of social life, whether one is moving from childhood to adulthood, from single to married life, from adulthood to old age, or from life to death. In the case of human communities, boundary-crossing rites are crucial markers of group identity, for they control who is in and who is out and how one gets in and out. They define a community’s character and profile. Hence, this study will focus on boundary-crossing and the rites that attended it in the early church.

Boundary-crossing involves either movement into a group or out of it, and both deserve attention. This study falls into two parts, therefore, beginning with entry rites and focusing on a rite of central importance to the early church: baptism. Chapter 1 foregrounds baptism, and in doing so reveals the immense gap between the rite and its depiction in the New Testament. At the same time, Chapter 1 is a non-technical introduction to ritual theory. It explores how scholars, primarily anthropologists, have characterized ritual with a view to filling out the picture of baptism, whose portrait is so incomplete in the New Testament.

As Chapter 1 will show, ritual theorists agree that the circumstances around a rite’s performance are crucial to determining the rite’s effect and significance. Guided by that insight, Chapters 2 and 3 undertake what anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call a thick description of baptism in a specific location, namely, ancient Corinth. Chapter 2 will look at the many ways that water was used in Roman Corinth as a way of contextualizing its use by the Corinthian Christians for boundary-crossing. As the archaeology of Corinth attests, public baths, fountains, and other water facilities were central to Roman culture, and to understand baptism we need to set it against this backdrop.

Chapter 3 continues the microscopic situating of baptism by examining a peculiarly Corinthian practice, namely, baptism on behalf of the dead. It will consider the Greco-Roman ritual world in general and then concentrate on the cultural dynamics of Roman Corinth, with the goal of accounting for why the Christian community extended the rite of baptism to its dead.

* * *

These introductory remarks have used the term Christian freely, but the reader will find it seldom used elsewhere in the book. Why is this? Most scholars of ancient Mediterranean religion have come to the conclusion that Christianity, along with its sister religion, Judaism, were only forming in the first and second centuries. So to label first-century phenomena Christian or Jewish is historically inaccurate. Unfortunately, alternative terminology is not completely satisfactory. Many scholars refer to early followers of Jesus as the Jesus movement, but some would restrict that label to Jesus groups in Palestine and Syria. Some scholars prefer the word Judean to Jew, but the former could be either an ethnic or geographical designation, so it is not a perfect substitute. With hesitation, this study sticks with the terms Jew and Jewish.

In the case of Corinth, it is probably best to avoid talking about a Jesus movement on Greek soil. I have also avoided referring to Christians at Corinth, and have used the terms early church or Corinthian believers instead. The former is a convenient designation but it could be misunderstood. It is best to picture a loose affiliation of house churches or assemblies rather than a unified, hierarchical institution, which did not emerge until the third and fourth centuries.

1
Perilous Passage

In the New Testament, it is fair to say, Baptism is assumed as the way of entry into the Christian Church. It is taken as a matter of course in (to cite only some of the passages) Acts 2: 38, 41; 8: 13, 16, 36; 9: 18; 10: 47; 19: 3; Rom. 6: 3; I Cor. 6: 11 (apparently), 12: 13; Gal. 3: 27; Eph. 4: 5; Col. 2: 12; Tit. 3: 5; Heb. 6: 2 (perhaps), 4 (probably); I Pet. 3: 21. And although Matt. 28: 19 is the only New Testament reference to an actual command by Christ to perform it, and although the context of this passage and its trinitarian formula raise serious doubts about its authenticity as a literal verbum Domini [word of the Lord], yet, even without it, there is little doubt as to the universality of the practice in the Christian Church. In some of the passages just adduced, it is simply assumed that Christians, as such, must have been baptized; and the same is at least implied in others.

(Moule 1961: 47)

Even though C. F. D. Moule made these comments almost fifty years ago, most New Testament scholars today would still agree with him about the universality and self-evident importance of baptism in the early church. Accordingly, two generations later we find the very same perspective expressed in Lars Hartman’s important study of baptism, ‘Into the Name of the Lord Jesus’: Baptism in the Early Church. As the introduction begins, he observes

Nowhere in the New Testament do we find a text to which could be assigned the title ‘On baptism’ or the like. Certainly baptism is mentioned occasionally, and in a few cases the author dwells on it for a while. But baptism is taken for granted and apparently writers need not instruct their readers about it. This circumstance, however, enables our authors to adduce baptism, or, rather, ideas concerning its meaning, when they discuss other matters.

(Hartman 1997: 3)

Decades apart, both Moule and Hartman speak of how widely acknowledged and firmly established the rite must have been in order to leave the impression it did on the New Testament.

Yet this longstanding consensus belies the thin evidence and fragile argument it rests on. The one book in the New Testament where baptism appears routinely as the means of entry into the believing community, the Acts of the Apostles, is regarded by most scholars as a highly selective and idealized portrait of the early church, written long after the events it narrates. In other words, few scholars think Acts gives us a historically accurate picture of early church life. If so, baptism’s regular appearance in Acts may reveal how one writer pictured early church life but not how it actually was. As for the rest of the New Testament, if baptism really was as universal as Moule, Hartman, and many others claim (e.g., Horrell 1996: 82), references to baptism are surprisingly few. Many New Testament letters do not mention or allude to it at all, and the gospels, if references to John the baptizer’s activity are set aside, refer to it sparingly. Hartman seems to concede this very point, even as he claims how taken for granted baptism was.

How does one infer baptism’s universality from textual scarcity – its unquestioned acceptance and self-evident centrality despite the New Testament’s relative silence about it? While meager attestation could reasonably be taken to indicate the unimportance of a rite, Moule and others read that scarcity as evidence for a rite so widely accepted and well defined that it required neither description nor justification, hence little attention. Crucial to this line of argument is that baptism appears as a given when it is mentioned. In the case of Acts, it appears without fanfare at regular intervals in the narrative, always at points when individuals, families, or groups join the ranks of believers.

The taken-for-granted status of baptism is also clear in the apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, at least in one passage. When faced with a faith community fragmenting itself in Corinth, he resorts to the analogy of a single body composed of many different parts to argue for unity in the midst of diversity. Then, as he elaborates on the analogy, he reminds his readers of their common experience when they entered the circle of believers:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

(1 Cor 12: 12–13)

Paul’s claim in these verses that all Christians have undergone baptism and his introduction of it to argue for unity is instructive. Paul does not argue for baptism but from it. That is, he depends on it as a premise from which to address a problem current among the recipients of his letter.

Baptism was so well established early on, asserts the consensus position, that no one felt obliged to describe the rite or defend its existence. Its practice was so settled and so widely acknowledged that when New Testament writers did refer to it, it served as an incontrovertible basis for addressing disputes. This two-step argument, in the final analysis, asks us to accept baptism’s special prominence and permanence by finding it between the lines of the New Testament: baptism enjoyed an unquestioned importance in the early church that the New Testament reveals only at points, and even then usually obliquely.

This interpretation, resting as it does on slim rather than ample evidence, needs the glimpses of baptism we do get to be of a rite so well established that it is beyond controversy. Yet this is hardly the case. In 1 Corinthians, the letter just quoted, baptism also finds itself to be the cause of controversy, not a basis for solving it. Such is the case in the opening verses of that letter, where Paul implies that the conflicting loyalties that threaten group unity stem in part from who baptized whom (1: 10–13). Paul’s response to the situation is noteworthy:

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.)

(1 Cor 1: 14–16)

Why has Paul forgotten his hand in baptizing Corinthians? Explanations have typically assumed that baptism was a permanent fixture one could easily overlook. One commentator notes, “It was not a matter that needed close attention on Paul’s part” (Barrett 1968: 48). Another calls Paul’s faulty recollection an expression of his “relative indifference to baptisms in Corinth” (Orr and Walther 1976: 151). But do we really have here a nonchalance about baptism that reflects how casually it was regarded and administered?

Paul’s forgetfulness has another, more obvious explanation. His imprecise memory betrays uneasiness about his involvement in baptism and his unhappiness that the rite has contributed to divisiveness among the Corinthian house churches and within them (1: 10–13). Paul’s fogginess allows him to disentangle himself from the controversy to some degree. A few verses later, in 1:17, it becomes abundantly clear that he is trying to distance himself from baptism altogether when he makes the surprising claim – unexpected from the lips of an apostle and missionary – that he was sent to proclaim but not to baptize. This distancing reappears in chapter 3 in the division of labor that Paul insists originated with the Lord (3: 5–6): “I planted, Apollos watered.” This metaphor for the founding of the Corinthian community allows Paul not only to separate himself from any part in “watering,” i.e., baptizing, but also to assert priority in the mission to Corinth. More to the point, Paul certainly does not take baptism for granted in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians, as he seems to do in chapter 12.

Other passages from the New Testament also point to a rite that may have attracted controversy as readily as settling it. Some are puzzling, such as the disclaimer in the gospel of John that pointedly distances Jesus from practicing baptism (4:2) even though we are told earlier in the text that he did (3:22). This is akin to Paul’s claim not to have baptized followed by several exceptions. Likewise, just as Paul sought to distance himself from the act of baptism, the narrative of Acts may do the same for another important church leader, Peter. Chapter 10 relates the entry of Gentiles into the early church, a story in which Peter is central. Peter calls for baptism to mark entry to the circle of believers, but does not himself perform the rite: “Then Peter said, ‘Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 10: 46b–48a). Is there some reason why it was best for Peter not to have administered the water?

There are more passages to consider. If we juxtapose two of the references to baptism from the epigraph that begins this chapter, Ephesians 4:5 and Hebrews 6:2, we might conclude that the former’s insistence on single baptism – “There is one body and one Spirit, … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (4:4–6) – was not simply part of a rhetorical flourish in support of church unity but also a polemic against plural baptism. For Hebrews’s mention of instruction about baptisms – not the typical Greek term for baptism (Cross 2003: 163–86) – raises the possibility that some circles in the early church practiced multiple baptisms or recognized several types. Hints of such plurality come from Acts. As historically unreliable as it can be, Acts does report some believers knowing and practicing the baptism of John the Baptist (18:25; 19:3), which seems historically plausible. The situation is quickly and smoothly resolved in the narrative – with a second baptism in the latter instance – so we gain no access to the depth of discord that may have existed over differing baptismal practices and understandings in the early church. Nevertheless, the New Testament provides enough hints of actual or potential conflict so that the consensus view of baptism can be seen for what it is: a misleading characterization. What may have been true in later centuries, that baptism was universal and uncontroversial, was not the case in the church’s opening decades. Just as Acts smoothes over conflict surrounding baptism, as it does with many other early church crises, the claim (or assumption) that baptism was taken for granted obscures very real conflicts over baptism.

Another common way of characterizing baptism has been to use references to it in the New Testament to determine what role it played in the groups making up the early church. This approach has produced a consensus of its own, one sounded steadily and with growing frequency, as scholars pay increasing attention to the social context of New Testament literature and the social realities of the early church. With a view to how baptism functioned socially, a chorus of scholars has described baptism as a rite of initiation into the movement (Hunter 1961: 66; Beasley-Murray 1962: passim; Fitzmyer 1967: 65; Fuller 1976; Wedderburn 1987: 357; Dunn 1990: 159; Carlson 1993: 256–7; Horrell 1996: 82). This classification has become so commonplace that scholars typically state it without argument, let alone giving an explanation or definition of what a rite of initiation is. Much like the claim about the baptism’s universality, its initiatory function is considered obvious and taken as a matter of fact.

Yet on the rare occasion when a scholar makes a case for baptism as a rite of initiation, the conclusion is far from assured. For example, in The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, at the end of a section entitled “Baptism: Ritual of Initiation,” Wayne Meeks fits language about baptism from the Pauline letters into a ritual model originating with Arnold van Gennep and developed by Victor Turner (Meeks 1983: 150–7). Van Gennep coined the term rite of passage (French: rite de passage) to describe rites marking the transition of individuals between stages of life. Barbara Myerhoff offers an illustrative definition:

Rites of passage are a category of rituals that mark the passages of an individual through the life cycle, from one stage to another over time, from one role or social position to another, integrating the human and cultural experiences with biological destiny: birth, reproduction, and death. These ceremonies make the basic distinctions observed in all groups, between young and old, male and female, living and dead.

(Myerhoff 1982: 109)

Such rites have three elements or steps, corresponding to an individual’s departure from an existing status, movement between statuses or social categories, and entry into a new status or phase of existence (Van Gennep 1960: 10–11, passim).

Meeks gathered information about baptism gleaned from the Pauline letters and found it fitted this threefold scheme rather well (Meeks 1983: 157). When Paul wrote about baptism in terms of joining in the death and burial of Christ or as a crucifixion of the old self, Meeks found language of the initiates’ separation or departure from their former lives (Rom 6: 3–4, 6). When Colossians talks of the believer having stripped off the old self and having put on a new self, Meeks detected the movement between statuses and entry into a new status that baptism, as a rite of passage, enabled the believer to make (Col 3: 9–10). Thus, the rite of passage model allowed Meeks to integrate the limited data on baptism in the New Testament into a coherent and recognizable ritual pattern and to pinpoint how baptism functioned in the communities of the early church.

The correspondence between Van Gennep’s rite-of-passage model and what the Pauline letters say about baptism is not as unambiguous as it might seem, however. Meeks conceded that language for the new status the believer assumed in the final stage of initiation – the new self, a child, an existence beyond ethnicity, gender, or social status (Gal 3: 26–8; Col 3: 10–11) – most aptly ap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Ritual Studies and the New Testament
• PART I Entry Rites
• PART II Exit Rites
• Bibliography