JOHN063 - Why Did Christians Start Sprinkling to Baptize?

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast and today we are talking about baptism.

[00:00:06]Specifically, we're talking about how Christians have done baptism at different points in history and looking a little bit of the rationale of why that evolved into different things as opposed to it just always looking like it looked like in the Bible, which you we're looking at the literal word here, baptiso. in the Bible pretty clearly, literally people were getting dunked.

[00:00:32]Why did that change over time? What does that mean? And how does that affect our understanding of the big grand point of baptism? Even as we think about it today, we started talking about this yesterday. We're going to finish talking about it right after my friend Jeffrey plays some nice music for us. Here we go.

[00:00:57]So if we want to rightly envision what's happening with John's baptism and the origin of all baptismal practices within Christianity as they happen today, the best way to picture it is people getting dunked underwater. Now the question mark is was there more to it? Was there a ceremonial washing as well? Some people theorize that there might have been. You could maybe see some glimpses of that in the text. Clearly, baptism in part was emblematic of being washed clean of sin.

[00:01:26]So, that would make sense. But again, the word baptiso is inarguable. We have a whole bunch of extra biblical sources where the same word is used to describe the same practice. Josephus at one point in Jewish wars talks about um a sword being dipped into something. He uses baptiso. that's written I mean within a few years of when John is written. So that would be to the same people.

[00:01:53]Josephus is from the same background.

[00:01:55]They'd be using the word the exact same way. Josephus also uses baptiso to describe flooding or to flood like people flooding into Jerusalem. He describes that at one point. Plutarch at one point gives an instruction for somebody to plunge themselves into the sea. He uses baptize for that as well.

[00:02:16]Plutarch also talks about somebody being overcome with financial burden like drowning in debt and or you know over your head in debt and there he uses the term baptized for that kind of metaphor that kind of image Plato a few hundred years before I do not know all these off the top of my head obviously just to be super clear on that of course I went and looked up some extra biblical sources before we talked so I there's probably somebody who's smart enough to know all this off the top of their head but you're not talking to them here Plato talked about uh something being soaked in wine and he used the same word like baptized for full saturation or being dunked or dipped. So it just looks like there isn't a lot of debate about what was going on in the early church and indeed early church sources indicate that baptism happened by immersion. But what occurred as time passed is that well there were some challenges like fresh water was hard to come by. If we've got the location of Bethany beyond the Jordan nailed down here, then that means there were some springs by the little hill of Elijah and those springs would have been pleasant, calm, disease-free water where you could baptize people. Well, that wasn't always immediately available to everyone. We take for granted that we can go turn on the garden hose or fill a tub and get a container full of clean, non-deseased water whenever we want it. That was a bit more of a labor in ancient times and especially because Christianity was incredibly popular amongst common poor people. Well, sometimes clean water to get baptized in wasn't readily available. Also, sometimes the water wasn't perfect, but it looks like early Christians baptized in it anyway and they're like, I don't know, just rub some dirt on it, shake it off, whatever.

[00:03:58]But sometimes there were sick people and the current would overwhelm them.

[00:04:01]Sometimes there were there were sick people and you couldn't take the risk that whatever you know bacteria was born in that water you couldn't take the risk of exposing someone that frail to it. So from around a time relatively within spitting distance of the time that the book of John was written we have this other document called the deday. It looks like dash and the deday gives a whole bunch of descriptions of how to actually do Christian life church life Christian ritual. It's a book that to me looks like it's really informed by the Gospel of Matthew as well. But there's an instruction in there on baptism. The idea is you're supposed to baptize in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit in flowing water. And if that's not available, okay, then you can use other water. If you can't get cold water, use warm water. If you can't get either, the dedicay says that you can pour water three times on the head of the person being baptized. And you do so in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Again, that pouring thing is called eusion. So, it looks like pretty early on in Christianity.

[00:05:06]People figured out that the water isn't magic. Jesus is the point. Baptism points to that. And ideally, we'd want to imitate baptism, you know, the way John the Baptist did it and the way Jesus was baptized. Practically, well, I mean, sometimes there's a degree of urgency. Like what about a person on death row? What about a person at death's door? What about a person who's about to go into battle? Well, those are all times where people might have a bit of a reckoning with God and with important things. And what if you can't find the right kind of water to do it?

[00:05:41]So, Christians were making allowances for stuff that would get the point across and is clearly in keeping with the spirit of the point of baptism, even when circumstances or time might not allow. Now, a couple centuries later, as you're getting up toward the 250 and 300 AD, different church leaders are trying to say, "Hey, people who weren't able to be immersed, they still count. They're still Christians." There's one guy, Cyprien of Carthage, who has to go out of his way to say that these other means, not immersion, still count, that sometimes circumstances dictate that. and he wouldn't have been making this case if baptism by immersion still wasn't the main practice by the time we get into the 200s. You know, regardless of how you come at it, let's just try to be fair about this. If it is concluded that any type of baptism is efficacious, it's from God, it's real, it gets the point across, that counts.

[00:06:40]Well, then by convenience and for aesthetics, it's going to be a lot easier to do a fusion or eventually just sprinkling. That's going to be the appealing way to carry this out in terms of practicality and in terms of the visual effect and in terms of what happens as we get into the Middle Ages and the order and sanitation of the Roman era gives way to the lack thereof of the the medieval era. It makes sense that people kind of gravitate more toward the baptismal font involving sprinkling. Now eventually people start baptizing babies and this represents a departure from my understanding of the point of baptism. There are you Catholics and Orthodox believe in baptizing babies. Orthodox dunk them.

[00:07:30]It's pretty crazy. And go watch one of those videos. They're very assertive and how they dunk those babies three times.

[00:07:36]Catholics will sprinkle babies and some Protestants as well will view the baptism of a baby as sort of the initiation into the church and they'll kind of view it like circumcision in the Old Testament. This is a mark of entering into the covenant community.

[00:07:52]Whereas a whole lot of other Protestants and evangelicals would say no, baptism by immersion quickly to follow someone professing faith in Christ is the way to do it. But in the same way, we can sit and talk about the idea of a salute and say, "All right, that had some kind of origin somewhere in something that clearly was meant to convey respect and deference." So, here we get a pretty specific look at the origins of baptism across the last 2,000 years of Christian history, and we can say with quite a bit of certainty, all right, this is what it looked like at the beginning. People were getting dunked. Maybe there was a degree of ritual washing that went along with this and the people who were getting dunked were people who were old enough to know what was going on. But then with the passage of time, we see baptism start to take on different modes, different means, different you physical manifestations of what that is.

[00:08:52]On the controversial side of that coin, Christians of different stripes will rightly look at ways of baptism they don't embrace and say, "Hey, baptism is really important. it really ought to be this other way and others will disagree with them and it'll be a point of I think very appropriate, very reasonable tension. There are right ways to have such conversations. There are destructive ways to have such conversations. Giving people the benefit of the doubt seems like a good way to get off on the right foot when you're having those kind of conversations.

[00:09:21]Still, every mode of trinitarian Christian baptism that exists today theoretically is supposed to point to Christ who is the author and perfector of our faith.

[00:09:35]Baptism is not savior. Baptism is not magic. Jesus is the one who Christians believe is the author of life and the forgiver of sins. Apart from Christ, all baptism does is get somebody wet and you performed a religious ritual. Okay, great. In Christ, however, it's a huge deal regardless of how different Christian groups might nuance that specifically. Bottom line, we've got a crystal clear origin story for the Christian practice of baptism. We knew what it looked like in the early going and we can easily trace the story of how baptism began to look a little different in different pockets of Christianity along the way. And on a personal note, I think that one of the things Christians could do a lot better is celebrate baptism across traditions with each other and rejoice in each other's baptism when that happens, even if we might conceive of it differently. Next time around, we will turn our attention back to Jesus and John the Baptist and the scene that we get here in John.

[00:10:42]We'll probably take a peek at Jesus' baptism in a couple of the other gospels as well. All right, that's good for now.

[00:10:47]I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.

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