I am certain (as much as a person 2000 years can be) that John simply adopted an existing ritual to Christianity. If you've read the original discussion that lead to the creation of this thread, you know that Mithraism and Zoroasterians practiced baptism and infant baptism. If I recall correctly, Zoroaster himself performed the baptism on the new born of the King. That was some 4000 years ago and I am not sure if the rite existed before then. Here is a little tad bit from Indian Hills Community Church of Lincoln, Nebraska biblebb.com
Origins and Types of Baptism
Exploring the Origins
Before we look into what the Scriptures say about baptism, perhaps it would be helpful to study something of the background of baptism apart from Scripture. As the New Testament opens, baptism is already being practiced and everyone seems to recognize and understand its significance. There were no questions like, “What is baptism? Why would you be putting people in water?” They recognized it for what it was. Yet when the Old Testament closed four hundred years earlier, there was no baptism going on. Somewhere between the time the Old Testament closed and the New Testament opened, the practice of baptism was started and became a recognized and understood religious activity.
Jewish Proselytes. Two areas will help us better understand the possible origins of baptism. The first is Jewish proselyte baptism. In the first century, a Gentile convert to Judaism was required to undergo circumcision, to undergo a ritual bath or cleansing called baptism, and to offer a sacrifice. The ritual bath or baptism symbolized the cleansing from his defilement as a Gentile and his identification with the nation Israel. It is not known how early this practice developed. The information we have comes from the last half of the first century, but the indications seem to be that the practice goes further back and was being practiced even before the time of Christ. This helps us understand why the Jews had no questions about what baptism signified as John practiced it among the Jews. They had adopted the practice themselves to identify converts who had become true adherents to Judaism.
Mystery Religions. Baptism was also practiced in another religious area: the mystery religions. The mystery religions were actually a variety of religions, dominant over a period of about a thousand years, from the time of Alexander the Great to several centuries after Christ. Through all this time the mystery religions pervaded the Greek and Roman world.
The mystery religions were a mixture of Greek and Roman ideas, strongly influenced by Oriental thought. The Greek religious system had, in effect, gone bankrupt. It started out strong, but its problem was in tending to emphasize the bright, sunny side of life—it made no provision for death or life after death. It made no provision for the dark side of life as we might call it. The Greeks soon came to realize that a religion that did nothing but speak about people who were in the bloom of health and about places where everything was going well was not worth much because it did not match reality. With the collapse of the Greek gods, the Oriental influence entered, and with it the developing of the system called mystery religions.
The reason we are interested in the mystery religions is because one of the requirements for an initiate entering a mystery religion was for the individual to be baptized. This symbolized a cleansing, as in Jewish proselyte baptism, and it also identified the person with that particular religious group. So with baptism already being practiced in the mystery religions, it would be common enough for the people to recognize its meaning.
It seems two things were present among both the Jewish proselyte baptism and the mystery religion baptism—they both symbolized that a cleansing or purification had taken place, and they were both a means of identification. They identified a person with a particular religious group or sect. In New Testament times baptism was probably a recognized practice, well understood by people because of its use among various religions... |
