Having started out along the Way of Life, the next step for the person whose call by the Lord had been prepared by the Spirit (Did. 4.10) was to join the group, the Church. While the word ‘church’ conjures up for most people today a negative image of musty buildings, legal structures and clerics, for the early communities the word ‘church’ (ekklēsia) would still have echoed its literal meaning: the ‘assembly’ of the Lord’s people. The word ekklēsia was familiar to all Greek-speaking Jews because it was used to translate qahal in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures – we render the word with phrases like: ‘assembly of the Lord’ (Deut. 23.2 [RSV]); ‘all the assembly of Israel, men and women’ (Josh. 8.35); or ‘assembly of God’ (Neh. 13.1 [RSV]). ‘Church’ became our common word because that Greek translation became the basic text of the Scriptures for Christians. But ‘being one of the assembly’ was not simply a common label: one had to be admitted by one who was already part of the community and a formal ritual of admission set a boundary around the group. This act of being incorporated was called ‘baptism’. Here is what the Didache has to say about it, and note that the ‘you’ referred to is in the plural – ‘ye’ – and the teaching is therefore intended for every member of the group:
With regard to baptism, here is the teaching:
You are to baptize in this way.
Once you have gone back over all that is in the Two Ways, you baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit in living water.
However, if you do not have access to living water, then baptize in some other water; and if you do not have any cold water, then you can use warm water.
And if you cannot get access to either [running or still water], then pour water three times on the head in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Moreover, before the baptism takes place, let both the person baptizing and the person who is going to be baptized fast – along with as many others as are able to do so. Indeed, you must instruct the person who is going to be baptized to fast for one or two days before the baptism.
(Did. 7)
To Christians today this all seems so normal – the actions and the words – that we can easily forget to ask some basic questions. For instance: why did they choose the action of ‘being plunged’ – the literal meaning of ‘being baptized’ – as the key event in entering the community; where did the idea of plunging come from; why does joining the community of Jesus need a ritual at all; and how would they have explained the ritual?
This might seem a silly question: was not Jesus baptized by John the Baptist (Mark 1.9, followed by Matt. 3.13 and Luke 3.21), did he not engage with his disciples in baptizing (John 4.1–2), and did he not command his followers to make disciples from all the nations and baptize them using the very words we have in the Didache (> Matt. 28.19)? However, these Gospel passages, with the possible exception of Mark whose Gospel was being preached before AD 70, are later than the instruction in the Didache. Therefore, we have to explain both the choice of the action of baptizing and how that action was linked with the memory of Jesus in the first churches.
For Jews, the ritual that marked their boundary as a community, and as the assembly who had accepted the covenant, was circumcision. Circumcision, along with the sabbath and the regulations regarding food, was the mark of accepting God’s promises (Gen. 17.9–14). By the time of Jesus, indeed for more than a century before his time, circumcision was closely linked to Israel’s self-perception as the covenant people of God (1 Macc. 1.14–15, 60–61; 2 Macc. 6.10). It was the most important boundary marker separating Jew from gentile, those within the covenant from those outside it. So there was no need for any other fundamental boundary ritual – a boundary ritual is an action that distinguishes a group from those who are not-belonging-to-the-group, ‘the people’ as distinct from everyone else.
But there were many other traditions that marked transitions from one state of relationship with God to another for those who were within the covenant community. One such important ritual was that of a bath to cleanse away certain impurities before acts of worship. A leper, for instance, once clear of disease – after seeing a priest – could only be readmitted to the community after washing his clothes, shaving his hair and having had a bath (Lev. 14.2–8). And contacts with ‘impure’ bodily discharges which could make one unfit to perform the service of God were to be washed away by washing clothes and having a bath (e.g. Lev. 15.2–5). We know from archaeological discoveries that in Jewish towns there were pools for taking these special religious baths, while in Qumran there were numerous pools so that this community could see itself as always pure, and so always ready to offer praise to God. It was this ritual practice that was adopted by John the Baptist to mark out those who had accepted his preaching that the judgement of God was imminent. These were the people who had fled sin and repented, were washed by John in the living, that is, flowing, water of the Jordan, and now purified of sin could withstand coming judgement. John’s message was that the crunch was about to come upon a wicked generation: those who listened to him saw the need to separate themselves and be purified of their sins by a bathing. This washing which made his followers into the purified people may have been taken over from existing rites of purification, but it had the effect of making them a group within a group, a people within a people – and, as such, the purification bath became a boundary ritual. The followers of John were a distinct community because each of them had been baptized by him.
In the Gospels, the relationship between John and Jesus is presented, especially in Luke, as one of intimacy, harmony and seamless continuity: they were cousins, John announces Jesus, baptizes him, and then Jesus brings to perfection that which was inaugurated by John the Baptist:
‘“After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.’ And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’
(John 1.30–34 [NRSV])
However, this is the picture looking backwards from several generations later, and, more importantly, with hindsight the evangelists saw all that happened as part of God’s providential plan. But the relationship was far more fraught. John preached that the judgement of God was coming on a sinful generation – the crunch was coming and only those who set themselves apart would be saved. Jesus seems to have had links with this movement, but broke away from it. His message about the imminent coming of the kingdom was radically different: the Day of the Lord was not a grim day of judgement, but rather the day of the Lord’s forgiveness.
In some places in our Gospels (e.g. the image of the sheep and the goats in Matt. 25) there is a sense of dread future judgement, but these instances – which exhibit the more widespread views of the early communities – have to be seen against the broad sweep of Jesus’ statements about the coming kingdom where he addresses God as ‘Father’ and such stories as that about the welcoming father in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15.11–32), or his own practice in the case of the woman taken in adultery (John 8.2–11) – a story about Jesus whose ‘laxity’ with regard to judgement shocked many early communities.
His new community was to rejoice that God had shown mercy and that that mercy would extend to all (> Meier, 1994, pp. 116–30). Whether Jesus would have seen any need for a washing to remove the ‘impurities’ of people before they could see themselves as part of the kingdom is very doubtful. There are so many stories of Jesus and the disciples eating without observing the purity laws (e.g. Mark 7.3), having contact with that which would make them impure, and not worrying about it (Matt. 8.3 and 9.20), and eating with sinners (e.g. Luke 7.34) that it appears that he considered the whole notion of impurity as having been swept away by God’s forgiving love. Purity was not a matter of cups and plates, but rather rooting out greed and self-indulgence (> Matt. 23.25). So, even though Jesus had at one stage in his life been baptized, why was there any later use for a notion of the need for a bath for impurity, and why was Jesus remembered as intimately linked with John’s bath?
The answer lies in the movement of many of John’s followers to become followers of Jesus – and it would seem that with John’s death many more of his disciples became followers of Jesus. One might imagine that if someone has left John and followed Jesus, then he or she would simply have jettisoned what was linked with John and adopt what belonged to Jesus! But this is not how human beings act, especially in religious matters: people carry their histories and their precious customs with them into the new situation. Some who changed over to Jesus may have only seen what John and Jesus had in common such as that the Lord was coming among his people or that there was another special route distinct from ‘ordinary Judaism’; others may have grafted Jesus’ teaching into what they had already heard from John; many others would not have realized the extent to which John’s teaching was still influencing them even when they thought they had moved from one prophet to another. The result was that the early communities that looked to Jesus as the Anointed One actually combined many elements from John’s teaching with elements from that of Jesus. We see this legacy in Christianity to this day: there are some people who look to the Gospels and come away with a message of God’s impending judgement, and their outlook is apocalyptic; others look at the same Gospels and think that this approach is wrong-headed. The legacy of John’s notion of the Day of the Lord as crunch, while it may not sit well with that of Jesus’ kingdom of welcome, is still with us, and is a theme that Christians return to from time to time.
One of those elements of John’s teaching that was carried over was the belief that accepting that the kingdom was at hand formed them into a distinct people apart; they were in a special relationship to the covenant; and while every Jewish boy was circumcised, this group was ritually distinct in that everyone in it, man and woman, had been baptized. For John’s followers this ritual bath was an item of major importance; it was how they thought of themselves as a group and how others thought of them – hence the sobriquet given to their prophet: ‘the baptizer’ – and as such it was a custom they would have held as precious. There is a funny phenomenon we see happening time and again in religion: group practices (the ritual) remain stubbornly the same, yet how they are explained (the theology) changes with circumstances. This is counter-intuitive: we might expect that people would hold onto their theories, and that practices would vary; but it is almost never like that. A group that has made the action of ‘plunging’ a key group moment is going to keep that custom when they see one leader replaced by another, and despite the fact that the way they explain the action has changed many times. No doubt when John opted for a bathing he was thinking in terms of the law in Leviticus and of purifying the people before the terrible day of judgement – we see this in references to his preaching ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Luke 3.3) – but the practice soon took on the significance of being, for those not in the group, the brand of his followers, while for those in the group it became their badge of identity: we are the community within the larger Israel that is ready for what is coming. Later, when that group came under the influence of Jesus – and now saw themselves as his followers – they continued with this badge of identity. You knew that you were part of this new People of Israel – amidst all the other Jews who were children of the covenant – because you had been through the plunging in the living water (i.e. flowing water). Baptism formed the boundary for John’s community, and it migrated to become the boundary for Jesus’ community.
However, while the action of baptism seems to have been accepted by all the followers without much difficulty – all groups seem to generate boundary rituals in one way or another – the assimilation of John’s teaching with that of Jesus would be no easy matter. In the Gospels we see stories which present the two strands living harmoniously, but the fissures that open up again and again in Christianity – as we shall see later with the practice of fasting – can often be traced to the fact of two very different visions of how God relates to us: one can be traced to John and the other to Jesus. These views were never integrated – that would have been impossible – but were shoved together as if the differences could be passed over. Every so often the glue fails and groups reject either the Jesus or the John vision of God’s love. Meanwhile most Christians, for the most part, shuffle on with the ‘lumpy mixture’ of both that we find in the early churches and their great evangelists. Baptism is a case in point: by the time of John’s death it had ceased being simply a requirement of the covenant’s law so that people could offer pure service to God and had become a mark of belonging to John’s people, then the practice continued and it came to be the mark of belonging to Jesus’ people. And as such, it became the key moment of initiation into the Way of Jesus in the Didache and has remained a key feature in Christian practice ever since – but even then, the legacy of the ‘lumpy mixture’ continued in the many divisions that have occurred in the Church over baptism. Some would argue that it was about removing sin that could lead to death (a very John-like view) and so it was very important to baptize infants – and they saw initiation as something happening afterwards; others would see baptism as fundamentally the moment of commitment to Jesus and so would argue that only adults could be baptized. Significantly, in the Didache we have the emphasis on the practice, without any attempt at ‘explaining’ its significance.
But if baptism came to the followers of Jesus from those who originally followed John the Baptizer, how did it become so important that it is a basic element of the didache and the preachers of Jesus? All four of the Gospels have a meeting with John as the crucial moment at the beginning of Jesus’ preaching. In Mark, Matthew and Luke there is the scene of John baptizing Jesus (John the Evangelist is nuanced and does not actually say that Jesus was baptized; while the final editor of John’s Gospel has Jesus’ disciples, but not Jesus himself, baptize). That memory of Jesus being baptized by John had the effect of giving the act of baptism – and, therefore, the custom among John’s people – the stamp of approval by Jesus.
But would Jesus have approved of any ritual? There have been groups down the centuries that have assumed either that there was no need for ritual or that ritual was one of the aspects of religion that Jesus abandoned: surely, they argue, his religion was of ‘those who worship the Father… in spirit and truth’ (John 4.24) and had little role for ceremony. Certainly, down the centuries many Christians have taken this line and have thought that all rituals were a distraction; and only continued with baptism and the Eucharist because they were ‘explicitly’ commanded to do so by the Lord! They were ‘the dominical sacraments’ and as such were exempt from condemnation (but should be performed with ‘as little fuss as possible’). However, rather than starting with theories about what should be the case, let us start with the reality of our human nature.
Imagination makes us human. We understand far more than we see, we know more than we encounter, we learn much besides what we are taught, we communicate far more than we say or write, and what we hear is different from that recorded by tape or transcript. This fact of our nature is both good and bad news for theologians. It is good in so far as it reassures us that human beings cannot be reduced to either isolated centres of rational consciousness or biological processors of sensory stimuli: the world of a human being will always be more than the sum of its parts. It is also good news in that it reminds us that we are ritual animals and liturgy of some sort is ‘hard wired’ into our existence: we both establish our world and make sense of our living within it through complex social rituals, through community validated narratives, and through symbols that reach us holistically: speaking at once to senses, mind and emotions (> Rothenbuhler, 1998). We in the contemporary Western world may have a strong sense that we can distinguish between ‘symbols’ and ‘reality’ – or even have a notion that ‘symbols’ are opposed to ‘reality’ – but that belief is most probably just one of the conceits of our particular cultural market place. Being human is being able to read the ‘vibes’ of a situation or event along with the rationally intended communications of one person to another. Indeed, many would argue that there are human signals that operate within societies at so basic a level of interpersonal communication that we are unconscious of them, or even that such signals are to a large extent beyond our rational control. Thus a gesture that is a fixed part of a formal ritual may equally be a basic gesture that only takes on its most formal aspect when used within that specific ritual: a nod to a passing acquaintance in the street is a ritual action, yet the same notion of acknowledgement can take on a formal ritual form in a salute. Rituals are everywhere in life – not just in musty ceremonies frequented by those who like that sort of thing – because they show us and those around us who we are and what are our most pressing concerns. Our rituals create the world we inhabit and call ‘our culture’. So any group who adopt a way of life, link themselves with a particular view of the universe, choose to follow a teacher, or seek to exist with a definite view of themselves and their history – these are the basic forms of all religions – will develop, whether they set out to or not, a set of rituals that give shape to that lifestyle, that commitment, that vision and that world-view.
The early followers of Jesus had all these factors in their background: they had a distinct view of themselves as the people of the mutual relationship (i.e. the covenant) with God; they had a distinctive history; they had their own ritual of worship at the large, group scale in the Temple and at the intimate family level in the Passover and sabbath meals and they had a vision of the universe: one God who was beyond the creation. This relation, vision, history, commitment was even marked on the bodies of their men folk – for they were distinct from the nations surrounding them – by circumcision. Rituals created the people, and it was in the context of those rituals that they told stories and heard preaching. They even had a sacred set of books because the formal recollection of a group’s memory and laws always becomes a ritual in itself. Now to any group within that group, all those rituals would simply continue – so, for example, when the early Christians referred to ‘the Scriptures’ it was those same Scriptures (i.e. what we call ‘the Old Testament’) they meant; and it would take well over a century for the early stories of the Christians to be ritualized as a sacred memory and gain the cachet of ‘Scripture’ (i.e. what we call ‘the New Testament’).
Not only was ritual in the background of those from among the Jewish people who followed John or Jesus, but also those people quickly developed a strong sense of who they were. They were bearing witness to God’s initiative; not only had they chosen a life of dedication to the covenant, but also they understood it as the Way of loving service. They thought of themselves as a body; they knew that Jesus had died as a result of this way; and they believed that he was the Lord whom the Father – their new way of addressing God – had raised from the dead. Moreover, they were walking along this Way because the Spirit had called them and enabled them. With such a distinctive view of themselves, the world and God, this new group within the People of Israel would need to evolve rituals that expressed this distinctive identity: this evolution was simply a function of their humanity.
Any group which has:
will have a very clear sense of its boundaries, and of who is within the group. Furthermore, it will ritualize the gateways in those boundaries so that the whole group have a badge of identity and newcomers know they have crossed a threshold. For the followers of Jesus, that ritual, inherited from John’s followers, was baptism.
In Matthew’s Gospel, and also in that of Luke, there is a statement of Jesus that must go back to Jesus himself because it contains the implications of the differences between John the Baptist and Jesus – differences that were being ignored by the last quarter of the first century:
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’
(Matt. 11.18–19 [NRSV]/Luke 7.33–34)
Jesus not only proclaimed the closeness of the kingdom of God but also portrayed a loving Father who offered forgiveness and new life. His image of God’s call was of outcasts becoming his intimates around his table. And within this environment of welcome, each was to set out on a new path in fulfilling the covenant in love. Those who set out on this path formed a community – and just as Jesus extended his table to prostitutes and tax-collectors, so that community was to be one that was to be characterized by openness. Anyone who wanted to join the Way, and was willing to set out on the Way, could join the Way. It had clear boundaries, but they were looking outwards and the gates on those boundaries had welcome signs to those outside. It is important to note that this is a prominent feature of the Jesus movement – and many who would accept welcome themselves would find offering a similar welcome to those of whom they disapproved far more difficult. Most religious groups are, alas, better at identifying those who should not belong than in offering acceptance – as Paul would point out to the Corinthians in his first letter to them, or (disagreeing with Peter) in his letter to the Galatians over the matter of whether gentile converts had to follow all the law’s prescriptions.
The openness that Jesus exemplified and which is seen in the Didache – if you accept the Way of life and love then you are ready for baptism without more ado – is quite unusual. Most groups define themselves by who they exclude and so the boundaries have notices like: only those who are… or have… or can do… can enter here. The effect of the ‘only’ is that they tell you this is an exclusive group: to understand it, you are to look at who are not allowed to enter, who are excluded. You have to pass the test, and the test is designed to fail all but the select few. In such exclusive communities the aim is to draw the boundaries so that they point out who is outside, and to keep those inside and those outside apart. But the boundary of baptism was an open boundary: any member of the people of God who chose to live the Way could enter, and within a generation it was realized that if the Father’s love and forgiveness knew no bounds, then not only those who were already within the covenant but also people everywhere could cross the boundary marked by baptism if they too wanted to enter the community that called God ‘Father’ and set out on the path of life. Baptism is the ritual that counts you in, and sets a seal on the decision to walk in a certain way. In the first years it was assumed that this new inclusive group lay within the boundaries of the People of Israel marked out by circumcision and so marked-off from the nations.
But within a very short space of time the community whose threshold was baptism was much larger than that of the Jewish covenant – did these new followers of the Way also need to be circumcised and keep the law? This would be a debate that would rumble on for decades, but the significance of baptism as the boundary ritual was steadily growing as the followers of Jesus evolved from being a group within Judaism to being a distinct religion: ‘the Christians’. Soon baptism would be the mark of every Christian – and by the time Matthew preached in the 70s or 80s, making disciples, which involved didache followed by baptism, from people of every nation was seen as the culmination of Jesus’ message (> Matt. 28.19–20). Discipleship and baptism was to be open to all, and to embrace men and women, Jews and gentiles, slaves and free. It was to create a boundary that cut across the most ingrained divisions of religion, gender, race and class. However, keeping those divisions at bay within the new religion would be a far more difficult task.
In looking at the oral quality of the Didache (> ch. 1) we remarked that becoming a disciple was probably best seen as a process of apprenticeship. A follower of the Way acted as guide and mentor to a person who was seeking to learn how to live the path of Jesus. It would be easy to imagine that a man acted as the teacher for a man, and a woman acted as the teacher for a woman – while much has been made in recent years about how Jesus broke gender boundaries, we should not imagine that his followers found this easy. Paul, for example, is clear that baptism, being in Christ, cuts across the gender divide (‘there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ – Gal. 3.28), but Paul’s followers around the end of the first century who wrote in his name the letter we call ‘1 Timothy’ were far more troubled by the notion of a woman being engaged in teaching (didaskein) a man: ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man’ (1 Tim. 2.12 [NRSV]). This may have been simply making custom into a regulation: men can act as guides in transmitting the didache to men and women, but women can only guide women. But a common point seems to be: whoever taught the apprentice disciple the Way was the one who finally admitted him/her to the community by baptizing the person. This is shown in that the instruction ‘you baptize in this way’ is given in the plural (literally: ‘ye baptize’) and it is addressed to the whole community. There is no hint that there was a special designated person who baptized or that the baptizer had a special role – and there were people with special roles (> ch. 6) in the community. The task of forming new disciples, of training apprentice followers of Jesus’ Way fell on all in the church, and so all could bring their pupils to the point when they would introduce them to the church by baptizing them. This might seem strange as rarely today, in most churches, are people baptized by anyone other than a ‘minister’. However, the memory of the earlier practice is still remembered. Even churches with a very structured view of ministry (e.g. Catholicism) still hold that anyone can baptize – indeed must do so in case of need – while seeing such baptisms as ‘extra ordinary’.
John’s baptism was given in a river out in the wilderness – note it is in raw nature that his baptism was given and not in a special ritual bath – and the notion of being in the wilderness, away from human works, was intended no doubt to instil the notion that his baptism was a return to the time of Israel in the desert during the exodus from Egypt and a new crossing of the Jordan to become renewed dwellers in the Land of the Covenant. The desert and the Jordan were full of memories for those to whom he preached. This memory of river remained with his followers even after they moved over to Jesus. The evangelist John recalls, much later than the Didache, that ‘John [the Baptist] also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim because water was abundant there; and people kept coming and were being baptized’ (John 3.23 [NRSV]). And this choice of a river was seen as the ideal location for a baptism by the early churches: this is indicated by the use of the term ‘living water’ which means the flowing water of a river as distinct from the still water that is stored in cisterns or found in wells. Indeed, this memory and preference is confirmed by the use of ‘living water’ as a metaphor in the preaching (kerugma): standing by the well Jesus promises the Samaritan woman ‘living water’ (John 4.10–11) and also John the evangelist compares the Spirit in the believers’ hearts to ‘a river of living water’ (John 7.38–39). For the communities a baptism in a river was pregnant with memories: of the desert, of crossing the Red Sea and the Jordan, of John baptizing, of Jesus being baptized. And it was gaining new memories of being the place of the new life of the Spirit, given by Jesus, within their hearts.
But not every community could get access to a river, so just as there was a practical compromise on observing the law of Moses such that gentile converts were asked only to do as much as they were able (Did. 6.2), now they can use any other water (i.e. water from a cistern or well) if they cannot get to a river. Wherever the community was located, there it could baptize: there was no specific sacred place to which they had to track off. Moreover, if you cannot get baptized in cold water, then it is all right to use warm water! Much ink has been spilled over why this detail has been added here, but I believe the answer is simple. While the idea of a cold bath might not trouble some, for others it would be a worry and such worries would distract the apprentice from the Way: so they simply agreed that s/he could be baptized in a warm water pool such as were to be found in many of the wealthier houses of the Roman world. The more important point is this: baptism was important as marking the completion of apprenticeship and the entry to the community, but they were not to get too worked up about the ritual details. Baptism was not a magical rite, unlike other initiation ceremonies into religious movements in the Graeco-Roman world, where if any little detail were left out then the candidate would not be ‘really done’. This sense of practicality, and not paying too much attention to material details, reaches its highpoint when the Didache says that if you cannot find a place to have a full plunging then simply baptize by pouring water three times on the head. Ritual was a boundary marker, not a process where every detail was a matter of life and death. Down the centuries many Christians have become so obsessed with the details of ritual – thinking of it in a manner akin to how we view correct surgical procedures today: one slip and it could cost a patient’s life – that they have made those details the cause of divisions among Christians and within churches! We still have much to learn from the Didache with its insistence on setting out on the way of love, alongside a balanced practicality about ritual forms.
Last, there is the instruction to fast before the baptism. The Didache sees this as very important for the candidate – it repeats its message to stress the point – and it desires that it involve as many as possible in the community the candidate is about to enter. And again we see the Didache setting out the ideal, but also being pragmatic. Get as many as possible to fast, at least the baptizer and the candidate, but at the very least the candidate for two days, or, if even that is too difficult, then just one day! But why fast if baptism is the culmination of a process of entering the group? How could fasting assist the process?
We see fasting as something punitive or restorative. Either fasting is penitential – the notion of taking on suffering to somehow ‘make up’ for past sins; or fasting is restorative in the sense that we have over-indulged, and now by depriving ourselves we are training ourselves in proper discipline. But there is another strand to fasting in Judaism that we have all but forgotten: fasting as preparing and fine-tuning ourselves so that we can appreciate an encounter with God (> ch. 4). This could be described as fasting as ‘psyching-ourselves-up’ for the significant moment of baptism. When Jews in Jesus’ time recalled Moses receiving the law on Sinai they remembered that he had to prepare for this meeting by fasting for 40 days (Exod. 34.28). Likewise, Daniel fasted while he awaited his revelation (Dan. 10.3). The communities of the Jesus movement would also have thought of him fasting as a preparation for the start of his public ministry (> Mark 1.13/Matt. 4.2/Luke 4.2). So by fasting the candidate was being finally prepared for formally setting out on the Way – but this was a path she or he would follow in company, and so the whole community by fasting was helping the candidate with her/his preparation for this moment of change in her/his life (> O’Loughlin, 2003a, pp. 95–100).
Knowing what the Didache tells us about fasting before the event of baptism, we are then able to understand other references to fasting from the early Church. When Luke describes how Paul was baptized – a description that is later than the Didache – we see that he believes that Paul followed what was clearly the standard practice and routine of the churches. For the three days between the revelation on the Damascus road and his baptism, Paul neither ate nor drank (Acts 9.9–18). Likewise, before Paul set aside Barnabas and Saul for special work, Luke points out that they prayed and fasted (Acts 13.1–2); and when Paul was about to entrust the care of a church to elders he did so with prayer and fasting (Acts 14.23). Incidentally, this practice of fasting before baptism continued for many centuries – we have many references to it in second-century documents – and it is the origin of the season of fasting before Easter, called ‘Lent’ in English. Easter Night was the great moment for baptisms and it was prepared for by a fast of 40 days by the whole community. Later, when infant baptisms became the norm (and these did not take place at the Easter Vigil) the custom of the Lenten fast continued – and acquired a new explanation as a time of penance.
What is important in baptism is not the details of the ritual but that it marks a moment of decision in life: now, fully trained and shaped as a disciple, someone sets out in a new direction on life’s journey. Baptism is a moment in a process: the preparation by the Spirit, then the apprenticeship with the teacher, then life moving forward as part of the community of disciples. We sometimes think that baptism took place immediately someone had recognized the power of the gospel. We then point to the story of Philip baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch after he had explained how the Scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus (Acts 8.26–40) or how Paul baptized the jailer in Thyatira, along with his whole family one night ‘without delay’ (Acts 16.25–34). However, the whole point about these stories is that they are the exceptional cases – and so worthy of dramatic note which show that the normal practice was otherwise. Discipleship had to be learned: it was not the passing whim of a moment. A period of learning with one member of the community as teacher, then a time of fasting, and then baptism marking the beginning of the new Path of Life.
Rituals are events in themselves. Normally we do not ask why we shake hands, bring flowers, or join our hands in prayer: we just do it. But when someone does not know our rituals we are faced with the question of why do we do this or that, or we ask what the ritual means. Then follows an explanation in which we either tell how we imagine the ritual originated or else try to explain what it means now by ‘reading’ the various elements of the ritual as if it were an allegorically rich play. Most Christians today would be able to give several of these explanations of baptism. Here is an example: why do we do it? Because Jesus’ last command to us was to do it, and he is Lord, so we do it! Or this one: water washes us and makes us clean, so pouring water over us in baptism washes away sins or ‘symbolizes’ them being washed away! Or, water that covers us would drown us, so this is passage from death to the old self and a birth as a new self. Or we might explain it by pointing to the font/pool as the birthing pool of Christians. There are umpteen such explanations and most of them can be tracked back to the first century and the writings of Paul (e.g. Rom. 6.4) and the evangelist John (John 3.3–6). The strange thing about all such explanations is that while each seems to ‘make sense’ of the ritual, they are all different and they do not dovetail together despite the desperate efforts of many fundamentalists!
The actual custom of the community is the fact, the new life is the reality, and the ‘explanations’ are always secondary. The custom forms the continuity, the explanations change. We should think of the ritual as a great drama where every person who attends a performance can take away a new meaning from it. The drama is the thing, and the many interpretations are a tribute to its depth and richness.
This is an important point to remember when we read the Didache. The Didache tells the details of the custom – something each disciple needs to know so that she/he can initiate another – but it does not give us any ‘explanation’. That is something that the teacher can draw out in response to questions, or they can take it from one of the many ‘explanations’ that were being preached among the communities. Baptism as with all other Christian liturgy is an event – which can indeed generate any number of explanations/theologies; but it is neither a theology class nor some abstract chunk of doctrine being simplified by role-play.