Lord, they were eager to seal their promises of reform, and bind themselves over in advance to be obedient subjects in "the kingdom of heaven," now at hand in a new manifestation. So there "went out to him Jerusalem and all Judæa, and all the region round about Jordan, and were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins."3 So general was this expectation of the Messiah, and so ready were they to prepare the way of the Lord, that this baptism was almost as the baptism of the populace, so extensive was it.

The import of the rite is obvious. It was performed on a circumcised people, the chosen of God. They had broad notions of discrimination between the clean and the unclean. When Aaron and his sons were consecrated for the priesthood, they were washed and made clean; and when Israel was about to receive the dispensation of Moses and of Sinai, they were required first to wash and be clean. Baptism has the import of purification and dedication; and so now, when" Jerusalem and all Judæa " are about to receive the Christian dispensation, this rite is administered to them as purifying and preparatory and dedicatory. Indeed, we find that their High Priest himself is inaugurated by the same rite of consecration: so it became him to fulfil all righteousness; and so, "when all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also was baptized."

This, then, was not Christian baptism: that was first administered a few years afterward to those three

8 Matt. iii. 5, 6.

thousand Christian converts on the day of Pentecost. It was not a baptism representative of "the washing of regeneration;" for some of the subjects of it thirty years afterward had "not so much as heard. whether there be any Holy Ghost; " and then, the Master himself received it, in whom it could represent no such regenerating work.

It was

It was administered to Church-members. a ceremonial purification and introduction of the Church to a higher and holier dispensation. The baptism of John was a formal purification of the people, preparatory to the inauguration of Christianity. He called upon his countrymen to prepare themselves by repentance for sin, and reception of baptism as a symbol of a changed mood to enter into the Messianic kingdom, now on the point of being established." 5

"An opinion, it appears, prevailed among the Jews, that Elias, whose coming was to precede that of the Messiah, as also the Messiah himself, would initiate their disciples by a sacred ablution; and it was therefore necessary, in order to avoid giving the Jews any pretext for doubt respecting either Christ's authority or functions, that both John and himself should accommodate themselves to this popular persuasion." 6

4 Acts xix. 2.

5 Guericke's Ch. Hist., Shedd's ed., p. 36.

6 Mosheim's Commentaries, Murdock's ed., i. 89.

CHAPTER X.

THE

THE BAPTISM OF JOHN NO NOVELTY.

HE baptism of John does not seem to have created, as a ceremony, any interest, as if it were a strange custom in Judæa, introduced by John himself. Indeed, in all the hostility to John and his work, there is no accusation that he had assumed to create another sacred ceremonial'; and in all the hostility of the Jews to the Christians, for their innovations in religious teachings and rites, it is nowhere implied that the Jews regarded baptism as a new ceremony, springing up with this new sect.

We enter, therefore, in this chapter, into an inquiry concerning Jewish baptisms before the times of John the Baptist.

The Jewish systems of religious and social life abounded with ceremonial washings and purifications. These are called in the New Testament "baptisms." 1 Their use was frequent and varied, as the Old Testament abundantly shows. Any commentary on the passages cited in Mark and Hebrews will make this plain.2

1 Mark vii. 4, Βαπτίσμους. Heb. vi. 2, Βαπτισμῶν; διαφόροις Βαπτισμοῖς, ix. 10.

2 The Hebrew Old Testament uses these words mainly to express these baptisms: y Dan. iv. 22. 2 Kings v. 14. Josh. iii. 15.

There is also a class of passages where the same act is expressed by a circumlocution, as in Lev. xi. 32, "It must be put into water."

But the different persons, things, and modes of the Jewish baptisms are not so fully obvious on the face of the Hebrew text, and in its single words.

The Greek translation in the Septuagint casts much light on the line of our present investigation. Indeed, one is at first surprised to see how much baptism the Seventy find in the Hebrew Scriptures.

This Greek version of the Old Testament began to be made at Alexandria about 280 B.C., and was perhaps a century in its progress to completion. That tradition of its origin, starting with Irenæus, may have some historical element in it; but the body of it is evidently of the fabulous and marvellous. He says that Ptolemy Lagi wished to adorn his Alexandrian library with a Greek copy of the Old Testament, and so asked the favor of a translation of it from the Jews of Jerusalem. They sent to the king seventy of their learned elders, who, each in a separate cell, produced one and the same version, each being identical with every other, word for word.

In the absence of all historic data as to the origin of the Septuagint, probabilities must serve us, if we say any thing.

When the Jews returned from the Captivity, the Hebrew was almost an unknown tongue to the most of them, born and educated as they had been among

the Chaldeans. When, therefore, the Scriptures were read in the synagogues in Palestine, they were rendered and explained in Chaldean. So the Jews at Alexandria, settling there soon after the conquests of Alexander, must have lost their knowledge of the Hebrew, and made Greek their vernacular. Their synagogue readings and expoundings would, then, naturally come through the Greek; and so a Greek version of the Old Testament would be begun, ending, in a century or so, in an entire translation. The necessities of the case, therefore, in the natural production of a Greek translation, as well as any business request of Ptolemy, must be reckoned in among the producing causes of the Septuagint.

Long before the coming of Christ this translation had become widely known, and much esteemed and used. It followed the conquests of Alexander and the Grecian colonies, and thus did much to prepare the Gentiles for the reception of Christianity.

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Many of those Jews who were assembled at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, from Asia Minor, from Africa, from Crete and Rome, used the Greek language; the testimonies to Christ from the Law and the Prophets came to them in the words of the Septuagint; St. Stephen probably quoted from it in his address to the Jews; the Ethiopian eunuch was reading the Septuagint version of Isaiah in his chariot. They who were scattered abroad went forth into many lands speaking of Christ in Greek, and pointing to the things written of him in the Greek version of Moses and the Prophets. From Antioch and Alexandria in the East, to Rome and Massilia in the