On Baptism

On Baptism B. Translated by John Turner. In Nag Hammadi Codices XI, XII, XIII, edited by Charles W. Hedrick. NHS 28. Leiden E.J. Brill, 1990. 

The Southside, a gin lemonade that is baptismal-font water to the traditional East Coast society set, is most typically a spring and summer refreshment, but as Bruce Snyder, the restaurant manager at the 2f Club, which did business with me, observed, The spigot never shuts. That means, according to Mr. Snyder s thirty-six years of experience with his clientele, you retire the white shoes, straw hats, linen and seersucker on Labor Day, but the Southside sails on through, brisk autumn seas ahead. Dark rum, substituting occasionally for gin, relieves any boredom. 

For a Catholic perspective on the dogma of Christ s sacrifice Daly, Ortons of the Christian Doctrine of Sacrifice (1978), 53 IT. Also, for the history of the sacraments of sacrifice and baptism in pagan and Christian rites, specifically the mass and baptism, see E. O. James, Sacrfice and Sacrament (London Thames and Hudson, 1962), 13-27, 104-25, 213-59. 

God. It is a scene that alludes to the baptism of Christ when the Baptist cries out Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world (John 1 29). The Eucharist anticipates the nuptial banquet of the bridegroom Christ on the Last Day (Revelation 19 7-9, 21 2), when the Lamb will feed the faithful with his own being. ... 

There, down on the shore, two white-robed women waded out. The girl he recognised, even from here, and she was being led by the hand into the water. What was this, some sort of baptism Vorman coughed up a clot of bloody phlegm and spat it out. 

Holding on to his hand, she ducked underwater and pulled him under. He let himself go with it, figuring it as his baptism in a whole new perspective. 

Osier, M. (1983). Providence and Divine Will in Gassendi s Views on Scientific Knowledge. journal of the History of Ideas, 44, 549-560 Osier, M.J. (1991). Fortune, fate and divination Gassendi s voluntarist theology and the baptism of Epicureanism. In M.J. Osier (Ed.), Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility. Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought. Cambridge. 

The ceremony started at about 10 30 when Maria and her daughter took their positions before a small table that served as their altar. On this table, Wasson reported, were two holy pictures —one depicting Jesus as a child, the other his baptism in the Jordan River. This confirmed, if further proof were needed, that the Mazatecs viewed their ritual as linked in some basic way with Christianity. Furthermore, Wasson noted The Senora had asked us to take care not to invade the corner of the room on the left of the altar table, for down that corner would descend the Holy Ghost (Wasson and Wasson 1957). 

Despite their authors best intentions, these passages only serve to underscore the fact that both Pauline Christianity and its opponents offered their adherents the same thing freedom from astral fatahsm. Paul s opponents chose as their path certain ascetic practices (hardly foreign to Pauhne Christianity) and propitiation of angehc beings in order not to remain, to borrow Beare s words, puppets of necessity. Pauline Christianity, on the other hand, presented Christ as the only tme savior from a life of spiritual bondage, and baptism as the only tme medium of salvation. 

The secondary scholarship on this subject is voluminous. For scholarship on early Christian baptism, see Edward P. Myers, A Study of Baptism in the First Three Centuries (PhJ). Dissertation, Drew University, 1985) A. Benoit, Le bapteme chretien au second siecle (Paris Presses Unlversitalres de France, 1953) G.R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (New York St. Martin s Press, 1962) G. Bomkamm, Early Christian Experience (New York Harper Row, 1969) O. CuIImatm, Baptism in the New Testament, trans. J.K.S. Reid (London S.C.M. Press, 1953). On Pauline baptism, see E. Fascher, Zur Taufe des Paulus, TLZ 80 (1955) 643-648 E. Klaar, Zum paulinisdien Taufverstandnis, ZNW 49 (1958) 278-282 ... 

Despite Christ s enthronement over the heavenly rulers, however, the author of Ephesians maintained that these beings still exerted an influence over people on earth. Dissolute behavior proved that people hve dominated by the aeon of this age. The archon of the authority of the air continued to rule the sons of disobedience, forcing them to act in the lusts of their flesh (2 3). After baptism, however, humans were no longer children of wrath by nature (2 3). God made Christians ahve with Christ, that is to say, he transmuted their beings into part of the body of Christ, or into the pleroma. 

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