There is no validity to the argument that the wilderness was devoid of the amounts of water needed for ritual bathing. The Qumran is an example of a dry desert community which received the majority of their rain only twice a year. There is much evidence that they were able to provide the necessary water for ritual baptism at this site.
No, what is INVALID is the idea that it is legitimate to compare
settlement conditions, for a relatively small and dispersed community, living in semi-arid stasis, and having both access to water, and the time and resources necessary to construct pools for storage, or bathing, or any other purpose; and
nomadic conditions, with a whole nation of a million or more people, in the open DESERT, on the move, living in tents; and what's more: invariably placed under various time-and-material constraints.
The two situations could not be more
dissimilar, except for the nebulous connection between two arid-locations, neither of which shares an actual neighborhood, nor are the sizes of those neighborhood comparable.
It is improper to reason back to immersions in the desert, thinking that Israel
must have immersed themselves in earlier times because of
ex post facto archaeological findings and literary descriptions of traditional practice (extra-biblical) from another era and location; and the
a priori decision on the limits of what manner of rites the term
baptism is allowed to describe.
If, in fact, baptism can lawfully describe a sprinkling, as well as almost any other ritual cleansing (up to and including a full bath), then the allegation that bathing pools were required in the desert wastes where Israel was wandering about, in order that they could fulfill various requirements imposed on them, is mooted entirely.
And furthermore, all deductions from the proposal that something can't happen, or it must happen because immersion is required, are tossed out.
There are two
a prioris at work in this debate.
1) "Baptism has to mean a full body immersion, ergo the desert must have contained, and the wanderers must have possessed, the means to immerse."
Please note that the meticulous descriptions of the utensils and furniture prescribed by God for his religious ceremonies contain no provisions for full-body immersion. The facilities and the water would have to be ceremonially clean and dedicated for any such purpose if such a requirement were imposed. As it stands, washing requirements were either connected to the laver and its sanctified waters, or else they were generalized and needed no dedicated facilities or manner of direction. Once again, the Mosaic law, given in the wilderness, knows nothing of immersion--and especially, it is wholly opposed to the idea of a nude bath (another man-made regulation applicable in some late Jewish religious communities); n.b. Ex.20:26; 28:42. Qumran, Essenes, Pharisees or any other cultural way of life are totally irrelevant to determining a biblical baseline for legitimacy.
2) "The Mosaic Law containing all the regulation for ceremonial life was promulgated under desert conditions for nomads in ancient times; ergo, those spatio-temporal conditions establish what is ordinarily possible and proper, thus informing exegesis.
The difference between the two a prioris is two completely different social contexts accepted as the proper background. One (the second) is original to the text of Scripture when it was delivered to Moses. The other is foreign to the text relative to when it was delivered, and assumes certain traditional practices promoted in the first century are normative for interpretation. The habit of reading tradition back into the text (and beside it) was critiqued by our Lord contemporaneously as containing much error. Which should take precedence?
Also remember that God was the provider for all things necessary to the nation of Isreal for rightful living, including water. Just as a shepherds responsibility to the sheep is to lead them to water, so God did for them in the desert, providing water as needed but only as they relied upon Him. This is a great picture of itself.
How does the acknowledged fact--that God provided everything necessary for Israel in their desert wanderings--demonstrate that they practiced immersion under those conditions? If you haven't established that immersions were required/expected in that setting, then he didn't need to provide them, and he didn't provide them in fact.
You are asking the reader to first accept the theory of immersions everywhere Israel went, and then saying "God must have provided for the need." Anything becomes possible by the same logic. Theorize that Israel needed heavenly moon-rocks for building their 12-stone altars. Well then, he must have taken some beefy Israelites up there and got them. The "if -then" only works when the "if" holds water (pun intended).
Was the wilderness a place of plenty and ease? Or a place of privation, in which circumstances God gave his people what would sustain them, while not removing them from the harshness of its discipline? If baths were the order of the day, then Israel would have had them everywhere. And so would today's nomads. They do not have them today under similar conditions. So much less would they have been available in the ancient days of wandering the wastes.
Assuming for sake of argument your presumption is correct however, and the archetype was modified due to a lack of water, it still is to be presumed that the preferred method would be the pre-exisisting full immersion practice and partial immersion or sprinkling would only be a short term substitute until adequate water supplies were once again to be had. To continue this practice today would be the equivalent of them continuing to live on Quail and Manna after entering a land flowing with milk and honey.
This is false reasoning. You claim that the archetype was "modified." Presumably, you mean that baptism is the archetype, which you claim has a fixed and certain definition. You already "know" what baptism "is supposed to be," and then you point backwards to the desert and the Law and say that the "types" of baptism are allowed by circumstances to be "less" that the fullness.
The first problem is that baptism is itself a ritual and a type. It is a sign, pointing to something else, something spiritual. Which is the same function as the OT rituals, including their cleansings. NT baptism is not a "reality" to which various OT symbols gave witness. Both sets of signs (OT & NT) point above to heavenly realities.
The second problem is the idea that the archetype undergoes any kind of "modification." I'm not completely certain what you might mean by that; at best I suppose that you mean it admits a lesser earthly-representation of itself, in order to fit into earthly conditions. It certainly cannot mean that the later practice (without biblical support) is most certainly valid, serves as an "archetype," and lesser exhibitions must have been authorized due to circumstances. This is a recipe for permitting the change of anything at all, provided one offers a plausible notion of "development." This isn't reasoning at all, but
ex post facto justification. It eliminates the possibility of ever
reforming anything by reestablishing the baseline.
A third problem would be an allegation that there was a "pre-existing full immersion practice" prior to going out the wilderness. But there was no such Law prior to going out to the wilderness, and the giving of the Sinai covenant.
A fourth problem would be in assuming that the sects of Judaism that practiced the full-body baths in and around the first century is the normative background to NT baptism. Why should this be believed? By anyone, including baptists in the present day? Such requirements cannot be established by Scripture, and Jesus himself criticized the rabbinical traditions wholesale, and
in particular various elaborate cleansing rituals of his day, see e.g. Mt.23:26; Mk.7:4.
As for the criticism that to sprinkle/pour is "going backward" (if it be allowed at all under primitive conditions only), this thinking
inverts the OT-NT relationship. The NT rituals are LESS GLORIOUS in outward form than the OT ceremonies. As Paul explains in 2Cor.3, one of the effects (intended by God) of the glories of the OT Tabernacle and Temple rituals, even the whole legal-ceremonial system, was that it blinded many to the spiritual realities. People were caught up in the signs themselves, seeing them as ends, rather than as means to the end--spiritual communion with God. Our ordinances today are fewer in number, and administered with more simplicity, and less outward glory; yet, in them, God's new covenant is held forth in more fullness, evidence, and spiritual efficacy to all nations, both Jews and Gentiles.
Finally, it would be a fatal concession for the baptist to allow for any baptisms by sprinkling and pouring today, even for nomads in the heart of the Sahara. Because if it could be justified by circumstances, then the "baptism-means-immersion-absolutely" pillar of their argument would fall.
Although I believe in water conservation, I do not believe that our situation today requires us to adopt water conserving baptisms. I think we will have to agreeably disagree here.
I don't think you understand my critique. You make it sound as if my argument stands or falls depending on whether or not we are in the desert. I'm not making the
circumstantial argument. The argument is this: if those OT ceremonial cleansings were
baptisms, then baptism
ipso facto does not require full-body immersion for validity. Anywhere. Any time.
This is very specific that the fetus is not considered an individual separate from the mother. Therefore baptizing the fetus with the mother is not baptizing one who does not choose to convert. A born child is only able to convert and be baptized by approval of the Jewish Court. Are you trying to infer here that we should baptize all pregnant women as the child is yet a fetus? If not then we must recognize that born children were not baptized without the permission of the Court. Why would this be if the custom was to baptize all infants on the 8th day.
To your last argument, by the 12th century, you have Jewish cultures conducting all kinds of religious customs, to say that any of these are by default correct is a far stretch. As I previously posted, I doubt even the validity of the Ribbinical texts which arise in 200 as reliable biblical interpretations. The traditions of the Qumran and earlier Jewish communities in my view are far more reliable than those after 200.
I really don't think that you are following the nature of my argument, and why I appealed to a Jewish text. You made a claim concerning Jewish beliefs and practices. You offered us no verifiable references for your claim to knowledge. And, in fact your conclusion that such practices precluded infant baptism does not follow from the premises you offered.
Not only do they not follow, they are refuted by Jewish belief and practice concerning
converts. Where do I say anything about Jewish infants being baptized on the 8th day? The purpose of the text is to point out the fact that
contrary to your unsubstantiated claim that minors and infants were not "baptized" by Jews in mikveh, there is readable and debatable evidence that they were so, going back to the days of Jesus and before. Maimonedes believed that he was defending ancient practice going back to Moses himself. While that belief fails the test of Jesus and the Apostles, it does not fail the test of being traceable to the first century, and even to the intertestamental period.
You keyed in on the connection between the fetus and the mother. And apparently you ignored the far more relevant portions of that halacha (verse equivalent), as well as the fact that this "baptism" of any family and members was a one-time event, which affected even an unborn infant. In other words, the infant WAS "baptized," and as the rest of that verse tells us, so were any MINORS in the house, from infancy up to 13yrs, male and female, by the order of the court. Indeed, all the unborn children for a thousand generations were believed to have been so "baptized" in that single event.
This is so obvious, by the fact that no one whose lineage was presumed to go back to Sinai after so many generations was treated as if he needed this "baptismal" rite. He (or she) was believed to have been so "baptized" in the generation standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai. You really need to come to grips with this form of thinking that is manifestly present in Judaism, and which is about the only SURE THING that goes back all the way to Sinai. Certainly the traditions don't; but the thinking in terms of family solidarity certainly does.
If it was present in Judaism in the 12th century A.D., and believed to be mainstream thinking going back at least to the first century, it becomes extremely relevant to our beliefs concerning the NT setting. Proposing that the most isolated and splintered sects of Judaism closer to those days (Qumran, Essene, etc.) give us the most accurate reflection of first century Judaism is seriously overestimating their relevance. The reason we have more of their writings from those days is not because they were mainstream, but because they were NOT. Their texts survived in caves and hidyholes near the Dead Sea because of the semi-arid and inhospitable conditions there.
In conclusion, we can say this much: the only "hard evidence" so far produced concerning the use of mikveh--for anything remotely resembling "baptism" in NT terms--initiating Jewish converts into that religion, expressly states that "baptism" was authorized for approved MINORS (anyone from infancy to 13yrs) on the basis that it was judged objectively beneficial to that person. And even for an unborn child--whose case is addressed because he is in some sense regarded as a separate human being--he too was judged to have been "baptized" with the rest of the family (particularly in the mother's personal participation), and no later inclusion was deemed necessary to "catch him up" with the other members of the house.
This "baptism" was not required to be repeated by
any subsequent generation maintaining that sect's doctrine. They were all viewed as having received that "baptism" in their fathers and mothers, JUST AS non-converting Jews were believed to have all shared in the "baptism" that took place at the foot of Sinai.
