The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

JOSEPH M. BAUMGARTEN 103
It is routinely claimed that John preached a “conversionary repentance” by
baptism, an act once for all which was not repeatable nor to be repeated.
That is a fine description of how baptism is portrayed in the Epistle to the
Hebrews 6:1–8, and such a theology came to predominate within catholic
Christianity. But ablutions in Judaism were characteristically repeatable,
and Hebrews must argue against the proposition that one may be baptized
afresh. Only the attribution to John of later, catholic theology of baptism
can justify the characterization of his baptism as symbol of a definite
“conversion.” 15
In Jewish thought repentance tends to be viewed, like cleansing, as a perennial
process. 16 True, the Rabbis took a very dim view of the sinner who
declares a priori, “I will sin and repent, and do both again” (m. Yoma 8, 9),
but they were not oblivious to the fallibility of human nature. Can we
assume that, John, the prominent advocate of immersion for the sake of
repentance, would have denied its value for one who had sincerely
immersed himself in the past? The penitents of Qumran apparently did not.
Another issue that has been raised with regard to the baptism of John
is its administration by an authority figure, rather than the allegedly selfadministered
immersions of Qumran. Yet, the presumption that immersions
at Qumran were not subject to the control of any communal
authority should by no means be taken for granted. True, the available
sources do not specify that this was the function of any particular supervisor,
but they do indicate that there were those to whom the privilege of
immersion was denied. Concerning one who fails to obey the rules of the
sect, the Rule of the Community 5.13 says, “He must not enter the water in
order to touch the purity of the men of holiness.” From this one may
plausibly infer firstly, that immersion was one of the requirements for
admission into the dxy and secondly, that it was subject to some form of
communal control. This was clearly the case with the Essenes, where a
neophyte who had successfully completed a one year probation was
“allowed to share the purer kind of water for purification, tw= n pro\j
a(gneian u(da/twn” (J.W. 2.138).
15. Bruce D. Chilton, Judaic Approaches to the Gospels (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994),
26–27; cf. James A. T. Robinson, “The Baptism of John and the Qumran
Community,” in Twelve New Testament Studies (Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1962), 17;
Leonard F. Badia, The Qumran Baptism and John the Baptist’s Baptism (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1980), 49; and Hartmut Stegemann, Die Essener, Qumran,
Johannes der Taufer und Jesus (Freiburg: Herder, 1993), 306–7 are among those who
claim the one-time character of John’s purification.
16. See Tertullian’s caricature of this fact: Israel cotidie lavat quia cotidie inquinatur (Bapt.
15.3), approvingly cited by Emil Schürer, Geschichte des Jü dischen Volkes im
Zeitalter Jesu Christi (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1898), 3:131.