Via Touchstone, I read an article recently on Women’s ordination that’s gotten me thinking about Baptism, of all things.
Apparently, supporters of women’s ordination, especially among Catholics, have recently been appealing to history to prove that ordination for women is well within the bounds of tradition. William Tighe argues against such a position, and seems to do it quite nicely. But in the mess of it, he mentions that in the First Century, Judaism was a “proselytizing missionary religion.
Gentiles who converted to Judaism—in the case of men by “proselyte baptism” followed by circumcision, in that of women by “proselyte baptism” alone—were full and coequal members of the People of God: they took new Jewish names and the Talmud recalls that Jews who reproached converts with their pagan origins were subject to severe censure. From the beginning, as the New Testament in general and St. Paul on more than one occasion explicitly witnesses, the Church which Christ founded upon the apostles regarded itself as the “Israel of God” or the “true Israel”.
This set me to all sorts of thinking. I’d known for a while that Judaism was a missionary religion, witness Jesus’ complaint that the Pharisees “travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, …make him twice as much a son of hell as [them].” But it had never occurred to me how exactly that might have played out when Christianity came on the scene. Baptism for conversion was the norm for Christianity directly because it was first established in Judaism. This implies that early Christians may not have made as much distinction between “Israel” and “the church” as we are accustomed to. As Tighe goes on to say, “By definition, all baptized members of Christ’s Church are ‘sons of Israel’ and so the question of ‘ethnicity’ is, and always has been, irrelevant to the argument.”
But if that’s the case, why does Paul make such a big deal out of circumcision? Continue reading “Circumcision and Infant Baptism”
neumatikos 