Baptism as Purification in Early Christian Texts

Chapter 5 discusses baptism as a ritual of purification and as marking the community’s external boundaries. Most authors who wrote about baptism in the second and third centuries described it as an act of purification, an understanding which is supported by the imagery of the ritual itself and by the Jewish and pagan parallels. This understanding made baptism dangerously similar to Jewish ritual, and the first section of the chapter therefore focuses on the efforts of Christian authors to differentiate between Christian baptism and Jewish rituals. Furthermore, this chapter investigates what exactly baptism was thought to purify. The identification of baptism—a physical act of washing—with purification from what would seem to be non- or semi-physical entities makes it a major site for addressing the relationship between external and internal purity, the role of conscious intention as opposed to ritual action, and the place of spiritual entities.