Paul and Jesus

Jesus was baptized by John, and Christians would have difficulty explaining why he would be baptized for the “remission of sins.”¹³ Apparently, Peter and John, at least, had been disciples of John even before Jesus joined the baptizing movement (Acts 1:22; John 1:35–42). Jesus teamed up with John the Baptizer and began to preach the same message: that the kingdom was at hand and people should repent of their sins and be baptized (John 3:22). When John was arrested and killed by Herod Antipas, Jesus took over the leadership of this apocalyptic baptizing movement. The last week of Jesus’ life he brought up the subject of John’s baptism, indicating that it had been the litmus test of his generation. According to Jesus those who rejected John’s baptism had rejected God, because John was one of his greatest prophets (Mark 11:29–33; Luke 7:26–30).

The new idea of baptism “in the name of Christ” as practiced by Paul and by Christians today is dramatically different from John’s baptism. The book of Acts reports that Peter and the rest of the apostles began to preach this new kind of Christian baptism within weeks of Jesus’ crucifixion, telling people to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of their sins in order to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). Ironically, the author never reports that any of the Twelve were ever rebaptized in this new way, but he insists that they began to require it of others.

It is hard not to hear Paul whispering in the background here. The author of Acts is imposing Paul’s view of Christian baptism on his narrative so as to give it apostolic legitimacy decades after the deaths of James, Peter, John, and the first-generation leaders of the movement. He is not writing history but theology—and Pauline theology at that.

At one point in his narrative he unwittingly reveals this. He relates that a married couple named Priscilla and Aquila, disciples of Paul, ran into a Jewish-Christian preacher named Apollos at Ephesus. Although Apollos was a disciple of Jesus and a powerful preacher of the Christian message, he had never even heard about being baptized into Christ—and the author of Acts admits it! The year is A.D. 54—nearly twenty-five years after Jesus’ death. The way Acts describes Apollos is quite striking:

Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. (Acts 18:24–25)

This is rather telling evidence regarding an original form of baptism associated with John the Baptizer and Jesus that had nothing in common with Paul’s baptism.

Shortly thereafter Paul arrived in Ephesus, where he encountered a group of Christians of similar views to those of Apollos. Paul asks them, “Into what were you baptized?” and they reply, “Into John’s baptism.” They say they have never even heard of “receiving the Holy Spirit” (Acts 19:1–7). According to the author of Acts they were glad to be updated and Paul baptized them immediately “into Christ” and put his hands on them, at which point they received the Holy Spirit and began to speak ecstatically and utter prophecies. What the author of Acts does not say, perhaps because he did not dare make such a claim, is whether Apollos, the eloquent leader of the group, had submitted to such a rebaptism.

This becomes doubly interesting in that by the time Paul got to Ephesus, Apollos had left and gone to Corinth, where Paul had just spent the previous eighteen months, setting up a cell group of his followers. In Paul’s letter 1 Corinthians the group is hopelessly divided, with some saying “I belong to Paul” but others saying “I belong to Apollos.” It is surely no accident that the mysterious Apollos is suddenly mentioned in Paul’s letter. But even more to the point, Paul indicates that the divisions among the Corinthians were demarcated by what kind of baptism they had received (1 Corinthians 1:10–17). Paul rebukes the Corinthians from a long distance, through his letter, trying to shame them by saying he could not teach them the full mystery of his gospel because they were not yet ready, with some claiming to follow him, but others claiming to follow Apollos (1 Corinthians 3:1–4). Unfortunately we have no way of knowing Apollos’s side of the story. All we are left with is the implication in the book of Acts that he and his disciples, who knew only John’s baptism, quickly came over to Paul’s side. But apparently things were not nearly so harmonious.