Paul and Jesus

For the author of Acts to admit that a form of Christianity was actively and openly operating in Asia Minor and Greece, even into the mid-50s A.D., holding loyally to the baptism of John the Baptizer, the very baptism that Jesus himself endorsed and practiced, is a valuable witness to this form of lost Christianity before Paul. He wants his readers to view this odd group as an anomaly, a kind of backwater phenomenon that quickly shifted to the new baptism “into Christ” that Paul preached. From his second-century vantage point such might have been the case, but in forty or so years following the death of Jesus the proper baptism was that practiced by John and Jesus. Paul’s innovation had barely begun to take hold.

If the picture of harmony that Acts presents between Paul and the original apostles is a fiction, this tiny glimpse we get of Apollos and his understanding of baptism is quite telling. It shows that even decades after the death of Paul, when the book of Acts was composed, the author still felt the need to counter contrary views by retroactively projecting Paul’s views of baptism as the norm to be accepted in the entire Christian movement.

Paul gives us a thorough exposition of his understanding of baptism in his letters. There are three main texts:

For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have been Christ-clothed. There is neither Jew nor Greek [i.e., Gentile], there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26–27)

For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Corinthians 12:13)

All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too walk in a new life. (Romans 6:3–4)

Through Paul’s baptism one becomes a “Son of God,” stripped of the old but reclothed in Christ. Baptism was a means of uniting oneself with the cosmic Christ, and thus becoming one spiritual body with all those who are likewise so joined. The former person is dead and buried—literally, in a kind of watery grave of baptism, but then resurrected to a new life in the Spirit. All former personal identities are obsolete—whether ethnic, social, or gender based. This kind of mystical union can come about only by the agency of the one Spirit that animates the collective divine body of Christ as a whole.

This can sound complex, abstract, and theological to us today but for Paul and his followers it was as real as the physical creation, even though the internal transformation was not externally visible. As we saw in the previous chapter, Paul believed that while the outer body of flesh was in the process of dying, the inner person, now united with Christ as one Spirit, was being renewed each day (2 Corinthians 4:16; Romans 8:10). Being “united in a death like his” opens the way for “the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead to give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). Jesus, raised from the dead as the last Adam, had become this life-giving Spirit.

It should be noted that Paul does not distinguish between “the Spirit,” “the Spirit of God,” “the Spirit of Christ,” or the “Spirit of the One who raised Jesus from the dead” (Romans 8:9–11). That is why he can say, “The Lord is the Spirit,” and that the transformation “from one degree of glory to another” comes from “the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17–18). This sounds a bit confusing unless one realizes that in Paul’s understanding the One God manifests himself in the world through the agency of the Spirit. The generic word “spirit” in Greek is pneuma. It refers to an unseen force and is the normal word for “wind.” In these contexts it refers to the unseen agency of the One God in the visible world—and that agent is the cosmic Christ—who is the Spirit. That is why it makes sense in Paul’s thinking to speak of his followers as “being in Christ” but also of “Christ being in them.” Through their baptism they have become united with Christ, in the one spiritual body of Christ, but that union comes from Christ, who is the Spirit, dwelling in each of them.