Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. By EVERETT FERGUSON.

Abstract

This study is best described as an omnibus edition of what but for a most generous publisher should have been at least two, if not three separate volumes. Everett Ferguson has undertaken an exhaustive study of as many documents as at present are known which mention or describe or treat baptism, from the classical and Jewish antecedents through to the fifth century. This is certainly a marathon undertaking. The author begins with a survey of earlier works on baptism relating to this period, in English, German, and French, from 1702 until the reviewer’s own work of 2006, as well as topical studies and collections of relevant texts. With the introduction excepted, the first 198 pages deal with detailed discussion of the New Testament material, akin to the study by Beasley-Murray, though with the benefit of more recent scholarship. Some chapters seem to be an excursus, discussing, for example, the baptism of Jesus in later writers and in art before returning to further New Testament passages. The exhaustive treatment of the Jewish antecedents yields the conclusion that a fundamental difference was that, for all its lustrations, foundational for Judaism was circumcision, whereas, for the New Testament church, it was baptism. Furthermore, in Judaism lustrations and baths were self-administered, whereas in Christianity baptism was administered to a person. The same exhaustive treatment is given to the apocryphal literature. The patristic literature receives the same in-depth analysis, though sometimes—for example in the case of Hippolytus—documents are listed which actually yield practically nothing, and one wonders whether discussing every document of an author separately is the best way of approaching the literature. Subsequent chapters discuss authors in their linguistic or geographical areas, and commentaries and homilies are trawled for teaching on baptism.