idea." says bishop Toniline. " proselyte- were iho-e. and
those oni\ , w ho took upon ihem.-elvc- the obligal ion of the whole Mosaic law, but retained that name till thev
PROSELYTE
661
PROSELYTE
were admitted into the congregation of the Lord as I adopted children. Gentiles were allowed to worship | and offer sacrifices to the God of Israel in the outer court of the Temple; and some of them, persuaded of the sole and universal sovereignty of the Lord Jehovah, might renounce idolatry without embracing the Mosaic law ; but such persons appear to me never to be called proselytes in Scripture, or in any ancient Christian writer" {Elements of Christian Theology, i, 260, 207). Dr. Lardner has remarked that the notion of two sorts of proselytes is not to be found in any Christian writer before the fourteenth century {Works, vi, 522-533, 8vo, and xi. 313-324; see also Jennings, Jewish Antiquities, bk. i. ch. iii). The arguments on the other side are ably stated in Townsend, Chronological Arrangements of the New Testament, ii, 115, etc., Loud. ed.
2. Ceremonies of Admission. — Here all seems at first clear and definite enough. The proselyte was first cat- echised as to his motives (Maimonides, ut sup.). If these were satisfactory, he was first instructed as to the divine protection of the Jewish people, and then cir- cumcised. In the case of a convert already circumcised (a Midianite, e. g., or an Egyptian), it was still neces- sary to draw a few drops of " the blood of the covenant" (Gem. Bab. Shabb. f. 135 a). A special prayer was ap- pointed to accompany the act of circumcision. Often the proselyte took a new name, opening the Hebrew- Bible and accepting the first that came (Leyrer, ut sup.).
All this, however, was not enough. The convert was still a "stranger." His children would be counted as bastards, i. e. aliens. Baptism was required to com- plete his admission. When the wound caused by cir- cumcision was healed, he was stripped of all his clothes, in the presence of the three witnesses who had acted as his teachers, and who now acted as his sponsors, the "fathers" of the proselyte (Ketubh. xi; Erubh. xv. 1 ). and led into the tank or pool. As he stood there, up to his neck in water, they repeated the great command- ments of the law. These he promised and vowed to keep, and then, with an accompanying benediction, he plunged under the water. To leave one hand-breadth of his body unsubmerged would have vitiated the whole rite (Otho, Lex. Rabb. s. v. Baptismus ; Reisk. be Bapt. Pros, in Ugolino, vol. xxii). Strange as it seems. this part of the ceremony occupied, in the eyes of the later rabbins, a co-ordinate place with circumcision. The latter was incomplete without it, for baptism also was of the fathers (Gem. Bab. Jebam. f. 401, 2). One rabbin appears to have been bold enough to declare baptism to have been sufficient by itself (ibid.) ; but, for the most part, both were reckoned as alike indispensa- ble. They carried back the origin of the baptism to a remote antiquity, finding it in the command of Jacob (Gen. xxxv, 2) and of Moses (Exod. xix, 10). The Tar- gum of the pseudo-Jonathan inserts the word "Thou shalt circumcise and baptize" in Exod. xii, 44. Even in the Ethiopic version of Matt, xxiii, 15 we find " com- pass sea and land to baptize one proselyte." Language foreshadowing, or caricaturing, a higher truth was used of this baptism. It was a new birth (Jebam. f. 62, 1; 92, 1 ; Maimonides, Tssur. Bich. c. 14 ; Lightfoot, Harm, of the Gospels, iii, 14; Exere. on John iii). The prose- lyte became a little child. This thought probably had its starting-point in the language of Psa. lxxxvii. There also the proselytes of Babylon and Egypt are registered as "born" in Zion. See Regeneration. The new convert received the Holy Spirit (Jebam. f. 22 a, 48 b). All natural relationships, as we have seen, were cancelled.
The baptism was followed, as long as the Temple stood, by the offering or corban. It consisted, like the offerings after a birth (the analogy apparently being carried on), of two turtle-doves or pigeons (Lev. xii, 18). When the destruction of Jerusalem made the sacrifice impossible, a vow to offer it as soon as the Temple should be rebuilt was substituted. For women-prose- lytes, there were only baptism and the corban, or, in
later times, baptism by itself. The Galilaean female proselytes were said to have objected to this, as causing barrenness.
3. A ntiquity of these Practices. — Was this ritual ob- served as early as the commencement of the 1st cen- tury? If so, was the baptism of John or that of the Christian Church in any way derived from or connected with the baptism of proselytes? If not, was the latter in any way borrowed from the former? This point has been somewhat discussed above, but it will be enough to sum up the conclusions which seem fairly to be drawn from the extant information on the subject, es- pecially the question of the baptism of proselytes.
(1.) There is no direct evidence of the practice being in use before the destruction of Jerusalem. The state- ments of the Talmud as to its having come from the fathers, and their exegesis of the Old Test, in connec- tion with it, are alike destitute of authority.