For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. (Gal 3:27)
Commenting on this text and its theology of baptism, J. Louis Martyn wrote:
were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ as though he were your clothing. The liturgy presupposes the removal of clothing as one enters the water, an act signifying separation from “the old man and his [evil] deeds” (Col 3:9). The new robe, put on as one comes out of the water, signifies Christ himself. For he is the “place” in which the baptized now find their corporate life. The sons are made sons by being conformed to the image of the Son (Rom 8:29; cf. Gal 4:19). Paul can affirm the Jewish-Christian image of baptism as a cleansing bath (1 Cor 6:11), but for him the image of new clothing has less to do with cleansing than with equipping the baptized for participation in apocalyptic warfare. Recognizing the danger of its being understood as a cultic act that merely replaces circumcision as the rite of entry (1 Cor 1:11–17), Paul sees in baptism the juncture at which the person both participates in the death of Christ (Rom 6:4) and is equipped with the armor for apocalyptic battle (1 Thess 5:8–10; 1 Cor 15:53–54; Rom 13:12). These are motifs he can easily find reflected in the baptismal liturgy’s reference to the end of the old cosmos with its taken-for-granted pairs of opposites. (J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AB 33A; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008], 375-76)
In a note on Col 3:9 (“Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds”), Martyn wrote:
Cf. the putting away of evil desire and, as a protective covering, the putting on of its antidote, the good desire in Herm. Man. 12. In Col 3:5–15 (cf. Eph 4:20–32; 1 Pet 2:1) the baptismal images of the removal of clothing and the putting on of clothing are combined with traditional lists of vices and virtues. Contrast Gal 5:19–23, where Paul transforms such lists into marks of a community under the power of the Flesh and marks of a community under the power of the Spirit
