Acts lays great emphasis upon baptism in the
Name, followed by the reception of the Spirit for all Christians. But except
that it was given now in the “Name of Jesus” the rite itself seems to be the
one formerly preached and administered by John the Baptist. He too preached a
baptism of “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4), exactly what
Acts describes as a “blotting out” of sins (2:38; 3:19). A person thus “freed”
(Acts 13:38-39) would be ready for the great judgment at the founding of the
new kingdom. This is exactly the sort of forgiveness Jews have always prayed for,
especially in the great rituals of the high holy days. Paul opens an entirely new
conception of baptism when he says that the rite removes one’s sinful “nature,”
that one is baptized into Christ’s death in order to walk in a newness of life,
now dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus, become a new creature in
Christ Jesus. This the Fourth Gospel expressed in terms of a new “birth” of water
and the Spirit, a figure that created the great sacramental conception of
baptismal regeneration. Even if the figure of birth in the Fourth Gospel is “later”
(which, as it well known, I do not think likely [“John a Primitive Gospel,” JBL, LXV (1945), 145-82]), still the new
sacramental idea is expressed so clearly by Paul himself in his letters that he
must have been preaching it long before Acts was written, since he is the
famous hero of Acts. That is, theological and sacramental thinking about
baptism was fully alive at the stage of Christianity Acts describes . . . (Edwin
R. Goodenough, “The Perspective of Acts,” in L.E. Keck and J.L. Martyn, Studies in Luke-Acts [London: SPCK, 1968],
51-59, here, pp. 53-54)
