Sunday, March 26, 2023

W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson struggle to Explain Baptism for the Dead in 1 Corinthians 15:29

 

The only meaning which the Greek seems to admit here is a reference to the practice of submitting to baptism instead of some person who had died unbaptized. Yet this explanation is liable to very great difficulties. (1) How strange that St. Paul should refer to such a superstition without rebuking it! Perhaps, however, he may have censured it in a former letter, and now only refers to it as an argumentum ad homines. It has, indeed, been allege that the present mention of it implies a censure; but this is far from evidence. (2) If such a practice did exist in the Apostolic Church, how can we account for its being discontinued in the period which followed, when a magical efficacy was more and more ascribed to the material act of baptism? Yet the practice was never adopted except by some obscure sects of Gnostics, who seem to have founded their custom on this very passage.

 

The explanations which have been adopted to avoid the difficulty, such as ‘over the graves of the dead,’ or ‘in the name of the dead (meaning Christ),’ &c., are all inadmissible, as being contrary to the analogy of the language. On the whole, therefore, the passage must be considered to admit of no satisfactory explanation. It alludes to some practice of the Corinthians, which has not been recorded elsewhere, and of which every other trace has perished. (W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson, The Life and Epistles of St. Paul [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964], 412-13 n. 7)