Ritual
Practice
Johannine Christians evidently
practiced the rituals later known as baptism and the Eucharist. Unlike John the
Baptist, Jesus putatively offered a baptism “in the holy Spirit” (John 1:33).
He proffered the Samaritan woman “living water” leaping up unto eternal life
(4:10, 14). Jesus’s statement that “unless one is born from water and Spirit”
assumes that his baptism bestows the Spirit (3:5). Jesus himself was the source
of “living water” (19:34). Jesus is said to have baptized more people than
John the Baptist himself—through Jesus’s disciples were responsible for this
(4:1-2). (M. David Litwa, Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the
Second Century CE [London: T&T Clark, 2022], 35-36, emphasis added)
Notice how, Jesus (to be more exact, his atoning sacrifice) is the
meritorious cause of salvation, but baptism is the instrumental means of
appropriating the efficacy thereof in the above.
