For Paul, one is buried with Christ in the water and raised from the
dead upon coming up, when, with the imparting of the Spirit, one is a new
creation (Gal 6:15; Rom 6:4; 7:6; 2 Cor 5:17; Eph 2:10, 15; Col 3:10; Titus
3:5-7) “in Christ.” As such, normal societal divisions no longer existed: “There
is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no
longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28, and see
1 Cor 12:13). Paul saw Christians as having a spiritual seal or mark (2 Cor
1:21-22; Eph 1:13-14, 4:30) by means of the imparting of the Spirit. Thus Christian
water-and-Spirit baptism replaces the mark of Jewish circumcision, a notion we
find also in early extracanonical Christian literature (e.g., 2 Clem.
6:9; 7:6; 8:6; Barn. 9:6; 11:11).
In Acts 22:16 there is an understanding of baptism as being about
washing away of sins, a conception placed in the mouth of Ananias, who baptized
Paul. Paul might have understood baptism also as a kind of washing from sin: “but
you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were rendered righteous, in
the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor 6:11),
though elsewhere Paul (or his school) can use the imagery of washing in terms
of the common ritual of prenuptial washing of the bride, so that the Church—as the
bride of Christ—is prenuptially washed by the word of God (Eph 5:25-27). (Joan
E. Taylor, “Baptism,” The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed.
Katharine Doob Sakenfield, 5 vols. [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006], 1:394)
