Justin Martyr: Baptismal Rebirth
as Illumination By the mid-second century, Justin interpreted baptismal
rebirth (anagennēsis)
in terms of illumination (phōtismos).
He explicitly grounds the imperative for baptism in Jesus’s words, “Except you
are born again, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (John 3:3), and
Isaiah’s words, “Wash, become clean. . . . Though your sins be as crimson, I
will make them white as snow” (Isa 1:16, 18).
Appealing to the apostolic
practice and teachings of Paul, whom he simply calls “the apostle,” Justin provides
the logic behind baptism. Human beings’ first birth is from “wet seed” of their
parents’ intercourse from which they are both in ignorance and therefore live
as children of necessity reinforced by bad habits and an evil education—perhaps
a reference to participation in the pagan rituals that paid honor to demons in
the guise of the gods who deceived devotees. The second birth is from the water
of baptism, now cleansed of sins by their repentance of sin and illumination in
the name of “God the Father and Master of all . . . and of Jesus Christ, who was
crucified under Pontius Pilate, and in the name of the Holy Spirit, who through
the prophets foretold all things about Jesus” (1 Apol. 61). This last
clause, with its reference to the Spirit’s inspiration of the Old Testament
prophets’ foretelling Jesus coming, whether intended or not, would have drawn a
clear dividing line between Justin’s community and Marcion’s.
Justin is quick to distinguish
Christian washing from the removal of shoes and the washing before entering
pagan temples. The latter initiated by the demons, he explains, was a perverse
imitation of baptism and of Moses’s removing his shows before the burning bush
and receiving “mighty power from Christ” (1 Apol. 62). Thus, Justin
implicitly treats Moses’s putting off his sandals and entry into Christ’s
luminous presence in the burning bush as figures of baptismal purification and
illumination. (J. Warren Smith, Early Christian Theology: A History [Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2026], 21)
