A very helpful patron just bought me an expensive but crucial new book on the origins of Christian baptism: Donghyun Jeong’s Pauline Baptism among the Mysteries: Ritual Messages and the Promise of Initiation (De Gruyter, 2023). It establishes what we have long suspected (and many scholars before have argued): the Christian idea of baptism was adapted from a ubiquitous employment of baptism rituals in the Hellenistic mystery cults. Yes, like everything else, every instantiation of the core phenomenon is different in many particulars, but the same in abstract essentials. And it was adapted syncretically: the ritual and its ideology was recast in the light of Jewish precedents and thought, and to suit the core Christian mission and creed. But the central idea of it comes from pagans, who already had essentially the same thing for centuries.

What I’ve Said Before

Today I will summarize how we can be sure of this. So this article now continues my series Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. and Virgin Birth: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. And as I pointed out in those articles, I am not endorsing inept or crank arguments to these ends, where false claims are made about the precedents or their relationship to Christianity. Forget everything “you heard on the internet” or read in some amateur’s book. If it’s not here, it might not be true. Only what’s here has been vetted as correct. This includes getting right how religious syncretism and cultural diffusion models actually work, which I have already covered in No, the Original Christians Did Not Loot Egypt. If you don’t understand the methodology here, you will need to read that article first.

There, I use baptism as only one of several models, showing that crank claims that baptism “was stolen from Egypt” are false, but that once we drop all the logic-chopping and bogus or misinformed claims and ideas, there remains evidence left over of diffusion, even possibly “from Egypt” but not solely, and not in the ways claimed. I make this point there for several aspects of Christianity, including baptism. The upshot is that originally, Egyptian Osiris cult had no such idea as salvific baptism. It had various water rituals, but none corresponding to what we’re talking about here. But then under Greek influence, when a Hellenistic mystery cult of Osiris was developed (which happened before Christianity arose), it adopted the generally pervasive idea of salvific baptism, which we know was pre-Christian because we have textual and archaeological confirmation of it as common in other mysteries before Christianity could ever have been an accepted influence on them.

In short, both the Egyptian Osiris cult and the Jewish Jesus cult borrowed their idea of baptism from existing Greek mystery religions. I represented this graphically like so:

Here, just as with Osiris, we see the key elements that distinguish Christian baptism from prior Jewish water rituals are the very elements that come from Greek paganism: the baptism emulates or shares in the death and resurrection of the savior god (as Paul explains in Romans 6:3–4, as well as his successors in Colossians 2:12), bringing some kind of union or communion with that savior god that ensures salvation (as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 12:13), and in result, it was simply assumed one could be baptized as a proxy for the dead (as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15:29) and thus transfer the same salvation to them (if perhaps they died before they could undergo the ritual: see the study by Mormon analysts David L. Paulsen and Brock M. Mason, “Baptism for the Dead in Early Christianity,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 19/2 (2010): 22–49).

Certainly, this borrowed pagan idea was transformed to be suitably Jewish, framing it into the role of mass resurrection ideology and blood atonement magic, and in line with the need of the Christian creed and mission, whereby a baptism was also a formal legal adoption by God as his sons (hence Christians originally imagined themselves by such monikers as Sons of the Living God: Romans 9:26, Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6). But the core elements of baptism as initiation into the corresponding “Lord’s” salvation, being thus reborn to share in some way in his triumph over death, is pagan.

As I wrote last time:

After Greek mystery cult entered Egypt and transformed Egyptian religion into the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, we get a completely different thing going on [than mere spellcasting on the mummies of old], as we can see from Apuleius, a second century Roman author who devoted a whole chapter of his novel to describing the matter. There, we see what has changed: now the individual while alive undergoes a ritual securing their future resurrection; the ritual is a baptism that emulates and thus recapitulates a death-and-resurrection; and the gods named are the ones who ensure it will carry forward into the afterlife. One is now seeking to become united with Osiris so Osiris can be your savior.

Apuleius goes on to explain this as being “born again.” The gods will intervene directly. It isn’t a third party ritual over your corpse after you are dead. It’s a personal initiation you undergo, uniting with the Lord in spirit (emulating his death and resurrection through live ritual reenactment). This is not Egyptian. It’s Greek. Of course, by then it had become Egyptian, just as the Persian [Zoroastrian] model of resurrection became Jewish. But it’s not coming from there. And in fact it is clear the first Christians knew this: they saw this model everywhere, not just in Egypt, and adopted the generic Hellenic package, not anything specifically Egyptian.

And once again we have specific evidence demonstrating this: at one point Paul casually mentions baptism for the dead, as if that was a standard feature of Christianity in its original days. He says, “Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them?” This is very peculiar. The Christian baptism was not merely, as for Apuleius, a ritual death and resurrection (again, see Romans 6:2-4); it was a ritual someone could perform in proxy for someone else who had already died.

There is certainly no Egyptian precedent for this—other than, we might suspect, in Hellenized Osiris cult. But we know it didn’t come from there. Because we have texts and physical inscriptions establishing this as a feature of mystery cults generally (see Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians: A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (1975), pp. 275-76; also alluded to in Plato’s Republic 364e-365a.

Conzelmann cites a 5th century quotation of ancient Orphic literature, on the vicarious initiation of the dead in the mysteries of Bacchus-Dionysus, by the pagan commentator Damascius (On Phaedo §11), and a second-century archaeological inscription confirming similar vicarious initiations involved ritual washing in the mysteries of Mithras (katelouseto, a ritual “bathing,” Supplementum Epigraphicum §4.649, Lydia; and identified by its call to Anahita, the mother of Mithras). But the citation of Plato shows the Dionysian version began centuries before Christianity. That this Bacchic initiation-salvation ritual involved a baptism (a washing ceremony) is not explicit anywhere, but would be typical (cleansing rituals appear to have been imagined essential to any sacred rite); and, indeed, we can infer it probably served as the precedent taken up by Mithraism and Christianity, thereby explaining how both came to it at the same time (it is unlikely Christianity or Mithraism adopted it from each other, as the most recent scholarship finds that they arose in the early first century, and were both then too small and obscure to have much concern for each other: see Roger Beck’s The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire).

Further confirming this conclusion is that Mithraism isn’t the only example of employing baptism as an essential component of initiation into a savior cult. We have to reconstruct all this for the Bacchic rite from various sources because we have no detailed account of it; but we do for Osiris cult. In Apuleius, Golden Ass 11, we find this:

The gates of the underworld and the guardianship of life are both in Isis’s hands, the priest said, and the rites of initiation are akin to a willing death and salvation through her grace. Indeed, [many are] summoned by the power of the Goddess to be in a manner reborn through her grace and set again on a path of renewed life. When I had bathed according to the custom, the priest asked favor from the gods, and purified me by a ritual cleansing, sprinkling me with water. … [And by such and more rituals] I reached the very gates of death, treading the threshold of Persephone [the Queen of Death], yet I passed through … and returned. … [But] I had not yet been introduced to the mysteries of the invincible Osiris, [which were] distinct, [but] linked, even joined, to that of Isis. [Yet I] was being sought after as a servant of his great divinity as well.

Notice how the core notion of salvific baptism is here merged with specifically Egyptian ways of conceptualizing it here, with reference to the myth of Isis reassembling Osiris, a call-back to “the gates of death,” and the role of the sibling gods working together, and likewise the famed pageantry of Egyptian religion generally. Just as Christian baptism took the core pagan package (baptism as an initiation ritual, and as being reborn under the savior’s wing to ensure a pleasant eternal life) and adapted it in ways more peculiarly Jewish. They are therefore not identical: they each are framed according to their respective local religious mythologies and ideologies; but they are clearly borrowing the same basic package: eternal salvation through a water-ritual initiation symbolizing death and rebirth.

That skeleton just needs a local cultural skin. The skin differs by culture (Egyptian, Jewish, Persian, Greek), but the skeleton underneath is basically the same thing, and that comes from an external influence: Hellenic pagan mystery religion. It is not something Jesus or the Apostles invented. It wasn’t even what John the Baptist was doing, although it shares a point of similarity: both Jewish and pagan baptism cleansed the recipient of sins. But John’s baptism was only a temporary temple-substituting sin-cleansing (Mark 1:4, Acts 13:24, Acts 18:25, Acts 19:2-6); the Christian baptism was enduring, and did not merely assist a penitent in repenting of sin, but secured eternal salvation through union with a dying-and-rising god’s death-and-resurrection, being reborn a new person, a son of God and thus heir to His Kingdom. Underneath all those assembled Jewish ideas is the core pagan idea of baptism as an initiation to eternal salvation through union with the savior—who was usually, like Jesus, some kind of dying-and-rising demigod.

The word itself could be a variable. “Baptism” meant, literally, a dunking. Any given mystery baptism may or may not have involved some form of that (Apuleius refers to bathing but the concluding act was a sprinkling). The core element is a water ritual having the symbolism and effects just described; rather than the means of carrying out the ritual (this is how baptism is understood even still today). How simple or elaborate the ritual is is variable. The mechanical details of the ritual are variable. How brief or thorough the contact with water is is variable. So, early Christian baptism may have adapted Jewish immersion rituals, while Greco-Egyptian baptism adapted Egyptian sprinkling rituals (and then some later Christian sects would do the same). So what is being adapted is only the savior-god-sharing “water initiation” generally; some versions of which may have then been called “baptism” specifically—though now that English word includes both.

And this seems to already have been the case. For even the Christian polemicist Tertullian tells us (On Baptism 5):

“But the nations, who are strangers to all understanding of spiritual powers, ascribe to their idols the imbuing of waters with the self-same efficacy!” So they do. But they cheat themselves with waters which are widowed. For washing is the channel through which they are initiated into some sacred rites—of some notorious Isis or Mithras. The gods themselves likewise they honor by washings. Moreover, by carrying water around, and sprinkling it, they everywhere expiate country-seats, houses, temples, and whole cities: at all events, at the Apollinarian and Eleusinian games they are baptized [tinguuntur]; and they presume that the effect of their doing that is their regeneration and the remission of the penalties due to their perjuries. Among the ancients, again, whoever had defiled himself with murder, was wont to go in quest of purifying waters. … [W]e recognise here also the zeal of the Devil rivaling the things of God, while we find him, too, practising baptism [baptismum] in his subjects. What similarity is there? The unclean cleanses! The ruiner sets free! The damned absolves! He will, forsooth, destroy his own work, by washing away the sins which he himself inspires!

It is telling that Tertullian makes no argument about the word or the details being different. He recognizes these are all baptismal rites, and that they often have similar functions (“regeneration” in reference to resurrection; “remission” in reference to sins), and were recognized as initiatory rites for the mystery religions (in particular those of Isis-Osiris and Mithras; the reference to the Eleusinian games alludes to another mystery cult associated with Demeter, which involved a baptism in the sea). Tertullian’s only argument against these other baptisms is that those of his God were real (his baptism actually worked), while the others were fake. Likewise, before that, Justin Martyr had made the broader point that baptism resembles all religious water-purification rituals, which he credits as faked by devils to diminish the “true” Christian version (Apology 62–62). As put by Rafael Rodríguez in his section on “Baptism” (pp. 361–91) in the new Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries: From Celsus to the Catacombs (T&T Clark, 2019), these ancient Christian apologetics “demonstrate that Christian baptism belonged in a common genus, one shared with others (Jews as well as pagans),” so Christians had to argue theirs differed “as a species” from other purificatory and initiatory water rituals all around them.

There is a valuable and source-rich analysis of all this in the master’s thesis of Matthew Michael Connor, “Baptism on Behalf of the Dead: 1 Corinthians 15:29 in Its Hellenistic Context.” Connor not only discusses the problems of apologetics attempting to “get rid” of these obvious truths for the threat they pose the faith, and the real way religions “hybridize” precedents to create new versions of old things, but also provides ample context and source citations for this understanding of baptism. An earlier study, Joseph Ysebaert’s 1962 dissertation “Greek Baptismal Terminology: Its Origins and Early Development,” likewise explores how the precise vocabulary was not particularly relevant: ancient Christians recognized their baptism had precedents (even diabolical “imitations”) in prior Jewish and pagan religion, and the Christian practice of baptism was also widely variable in its particulars but not in the core role it shared with its pagan analogs.

What I Can Add Now

Most attempts to deny this in the literature are apologetical, and not genuinely scholarly. They are dressed up to look scholarly, for rhetorical effect, and passed off in scholarly venues, to trade on its authority, but they don’t hold up to any honest analysis. This was noted recently in Benjamin Snyder’s “Inventing Baptism: The Religious Histories of the Origin of Christian Baptism,” submitted for a competition of the Midwest Region Society of Biblical Literature in 2017, whose central theme is that most of the wheel-spinning over the history of baptism has really been just rationalizing religious bias. Snyder assembles a valuable bibliography and makes several good points about the apologetical tenor of the debate—yet falls victim to the same biases he attempts to call out.

For example, Snyder claims that “baptisms in the mysteries did not by themselves initiate, rather they were preliminary acts of ritual purification performed within a complex initiation process.” But as we have seen, this is not a relevant difference: Bacchic texts and Mithraic inscriptions establish that vicarious initiation on behalf of the dead secured salvation for the deceased, and thus operated as a post-hoc initiation of them. And though Apuleius reveals that in Osiris cult the purificatory bathing and sprinkling were components of a more complex initiation ritual, they were nevertheless essential to it. Snyder is thus focusing on an irrelevant distinction (how elaborate or simple a cult made its ritual) rather than the relevant similarity (what the ritual does, and how it operates metaphysically). This is the same error as arguing that a god “isn’t really resurrected” because of trivial details of how or in what way they are resurrected, rather than only counting for the point what is actually relevant: they die, they are then dead, and they then come back to life from the dead (and indeed, in some body or other, whether new or old). The details are irrelevant—the skin on the bones. The bones are what is being borrowed, and simply reskinned.

Hence we see the same error in other works: Fritz Graf’s study “Baptism and Graeco-Roman Mystery Cults,” in David Hellholm et al. (eds.), Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity (De Gruyter, 2011); Jan Bremmer’s study, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (De Gruyter, 2014: pp. 151–65; and more polemically in Jan Bremmer’s editorial, “The Influence of Ancient Graeco-Roman Mystery Cults on Early Christianity“)—and, representative of them all, Everett Ferguson’s study Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Eerdmans, 2013), which non-ironically concludes that, like Christian baptism, the “Mysteries did occasionally express ideas of forgiveness, rebirth after a mystic death, eternal life, and illumination, but these ideas were associated with the ceremony as a whole and not primarily with the purification by water” (pp. 28–29). He thus admits the core concept is pagan (a water ritual entailing a mystic death and rebirth, forgiving sins, and securing a blessed eternal life), but thinks the trivial details of how simple or complex the ritual is somehow removes it from being a precedent. Obviously it does not. Proposing a mere “coincidence” of water rituals entailing a mystic death and rebirth, forgiving sins, and securing a blessed eternal life in pre-Christian paganism and subsequent Christianity is not credible. Influence—borrowing with adaptation—is the only credible explanation of this.

This is all the more obvious when a Christian will set aside petty doctrinal strife and simply admit that the only thing that actually matters about baptism is not the trivia of how it is carried out, but what it means: Death and rebirth to eternal salvation, by contact or immersion in water. Indeed, the reductive simplicity of the Christian ritual likely consists of the Jewish side of the Christian syncretism with pagan salvation cult: it picks up the practice of John the Baptist, and possibly other Jewish baptismal cults of the era (Ablution, pp. 266–67), of a simple washing ceremony of atonement. This allowed Christians to distance themselves from the elite pomp of pagan ritual, and economize it. The equation of this with a metaphysical death and rebirth into eternal life would then be the pagan contribution, thereby combining two commonplace water rituals ubiquitous in the world the Christians were born into.

Which brings us back to Jeong’s Pauline Baptism Among the Mysteries. He executes a massive and detailed study of this issue, and his conclusion cuts to the chase:

Baptism in the Pauline communities is a ritual analogous to mystery initiation. Both the initiation rituals of the mysteries and baptismal ritual practiced in the Pauline groups are informed by similar socio-cultural understandings of how initiation constructs divine-human and intra-human/social relationships. [For example, early Christian Baptism] shares a certain type of ritual messages with the initiation rituals of the Dionysiac mysteries and the mysteries of Isis. In terms of self-referential messages (or the benefits promised by initiation), baptism was primarily an entry ritual into Paul’s Christ groups (largely consisting of Christ-devotees from pagan backgrounds) in a way similar to the initiation rituals of the mysteries. These rituals of initiation transform individual and communal identity (intra-human relationships are formed), and accordingly create boundaries and norms for the group by which they can identify themselves. Significantly, both Christ-baptism and mystery initiation communicate the self-referential message that ritual participation creates a personalized, trustworthy bond between the deity and devotee(s). As an extension of this bond, the divine pledge of a blessed afterlife (though what this entails might differ) for the devotees is often communicated as part of the promise of initiation, as baptism communicated eschatological promise.

As well:

Canonical messages about the suffering of the deity (Dionysus, Isis, Christ), the deity’s nearness to the devotees (Dionysus, Christ) as well as sympathy/mercy (Isis, Christ), and the identification (or some type of unity) between the deity and the devotees based on the logic of metonymy (Dionysus, Isis, Christ) are found, mutatis mutandis, in both the mysteries and the description of baptism in the Pauline letters. The emphasis on the devotees’ faith/trust in the deity (in addition to the ritual activity itself), their right understanding of the meaning of ritual, and as mentioned above, their ethical behavior to maintain order within the cultic community appear in all three groups.

Which is natural, because:

Pagans in the first-century Mediterranean world who were familiar with how the Dionysiac mysteries or the mysteries of Isis worked would easily understand what ritual messages baptism communicated. Baptism fits the cognitive pattern of mystery initiation attested among pagans in Pauline cities.

Jeong picks these two mystery cults as closest to the Christian owing to similar features of democratization (they were baptisms open to all), but we should note that even though this feature was mitigated in other cults (the Eleusinian mysteries were meant for citizens of Athens; the Mithraic mysteries were restricted to men), their water-based initiation rituals also shared the same core structure and conceptual functions. Jeong also goes on to point out ways in which Paul (or, others might suspect, the apostles before him) creatively adapted mystery cult baptism into its Judeo-Christian form. Jeong does not characterize this as a “direct origin” but as a deliberate employment of “an analogical framework” to communicate the ideals and goals of the Christian mission, which is essentially what I mean by adaptive cultural diffusion. In effect, we can say exactly the same thing of all the other mystery cults: they, too, are not simply “originated” by prior such cults, but developed into their own form by the creators of each individual mystery cult, using this common “analogical framework” as the skeleton, and all their creative missional and cultural layering on top of that as its muscle and skin. Which is why no such cultural trend can be found in, say, ancient China; but was everywhere across the Roman Empire. The Christians were using ready-made local tools.

A diagram Jeong provides for the resulting matrix of cultural influence also helps understand this:

Jeong’s key to his thought-map:

• G: Generic Space (the broadest level of commonality).
• I: Initiation into the mysteries (Input Space 1)
• P: Paul’s initial teaching of baptism (Input Space 2)
• F: Funerary rituals, including other rituals engaging the dead (Input Space 3)
• B: Blended Space: Baptism for the dead (1 Cor. 15:29)
• Solid lines: matching and cross-space mapping
• Dotted lines: connections between inputs

The same diagram could be drawn for baptism in Osiris cult, in Mithras cult, in Dionysian cult, in the Eleusinian mysteries, and every other mystery cult, explaining why all these cults had their own version of this, and thus why Christians developed one, too.

On the Role of the Hero’s Struggle

Initiation into the various mysteries, usually facilitated by some form of baptism, was understood as a merging with their savior god (typically a demigod), and thus a sharing in both their suffering and their triumph. This was not always a literal death. The evidence suggests Mithras underwent a passion (a great struggle or suffering) from which he acquired a power to defeat death, but not by dying. Likewise Attis, who dies but conversely triumphs not by returning to life but by never decaying and ever-stirring; or Persephone (in the mysteries of Eleusis), where she is abducted into the land of the dead and rescued, but never “literally” dies. So, it is true all savior cults had a passion story, through which they gained victory over death, and thus eternal life. But for most savior lords, this passion was a literal death, and the triumph was a literal return to life from a state of being dead (Bacchus-Dionysus, Adonis-Tammuz, Hercules-Melqart, Baal-Dolichenus, and probably Zalmoxis, and definitely Osiris—and, the last to come, Jesus).

Jeong (as a devout believer still intent on defending the faith against potential pagan corruption) thinks the tight association of baptism with the actual death and resurrection of the hero is less clearly developed in the mystery cults than in Christianity. But we have already seen this is not true, or not relevantly true. Apuleius clearly understands his baptismal ritual as a dying and rising through the assistance of Isis, thus emulating the dying and rising of his savior, Osiris. That Apuleius does not strip the entire concept down to this one clear fact is more a difference of emphasis than content. Likewise in the case of the Dionysian (a.k.a. Bacchic) mysteries, we just don’t have a surviving account of its initiation ritual to compare, so we actually cannot say what wasn’t a physical or ideological component of it (even more so in the case of many other mysteries). But the hints and clues we have do indicate (such as by the epithet “thrice born” in ritual formulae referring to Dionysus’s mythical tendency to be resurrected after dying) that its initiatory cleansing—hence its baptism—would have worked (possibly in conjunction with other parts of a complex rite) by bonding the initiate to the spirit of Dionysus, precisely to share in his death and resurrection (see Masks of Dionysus and The Dionysian Gospel for some background).

Jeong might be operating from the old paradigm that incorrectly asserts that dying-and-rising saviors were not a trope; that has been thoroughly refuted. It is not credible to think that the particular affinity of numerous mystery cults for dying-and-rising saviors was a mere coincidence and that this feature of them was of no relevance to their initiation rituals. We can safely infer the opposite. Apuleius’s understanding of the Osirian baptism is far more likely to be typical of these cults than some coincidentally unique development. That would in fact better explain the adopting of this mechanism by Christians to produce the same effects: this was a ubiquitously understood phenomenon in their culture, and thus well suited to being adapted to exactly the same purpose for their dying and rising hero—and his devotees. Ironically, despite his interpretive maneuvering, Jeong’s evidential chapters on Dionysian cult and its practices and beliefs are full of evidence for this conclusion, especially when compared with his even clearer evidence for Osiris cult.

But apart from that one suspect apologetical approach, in his introductory chapters Jeong traces the history of this debate, and like Snyder, he finds the rejection of the diffusion hypothesis to be badly argued and improperly motivated. He situates himself in a rising tide of scholars rejecting that hostile pose and more informedly taking up the task of identifying the actual diffusion that occurred and why and how. Jeong emphasizes the ways it was transformed; but all the while conceding this was a transformation—of a long-extant ritual concept. And his survey of evidence is formidable. I don’t think the hostile pose can survive. It is quite clear that Christian baptism was a lift from popular salvation cults of the time, a creative hybridization of Jewish and pagan water rituals to effect essentially the same outcomes: to ensure the eternal salvation of initiates by bonding them to their god and his mythically proven ability to defeat death.

Conclusion

Baptism is just like resurrection and virgin birth, every instantiation of the general type is different: different kinds of deaths, different kinds of resurrections, different ways of being miraculously conceived, indeed almost every particular different (matching abundant creative and cultural material, distinct to each tradition and its purpose), and different initiatory water-contact rituals (of varying complexity and details). Yet in each and every case we see a general core structure: death and rebirth (often to eternal life); nonsexual conception (sometimes to a literal virgin); and now a symbolic death-and-rebirth, cleansed of sin and ready for receiving eternal life, using water as the gateway one must pass through (whether by literal “baptism,” through immersion, or by a figurative or token one, by an anointing or sprinkling or washing with water).

The features Christians lifted from the pagan mysteries are: passing from one state to another—life, through death, to a new life, symbolically through the water ritual. The features Christians lifted from Jewish water rituals are: humble simplicity, a joining to the body of Israel, and an atoning function that secures one access to the future resurrection. The feature both, Jewish and pagan, already shared, was this feature of cleansing sins in preparation to receive this new state and benefit. Christians used that common nexus to build a hybrid ritual, combining their preferred elements of both, to realize their own form of baptism. And when this began, they brought with it even such particulars as baptism for the dead, demonstrating the link to its pagan cultural past, and added joining “the body of Christ” as an analogy to joining “the body of Israel” in Jewish conversion-initiation water rituals. Following Jewish precedent, the rite was pared down to its simplest core, stripped of pomp and regalia and elaborate shows. Following pagan precedent, the rite was conceptualized as a symbolic but metaphysically potent death and resurrection. And following precedents in both Judaism and paganism, this was all tied to a cleansing away of past sins.

Baptism was thus no more unique to Christianity than a resurrected or virgin born savior. It was unique only in the way it was syncretized—hybridized—creatively. It was thus unique only in the way that literally every feature of every religion in history is “unique,” which is to say, unique only in creative particulars and combinations, but entirely inspired by (and indeed built out of) influential precedents in surrounding cultures. Christian baptism was, really, just a Mac to a PC: a superficial reconceptualization of an already popular product in its surrounding market culture.