Product Overview
Christian baptism is related to Jewish ritual bathing, but many assume that Christians transformed and rejected Jewish bathing practices. Archaeologists have found a large number of bathing structures in Jerusalem and Judea dating to the second and first centuries before the common era. Since such structures have not been found from earlier periods, this development has been attributed to widespread implementation of the purity system from Leviticus during this time. This book examines the development of bathing for ritual purification, complementing texts from the Hebrew Bible, Second Templeperiod literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls with archaeological evidence. Despite the polemics of later Christian and Jewish texts, the author shows that the earliest Christians drew on a tradition shared with the Qumran community and other Jewish groups of the time, in which each group chose its own emphasis ritual, metaphorical, or initiatory.
