Well, welcome to this very short podcast about the methods or modes of baptism. When we survey the methods of baptism used in the Christian world we count three. Some churches symbolically sprinkle water on the head as a form of baptism, some pour the water and others baptize by fully immersing a person in water. As you can imagine, this is another one of those areas of debate which has raged for centuries. Is there a right way to baptize and a wrong way? Does it even matter?
Let’s dive into it.
Definitions
In this podcast we’ll quickly review definitions used in the baptism debate and then we will peruse the details about baptisms in the next few podcasts as we close out our lengthly series on baptism.
The Bible, specifically, the New Testament uses the word baptize in its various forms over 60 times. Each time it is used in connection with conversion, it is derived from the Greek word “bapto” which means to dip, dye, plunge, overwhelm, cover completely, submerge, etc. The Greek word “Bapto” does not mean sprinkle or pour. This Greek word bapto is not native to the Bible… there is nothing spiritual about it at all. It was a common word used in ancient Greece and we have a very similar word in today’s Greek. Dozens of authors from Biblical time periods including Polybius, Plutarch, Galba and others used it outside of the Bible and it always meant to submerge.
If you want to dunk yourself in the definition of the word bapto, there is a deep, rich study of this topic at BibleHub.com and here is the link to the article. https://biblehub.com/greek/907.htm
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