Regarding the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” (eg, Mark 1:7-8) it’s evident that the original consumers of the Gospel of Mark (Ebionites) believed in a spiritual baptism that was to be received after initiation into the cult (profession of faith and baptism for the remission of sins (eg, by water)). John the Baptist is portrayed as foretelling Jesus as being one would could deliver it. In Acts, it’s described as a sudden event after the death of Jesus, proceded by the apostles going out into the city and performing miracles. In my mind this isn’t plausible, if there are non-supernatural explanations to be had. It had to have evolved or been repackaged from somewhere else.
My question is, if Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet of his time, with contemporary prophets who ALSO performed miracles (Simon in Acts 8), it would seem that spiritual baptism was something to be found in the Greco-Roman mystery religions of the time, leading initiates to believe they had special abilities.
In my opinion, there had to have been a “spiritual baptism” prior to the fictional Upper Room pentecost event, which evolved and was transmitted into the subsequent religion which mutated around the death (and resurrection) of Christ.
Is there any evidence that the contemporary Greco-Roman mystery religions or Jewish temple cults practiced any such ritual?
It seems a bit thin to me.
First, off, what do you mean by calling the Ebionites the “original consumers of Mark’s gospel”?
Second, I think it is leap to say “there had to have been a ‘spiritual baptism’ prior to the fictional Upper Room pentecost event”.
What prevents one from thinking, for example, that Jesus, historically, lives and dies and does his thing; over the following decades, Mark and his community come up with some idea of “baptism of the HS”, and Mark anachronistically includes a reference to it in his gospel without explaining what that phrase means to him or his community; then Luke comes along later still and comes up with his own interpretation of what it means and invents the Pentacost event?
I’m not saying that that is most likely. I don’t know what happened–it would not surprise me at all to learn that the Christians got the idea of baptism of the Spirit from the Qumran community–, but that’s the point. I don’t see how we can say there must have been this or that antecedent, or that the idea finds its origin in any particular pre-Christian community, rather than being invented within the Christian community itself, until we have evidence of such an antecedent.
Porphyry – “What prevents one from thinking, for example, that Jesus, historically, lives and dies and does his thing; over the following decades, Mark and his community come up with some idea of “baptism of the HS”, and Mark anachronistically includes a reference to it in his gospel without explaining what that phrase means to him or his community; then Luke comes along later still and comes up with his own interpretation of what it means and invents the Pentecost event?”
I do think your idea of Mark’s author anachronistically putting it on JtB’s lips has some merit, considering that Mark was written after Paul’s known writings, and Paul talks about it. The driving thought behind my original question was the evolutionary principle of meme-transmission, whereby something requiring direct experience would have to have a pre-existing source, meaning, the leader had to get it from somewhere. Considering that the destruction of the temple in 70 CE would coincide with the spawning of Christian communities, making me wonder if there was a Jewish sect that maintained some sort of Christ-lineage. Having seen someone baptized in person, and been offered it, the “language” did seem awfully shamanistic and primordial, for lack of a better description. And having read personal stories of people speaking in tongues while tripping on shrooms, the concept of speaking in tongues certainly isn’t unique to pentecostalism, as much as they would like to believe.
As an aside, the biblical description of “angels with many eyes and wings on wheels”, sounds like a psychedelic trip, if I ever heard of one.
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