 20. Baptism (of Spirit) |
If you could hear Jesus' teaching to the point of such conversion, you would be baptized with water. You would repent, you would be washed, you would pass through a sacramental ritual associated with this change. We may presume that this sacrament was practiced in the circle that surrounded Jesus. In addition the disciples preached and demonstrated certain kinds of spirit-power that were effective in converting people. Those who were converted, who would respond to that message, were then baptized or washed. They would from that point assume the condition to consider the teaching about the Spirit and to change their way of life.
Perhaps the fundamental orientation to which they were led is summarized elsewhere in the Gospels as well as in the Old Testament. That is that we must love God with every aspect of the being, not just with the inner soul, but with body, mind, action, everything. We must relate to God through love in all these areas of existence, and to all beings. Baptism with water, a necessary step in one's ultimate transformation, confirmed the individual in all these changes.
Water baptism was followed by baptism of fire, or the Spirit. And it is to be presumed, since Nicodemus is later named among the circle of Jesus, that Nicodemus had in fact been converted and baptized and that he was, at least secretly, part of the inner circle of Jesus. Jesus was described by John the Baptizer as a baptizer who was greater than himself. John's job, as probably the job of others, was to bring respondents through the process of repentance and accepting the conditions of practice and to perform the priestly ritual of water baptism. Water baptism, however, is only the first step in one's conversion. Presumably, then, there was another, secret form of baptism.
The Spirit baptism is not the mystical affair communicated in the ascetic, mystical tradition of the Orient and of present-day Christianity and other religions. Man, as a living being and therefore as a saved being, is viewed, in the true esotericism of Jesus' teaching, in his human terms, in his born terms, as a physical individual. Thus, Jesus did not teach that you must discover that you are an immortal soul, a spark of the Divine, that you must return to the Divine. He said that you must realize that you are born of the Spirit and that you are Spirit therefore. God is Spirit. Everything comes from God. Therefore, everything is Spirit. The nature of the universe is Spirit—not matter in the conventional sense of something dark, separate, and damned.
However, to speculate about this baptizing ritual, we can refer to a book called The Secret Gospel, by Morton Smith. It is a study of a fragment of an ancient document. A portion of a letter from a man named Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the first century or so after the presumed time of Jesus, was found on the back of another document from that time. Clement was one of the elders of the early Church and therefore an initiate into what would at that time still have been the esoteric tradition around Jesus, before Christianity was adopted as the official Roman religion. Only a portion of Clement's letter survives, but a sufficient portion to indicate that he was describing a form of secret baptism.
The fragment reads as follows:
From the letters of most holy Clement, author of the Stromateis. To Theodore: You did well in silencing the unspeakable teachings of the Carpocratians. For these are the "wandering stars" referred to in the prophecy, who wander from the narrow road of the commandments into a boundless abyss of the carnal and bodily sins. For, priding themselves in knowledge, as they say, "of deep [things] of Satan," they do not know that they are casting themselves away into "the nether world of the darkness" of falsity, and, boasting that they are free, they become slaves of servile desires. Such [men] are to be opposed in all ways and altogether. For even if they should say something true, one who loves the truth should not, even so, agree with them. For not all true [things] are the truth, nor should that truth which [merely] seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true truth, that according to the faith.
Now the [things] they keep saying about the divinely inspired Gospel according to Mark, some are altogether falsifications, and others, even if they do contain some true [elements], nevertheless are not reported truly. For the true [things], being mixed with inventions, are falsified, so that, as the saying [goes], even the salt loses its savor.
[As for] Mark, then, during Peter's stay in Rome he wrote [an account of] the Lord's doings, not, however declaring all [of them], nor yet hinting at the secret [ones], but selecting those he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed. But when Peter died as a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing both his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress toward knowledge [gnosis]. [Thus] he composed a more spiritual Gospel for the use of those who were being perfected.
