Abstract

The traditional view that assumes faith before baptism has often been challenged and revisited in the context of infant baptism debates. This survey, however, is not carried out with infant baptism in mind but baptism for individuals able to decide and answer for themselves. I reevaluate the faith-baptism question by examining views from Paul’s letters as well as from early church documents, to see if the former share discernible faith-baptism links with the latter. I study three faith-baptism Pauline texts (Rom 6:3-4; Gal 3:25-26; Col 2:12) before looking at first to third-century church documents like the Didache, Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum, and Apostolic Tradition for their baptismal practices, to ask how similar or different the latter are from what we understand could be the earliest baptismal understandings in Paul. In short, I am interested to know i) whether faith (an external-relational redefinition) was a necessary prerequisite for baptism and ii) if the earliest church documents share similarities on the matter with Pauline baptismal passages. I conclude that there is no clear evidence in Paul and the early church that faith was a necessary prerequisite for water baptism until the third century, but faith is required to precede baptism in order to understand and validate baptism as metaphor.