COMPLETING THE REFORMATION 500 YEARS LATER.
The Church of Rome’s water wine and wafer still divides her ‘separated brethren’
1. The reader’s reaction to this article is dependent upon whether or not he is totally captive to the Man of the Book, or to a denominational movement.
2. The primacy of Jesus’ practice and teaching during his life-time ministry is more sacrosanct than those of flawed human apostles; or early Roman Church Fathers (apostolic fathers) in the post apostolic period of the 2nd C and 3rd C.
3. Whoever thinks that is not the case has been indoctrinated with one form of ecclesiasticism or another, and equates the infallibility of early apostolic practice with that of Christ.
4. The life, sayings and teachings of Jesus Christ during his forty months’ mission was not superseded by any of the apostles or what they wrote.
5. The harmony of the four gospels must be centred upon the life, practice, and sayings of the Lord Jesus Christ wherever there appears conflict.
6. Humanity will alone be judged by the sayings and words of Christ, not those of the apostles. This applies to both the goats and the sheep, the former at the Great White Throne and the latter at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
7. Since the 19th C Bible churches have overreacted to apostate Higher Bible Criticism and gone into bibliolatrous literalism. Thus they have elevated the actions and words of the apostles to supersede those of the Lord Jesus. Each church movement has often clung to its own unique version of baptism and Lord’s Supper as its distinctive articles of faith that justify its separatist cause.
8. There is no conflict between the Lord’s practice before or after the cross. Students normally learn to harmonize the differences in the data of the four gospel authors, by tolerating their recording errors. Yet when it comes to the obvious discrepancies of the Galilean Commission each turns a blind eye because apostate Christendom wants to cling to the water-wine-wafer paradigm as methods of controlling entry and exit to their respective folds.
9. Of the three apostolic commissions only one is consistent with the prophecies of Zechariah; John the Baptist; the practice of Christ; and the Mt. Olivet record of the ascension. It is found in St. Luke 24; St. John 20; and Acts 1.
All focus on the events around Jerusalem and its adjoining Mount of Olives where Jesus often slept at night in the Garden of Gethsemane. The other two apostolic commissions were said to have been issued on an unnamed mountain in Galilee, 60 miles to the north. Suddenly added to the end of Matthew and Mark they leave the reader with a watery imposition.
Jesus was baptized by John (the last prophet of the Law) as an obedient Jew of the tribe of David (Judah) at age thirty. Leaving Jordan’s water his heavenly Father immediately anointed him audibly and visibly with the Spirit for his kingdom ministry. Therewith the line of demarcation was drawn between his old role as a Jew under the Levite priesthood and his new role as High Priest of the kingdom. Thenceforth his one mission was to fulfil his destiny on the cross, in his resurrection, and his final ascension forty days later.
John the Baptist and the ascension angel predicted Jesus would baptize members of his kingdom with fire, not water. Once he commenced his kingdom ministry he neither commanded nor practiced water baptism. This is most obvious even in the books of Matthew and Mark during his four year itinerary.
10. Thus the second and third apostolic commissions recorded in Galilee did not supersede the official Olivet ascension commission.
11. Many scholars from the broad spectrum of theology doubt the origin of Mark 16: 9-20, which does not appear in the most ancient extant Greek manuscripts.
12. Bible readers will also note that Matthew’s Trinitarian invocatory blessing was never adopted by the apostles in the baptisms in Luke’s book of Acts. This indicates that they were unaware of such a Galilean edict. They followed Peter’s water baptism at Pentecost, not Jesus’ for he had never baptized anyone during their time with him. His commission from Jerusalem did not order them to baptize in water. Phillip, Ananias and Paul using Peter’s precedent followed John the Baptist’s rite invoking the one name of Jesus Christ. However, they differed with each other’s administration of John’s baptism. Both Peter and Paul made radical changes: the former never again preached baptismal regeneration and the latter abandoned baptism after Corinth focusing instead on the baptism of the Spirit into the body of Christ (1 Cor.12:13).
13. From the 3rd C Roman paganistic customs and worship started to creep into Christian gatherings. Particularly was this so after the first church building was erected. Previously they had only met secretly in homes. Leaders began to use the title of priest and bishop to compete with idolatrous Roman religions. After three centuries of rabid pogroms and burnt earth persecution the Christians were given tolerance in the 4th C by the new emperor Constantine. Whereas there had been a subtle creeping change to formalism in the 3rd C, now came radical change to litany, liturgy and enforced sacraments for the masses by Constantine’s new Church of Rome.
14. The emperor’s right hand man was Bishop Eusebius, credited as the father of Church History. We should remember that this history was not Christian, but the history of the Church of Rome. Indeed all that the Church Fathers (apostolic Church Fathers) wrote was strongly slanted towards Romanism and heresy. Yet most seminaries and Bible colleges turn a convenient blind eye to this fact because of the shades of ecumenism and apostasy.
15. Most Protestant churches still retain Rome’s remaining sacramental doctrine without realizing its origin. Of the 2,800 denominations (Barratt 1970) communion and baptism has often been the cause of divisive sectarian separatism spawning hundreds upon hundreds of new denominations.
16. As 16th C reformers translated the original tongue of the New Testament into English they purged five of the seven Roman sacraments from the Latin New Testament not found in the Greek original. The Old Latin and Vulgate Latin Bible of the Roman Church had been in vogue for thirteen hundred years. The seven sacraments were added by Emperor Constantine to his fifty new Latin Bibles to authorize his compulsory nationalization of Christianity heralded at the inaugural founding of his Roman Church about 311 AD.
17. Because two of the seven sacraments were in the Greek manuscripts, the humanist scholar Erasmus included them in the first published Greek New Testament. The French publisher Stephanus and Elzevir failed to challenge this and the Textus Receptus of Puritan Bible translators left them intact.
18. Luther, Tyndale, Calvin, and Zwingli all differed with each other in their respective sacramental practice of water-wine-wafer. Each was ill at ease with the two surviving Roman rites. This caused division, disunity and disarray in the disparate Eucharistic practice. Rejecting transubstantiation, they wavered between consubstantiation, and mere memorial remembrance. In baptism they hesitantly selected baptismal regeneration, infant baptism, or believers’ baptism, while the method was sprinkling, pouring, or immersing candidates.
19. Nevertheless, one thing is held in common: the two Roman sacraments are good tools of administrative control. They are used to determine who will gain membership, or who needs to be expelled from membership of each religious clique, called the church, (ecclesia) a Latin word not found in the Greek New Testament and omitted by Tyndale in the first English publication of 1526. This so infuriated the Catholics and Anglicans that they burned or banned it before martyring him at the stake. Only when the word was replaced in the text did the English Church allow its publication. In the Koine Greek (ekklesia) means a ‘called out to assemble or congregate’. The early Christians were called out by God to leave the Jewish church at first, then to forsake the Roman church in the 4th C.
20. Early Reformers from the 13th C onwards had begun to abandon Roman ecclesiastic traditions and rites practiced since Emperor Constantine’s forcible takeover of Christianity.
21. The Waldensian, Albigensian, Hussite, Lollard, and Huguenot Christians were reformers before Luther posted his 1517 thesis of ‘the just shall live by faith’. Humanist scholars like Erasmus became involved with the Reformers’ quest in the 15th C
22. The great hurdles to anyone daring to complete the long overdue Reformation of the 16th C seem immoveable, but Luther’s unending echo of holy writ cannot be silenced: the ‘just shall live by faith’, not by water, wine or wafer.
CONCLUDING CHALLENGE
Many fanatically defend inerrancy of Scripture, but miss the final arbiter and filter of all Scripture: the very words of Christ himself; his practice and precepts during his forty months stay on earth before his death.
1. BELIEVER AND UNBELIEVER WILL BE JUDGED BY THESE WORDS
John 12:48 He that rejects me, and receives not my words, hath one that judges him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.
2. THE MOST IMPORTANT APOSTLE: No other apostle equates to his infallibility.
Hebrews 3:1 Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus;
3. READING SCRIPTURE BUT MISSING THE CORNERSTONE OF TRUTH
John 5:39 Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.
4. RARELY WILL A BELIEVER DO THIS.
Acts 17:11 (the Berean believers)…they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
5. ONLY MT OLIVET APOSTOLIC COMMISSION IS VALID (not the Galilean)
Acts 1:10 And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; 11 Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven. 12 Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a Sabbath day’s journey.
Zechariah 14:4 And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof…
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT.
1. During his 40 months’ ministry before his arrest neither Jesus nor the Twelve baptized others. The rumour in John 3 was mostly dispelled in John 4. The rumour was never endorsed anywhere else in the gospels and the Lord disavowed it by immediately leaving the area where he had been fellowshipping with his cousin John.
2. After his death and at the resurrection on the first day, then the fortieth day he gave the substance of his apostolic commission. Luke 24; John 20; Acts 1.
3. Only one commission was given and it was not on an unknown mountain in Galilee, but at Jerusalem in Judea 60 miles south.
a. This commission confirmed that Christ’s baptism of kingdom believers would be in fire not water, as prophesied by John the Baptist in Matthew 3 etcetera.
b. At no time anywhere recorded in the four gospel narrative of those 40 months did Jesus either baptize in water or command the Twelve to do so.
c. The Mount of Olives was confirmed and verified as the ascension mount to which he will descend in his return at the end of the age. See Zechariah 14:4 and Acts 1:11
d. St. Matthew’s Galilean baptismal commission invoked the trinity, but this form was not used by the four baptizers in Acts, indicating that the Eleven were unaware of its existence.
e. St. Mark’s Galilean baptismal commission was radically different in its compulsion and penalty for lack thereof. More importantly, historians, academics and even conservative scholars agree that the original vss. 9-20 had been lost and replaced by an unknown hand. The last half of St. Mark is missing from the most ancient extant manuscripts.
The geographic placement and content of both second and third apostolic commissions 60 miles distant in Galilee were:
i. contrary to the prophecy of John the Baptist, in Matthew 3:11
ii. contrary to the prophecy of John the Baptist in Mark 1:8
iii. contrary to the prophecy of John the Baptist in Luke 3:16
iv. contrary to the words of Christ in Acts 1:5
v. contrary to angels prophesying the place of His return Acts 1:11
vi. contrary to Zechariah’s prophecy of His return Zechariah 14:4
SPECIAL NOTE:
Ironically, the very two gospels that hastily close with a baptismal imprimatur, prophesy that Jesus would not baptize with water but with the Holy Ghost. It also places serious questions over Peter’s sudden institution of baptismal regeneration when Jesus had neither baptized them or any other candidate for His kingdom of heaven.
Furthermore, if Peter was infallible, as some would claim, why did he immediately abandon baptismal regeneration, (making baptism a condition of remission) for other changing forms of the Jewish water rite that the Jerusalem assembly demanded alongside circumcision for membership?
At Samaria Phillip’s baptism did not trigger the new birth. Only when Peter and John went there did the believers receive the Spirit.
Peter in Caesarea witnessed the same scenario when Gentiles were both regenerated and baptized with the Spirit during his sermon without any water rite.
In his second sermon in Jerusalem (Acts 3-4) Peter solely preached on the baptism of the Spirit. He actually avoided the Jewish water rite as he preached.
Paul’s emphasis after Ephesus and Corinth became the baptism of the Spirit and he appears to have gradually ceased using the water rite (1 Corinthians 1:17; 12:13; Ephesians 5:4). Indeed his emphasis in Galatians, Romans, and Colossians Paul alludes primarily to the baptism of fire, not water. The two accounts of Paul’s own baptism by Ananias of Damascus in Acts reveal the link between early Jewish baptismal regeneration, John the Baptist, and the priestly “water of separation for remission of sins. Cp. Numbers 19:9 (“for a water of separation: it is a purification for sin”).
Water baptism, implemented by Peter, was usually preceded by the baptism of fire. That is the Spirit’s work of grace in the heart of the seeker occurring before the Jewish rite was applied.
With John the Baptist, the last prophet of the Law, confession of sins always preceded his baptism of the candidate, though Old Testament remission had never been a blotting out of iniquities or expiation for they were remembered again on the Day of Atonement and re-confessed. In the kingdom’s atonement through Christ’s body that bore our sins to give the believer his righteousness, those iniquities would be “remembered no more”.
COMPLETING THE REFORMATION 500 YEARS LATER.