The final matter is admittedly the most difficult one. The New Testament was originally written in Greek, and even a quick comparison of various Bible translations will show that 15:29 has been consistently translated in the passive voice, suggesting that people were indeed being baptized for the dead. However, if Paul was referring to something like Taharah, then it seems this verse would need to be translated in the active voice, indicating that someone was doing baptism for the dead.
Voice is a grammatical concept that expresses the relationship between the elements of a sentence. These elements are often identified as the subject, the verb, and the object. In the active voice, the subject is doing the action, whereas in the passive voice, the subject is receiving the action.
Active – The child dropped the ball.
Passive – The ball was dropped by the child.
Most people are familiar with both the active and passive voices, but there is also a lesser known third option called the middle voice.
To understand the middle voice, it can be more helpful to think of the elements of the sentence not as subject, verb, and object, but as actor, action, and patient. In the active voice, the emphasis is on the actor, the one doing the action. In the passive voice, the emphasis is on the patient,the one receiving the action. However, in the middle voice, the emphasisis on the action itself.
Middle – The ball dropped.
This is relevant to understanding 15:29 because Greek is an inflected language. Like Latin and even Spanish, the Greek language uses changes in the spelling of words to indicate things like tense, voice, person, number, and even gender.[i] The challenge in translating Greek is that often the middle and passive voices are identical in the way they are written: the meaning must be discerned from the context.[ii]
A good example of this is found in 2 Kings 5:14 where Naaman dipped himself in the river to be cleansed from leprosy. The word used in the Septuagint for dipped is baptized and it is written in a form that can be understood as either middle or passive. Taken out of context, it could mean either Naaman immersed himself or someone else immersed him. However, the context makes it clear that his cleansing was self-administered. Consequently, it is understood to be in the middle voice, with emphasis on the action, and is translated, “So he went down and dipped (baptized) himself in the Jordan seven times.”
Understanding this use of the middle voice, as it relates to 15:29, may require a shift in how we think about baptism. In Christianity people don’t baptize themselves—a minister, pastor, or other officiant performs the baptism. This leads us to think of baptism largely as a passive activity: something that is done to us. However, in Judaism immersion has always been self-administered.[iii] For this reason, some believe that immersion under John the Baptist was usually a self-baptism.[iv]
This applies to the understanding of 15:29 because both references to baptism in the passage were written in this ambivalent middle/passive form and can be understood either way: only the context can determine which. Whereas 15:29 traditionally has been translated as passive, doing so has not provided a satisfactory explanation of what Paul is saying. Using the passive voice here is not based on any known context for understanding or applying the passage, other than our current thinking and assumptions about what baptism is and how it is done. However, if we approach this with the idea that Paul and his readers were very familiar with the Jewish understanding and practice of immersion for ceremonial cleansing (especially the purification of the dead), then we can suppose a credible context for understanding the passage and translating it in the middle voice.
In this case, the passage can take on a very different meaning:
“Otherwise, what will they do: those who wash and cleanse the dead for burial? If indeed the dead are not raised, why then are they doing purification for them?”
- 1 Corinthians 15:29
[i] For example, in Spanish: hablo– I speak, hablas – you speak, hablamos, we speak.
[ii] Ray Summers, Essentials of New Testament Greek, (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1950), “The forms of the middle voice in the present, imperfect and perfect tenses are the same as the passive. The difference is one of function. The context of the passage will indicate whether the construction is middle or passive in function,” p. 38
[iii] Lamm, Becoming a Jew, p.156ff
[iv] Ferguson, “Kurt Rudolph, AntikeBaptisten: Zu den Überlieferungen über frühjudische und -christliche Taufsekten, Sitzungsberihte der Sachsischen Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Leipzig 121.4 (Berlin: Akademie, 1981), p. 10 is among those who understand John’s practice as a self-baptism (a purification bath) with John as witness. …Albrecht Oepke, ‘βάπτω, βαπτίζω (et al.),’ in Gerhard Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, tr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964) Vol. 1, p. 537, points out that after John Christianity used βαπτίζειν in the active and passive, whereas for Jews and Gentiles the middle is most common (in rites of washing).”, p. 88, footnote 29
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