Death Ritual

Rituals of Exit

Ritual washing was part of Judaism from the Lore of Moses onwards, but practices of full immersion in water seem to have developed later. It's thought that in archaic times, people may have gone through purification rituals using rivers and lakes and springs, but in the few generations before John the Baptist’s day, the ritual seems to have been domesticated. It's possible that the bathing culture of the Greek colonisers had melded somewhat with Jewish ritual customs, as sometimes happens. There are numerous mikveh—ceremonial baths—dating back to this time. They're found in Jerusalem, Masada, Qumran and elsewhere. 

A mikveh was used for on-going purification rituals. If a person became ritually unclean then ceremonial washing was part of the process of their re-entering the religious community. They were also used in rituals of initiation. Those who wished to be welcomed into the Essenes’ sect were to be “sprinkled with purifying water and sanctified by cleansing water,” in order to “enter the covenant.” Still today, immersion in a mikveh is part of the process of conversion into Judaism. 

King Herod the Tetrarch, was a Jewish puppet ruler of the Romans. He was not well loved by his own people. His father, Herod the Great, was a builder of many grand things, and there were ceremonial baths installed across the various herodian residences. Herod the Tetrarch seemed to have had a peculiar obsession with John the Baptist. It's sometimes the way that very powerful people who are helplessly chained to the rigid law of their station, look with some longing toward powerless persons who live outside those trappings, and who seem to wield some other kind of power. John's river was everything Herod's expensive baths were not. Herod held the keys to the city, within the colonial borders of the Roman map. John seemed to exist outside these enclosures and all enclosures besides. His baptism was not so much a purification ritual to maintain some kind of inclusion, but rather a ceremony of exodus for those who were choosing to live outside the managed order of things.

John was an enemy of the kingdom that Herod had been born into. But Herod was anxious and bored of his lot. He admired the work of his enemy more than his own, so he had John brought to the palace to amuse him. It was not Herod's wish to have John executed, but through certain palace intrigues, this is how the thing plays out. Shortly afterwards the messiah figure that John had endorsed and baptised was executed also. Perhaps it was inevitable, since John’s baptism was, afterall, not a purification ceremony but rather a kind of death ritual. 

“Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law [to people of Rome, that is]—that the law is only binding on a person during that person's lifetime.” 

This was how Paul had come to understand the river ritual some twenty five years after the deaths of John and Jesus. There is something properly unhinged, something deeply dangerous about his rhetoric. He says:

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into the messiah Jesus have been baptised into his death?”

And further explains:

“Now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive.” 

He described this rite of passage as a ritual of uncitizenship. Having passed through death, by ceremony, the initiate had passed beyond the jurisdiction of the powers that be, who rule over the living. The dead have no debts. No master rules over them. They are policed under no law. Caesar is behind them. For Paulos, baptism was a declaration of exit from all such domination, into some open where life exists under no such terms. It was a performance both mystical and political.

I doubt that John's baptism would have been understood this way if not for the death of that messiah figure, around which, tales of resurrection abounded: stories, not of ghosts or after-lives as such, but of some embodied life that peaceably walked and talked and ate and made merry after the fact of political execution. These tales of encounter gave form to something barely imaginable: there now seemed to be a tear in the fabric of the world which led out into some open, some undesecrated image of the earth, beyond the reach of power and violence and law.

“We have been buried with him by Baptism into death, so that just as the Messiah was raised from the dead… so we too might walk in newness of life.”

From here the questions abound. How does one declare one's uncitizenship from the powers while also continuing, realistically, to live in their world? How to enact or perform in one's body, a life beyond law, in a world that remains enthralled? Paul’s was a subtle kind of insurrection: a manner of living “hos mé”—“as not.” That is to say, a way of living within a dominated present, as one who does not belong to it. This went alongside a kind of playful charade of obedience to Caesar’s temporary paradigm. In any case, he was not so subtle as to avoid his own execution. Just as John was a source of fascination for Herod, some of the Roman overlords seemed to be intrigued by Paul, bringing him in and out of his prison cell for conversation. At some point, the road runs out. As the pirates would say: “a short life, but a merry one.”