An early Christian manual preferred cold running water for baptism, but allowed warm
Christians have argued for centuries over how much water baptism needs. The Didache, a guide from between AD 60 and 150, preferred cold running water, accepted still or warm water if necessary, and failing all that allowed water simply poured three times on the head. The ancient church never settled on one method.
The word comes through Latin from the Greek baptisma, a New Testament coinage built on a verb used in Jewish texts for ritual washing. In everyday Greek the root could mean dipping cloth in dye, a ship sinking or a person being overwhelmed, and the classic Liddell and Scott lexicon gives dip or plunge as its primary sense. It may trace back to a reconstructed Indo-European root meaning dip.
The practice grew out of Jewish purification during the Second Temple period, when people immersed themselves in a ritual bath called a mikveh or in rivers, and Dead Sea Scrolls texts from Qumran describe cleansing by sprinkling and washing. John the Baptist made immersion central to his movement, and the synoptic Gospels say he baptised Jesus. The apostle Paul distinguished John's baptism of repentance from baptism in the name of Jesus. Outside Christianity, the Mandaeans, who revere John as their greatest prophet, still undergo repeated immersion for purification and call every river yardena after the Jordan.
There are three main modes: aspersion, or sprinkling; affusion, or pouring; and immersion, which some use for partial dipping and others only for full submersion. Tertullian and Cyprian both treated the quantity of water as unimportant. Infant baptism became common in the early Middle Ages, and in Western Europe pouring became normal between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, while Eastern churches kept immersion. Trine immersion, three dips for the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, survives among the River Brethren, the Schwarzenau Brethren and parts of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Theology divides as sharply as method. Catholic and Lutheran teaching treats baptism as generally necessary for salvation, while Huldrych Zwingli saw it as symbolic, and Anabaptists rejected infant baptism and rebaptised converts. Quakers and the Salvation Army do not baptise with water at all, and Oneness Pentecostals baptise in Jesus' name alone. The church also recognised baptism by blood for unbaptised martyrs and a baptism of desire for catechumens who die before the rite.
Source: Baptism
