Texts in Conversation
In Romans, Paul describes baptism as burial with Jesus in his death so believers can live a new life. In the Shepherd of Hermas, believers similarly go into the water dead and come up alive, but the death precedes baptism and is not shared with Jesus.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Romans 6:4
New Testament
1 What shall we say then? Are we to remain in sin so that grace may increase? 2 Absolutely not! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Or do you not know that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new life. 5 For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly also be united in the likeness of his resurrection. 6 We know that our old man was crucified with him so that the body of sin would no longer dominate us, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 (For someone who has died has been freed from sin.) 8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that since Christ has been raised from the dead, he is never going to die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10 For the death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 So you too consider yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Shepherd of Hermas 93:4
Early Christian
1 “Show me more, Sir,” I said. “What else do you want to know?” he said. “Why,” I said, “did the stones come up from the deep, and why were they placed into the building, even though they bore these spirits?” 2 “They had to rise up through water,” he said, “so that they might be made alive; otherwise they could not enter God’s kingdom, unless they had put away the deadness of their former life. 3 So these, too, who had fallen asleep received the seal of the Son of God and entered the kingdom of God. For before a person,” he said, “bears the name of the Son of God, he is dead; but when he receives the seal, he sets aside his deadness and takes up life. 4 The seal is the water; so they go down into the water dead, and come up alive. This seal was proclaimed to them too, and they used it to enter God’s kingdom.”
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Notes and References
“... The association of passing through water with entering the kingdom of God (v. 2) and receiving the seal [...] is unmistakably a reference to baptism, more explicit than the original allusion in Vis. 3.3.5. The language of death and life is similar to Pauline language but is not exactly the same: here, death is the pre-baptismal state, not the dying process that is symbolically enacted in the course of baptism. ...”
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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