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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 6 page paper which examines how this sacrament was conceived and performed in the early Church. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
6 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGbaptism.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
most associated with the Christian church, in its earliest forms it was "practiced by both religious and nonreligous for thousands of years before the dawn of the Christian period" (Simmons
36). These ritualistic practices that developed in both savage and civilized tribes in the East laid the foundation for the rite of baptism in the early church (Simmons 36).
For example, both these early groups featured water in the performance of many rituals (Simmons 36). Water was particularly significant in the birth of children, because it signified
their official entrance into the tribe (Simmons 36). Superstition was a shared characteristic that linked the savages and the civilized, and these tribal peoples attributed magical powers to water
(Simmons 36). Its cleansing effect convinced them that water had the power to cure disease (Simmons 36-37). Therefore, if water had the power to heal the body, it
must be able to achieve the same for the soul. Borrowing from this ancient belief, the Jews began attaching great importance to water in their own worship and religious
practices around the time Moses wrote the Law on Mt. Sinai (Simmons 37). According to the Orthodox rabbinical interpretation, baptism was only legitimate when it was performed by water
immersion (Simmons 38). It is believed that baptism in the early Church was performed on infants, although theologians and historians cannot seem to agree upon how and where it actually
began (Simmons 41). There is one theory that infant baptism is rooted in the beginnings of the church in Egypt, which was then passed on by the religious tradition
of the apostles (Simmons 41). A second plausible theory regarding the origin of baptism is connected to the primitive notion that women and girls were of no value to
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