Was baptism an ordeal?

In "John the Drowner," I mention Rupert Sheldrake's theory that the baptisms performed by John involved holding a person underwater almost to the point of death, the goal being to effect a spiritual transformation by inducing a near-death experience. If Sheldrake is correct, it would mean baptism was an intensely traumatic experience -- a form of torture, really -- but that some were brave enough to undergo it willingly because of the promised spiritual enlightenment.

Is there anything in the Gospels to support such an extraordinary view?

One of the few hints I can find of baptism as an ordeal is in Mark 10, and the parallel passage in Matthew 20. James and John have just asked to sit on Jesus' right and left hand in his glory.

But Jesus said unto them, "Ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"

And they said unto him, "We can."

 And Jesus said unto them, "Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized: But to sit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine to give; but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared" (Mark 10:38-40).

The clear import of Jesus' question is, "Are you prepared to endure the ordeals that I will have to endure?" -- and the metaphors he chose to convey this are those of drinking from a cup and submitting to baptism.

The cup metaphor appears to have been a common one. Several Old Testament prophecies portray the Lord as punishing people by figuratively making them drink from a cup. (See, for example, Isaiah 51, Jeremiah 25, and Jeremiah 49.) Just before his betrayal and execution, Jesus famously prayed, "O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done" (Matt. 26:42). When Simon Peter tried to defend him with a sword, Jesus said, "Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" (John 18:11).

Baptism as such was something relatively new and could hardly have become a stock metaphor like that of the cup of wrath. Nevertheless, Jesus knew that James and John would understand his meaning; it was natural for them to connect baptism with the idea of an awful ordeal.

John's "baptism of fire" metaphor also suggests baptism as an ordeal.

And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire (Matt. 3:10-12).

The meaning of this fiery baptism is disputed, but at least in Matthew's version, the context strongly suggests that "baptize you with fire" means "burn you up," like chaff or like a barren tree.

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Against this idea that baptism was traumatic, we have the fact that it was so enormously popular. Luke 3:7 says a "multitude" came to be baptized. According to Mark 1:5, "there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan." We might imagine an extraordinary person like Jesus submitting to a death-defying ordeal -- after all, he followed up his baptism with a David Blaine-like 40-day fast! -- but the entire population of Judaea and Jerusalem? There have admittedly been occasional "crazes" for self-flagellation and the like (see the Convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard), but nothing on this scale.

And, speaking of that 40-day fast, Matthew tells us that "Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water" and then marched out into the wilderness to fast for 40 days and be tested by the devil. Whereas, if Jesus' baptism had actually been a drowning, John would have dragged his unconscious body out of the water and resuscitated him, and Jesus would have lain gasping on the shore, coughing the Jordan up out of his lungs, and certainly in no condition to set off on a 40-day camping trip with no food.

More to the point, though, the whole idea of John drowning people in order to produce near-death experiences is ridiculous. NDEs are not at all common, and in fact are essentially a modern phenomenon, made possible by modern medicine's ability to bring people back from deeper and deeper states. You have to bring someone very, very close to death for an NDE to occur, and obviously if you deliberately try to do that, you're going to end up killing the person more often than not. Can you imagine wanting to have an NDE of your own and asking a friend to hold you underwater until you seemed almost dead and then bring you back up and resuscitate you? Isn't it obvious that this would be a criminally insane thing to do -- that you would be very unlikely to experience an NDE and very likely to just die, in which case your friend would be guilty of murder?

John had enemies, and he eventually ended up in prison -- but only for the crime of criticizing the marital irregularities of the Herods. When he was finally executed, it was not for any capital crime he was accused of, but to satisfy the whim of a vengeful woman. If John had really been doing what Sheldrake suggests, he would have had victims, lots of them, and it would have been trivially easy for his enemies to have him put to death for murder. That they did not do so -- and that the Pharisees were afraid even to criticize him because of his popularity with the people -- strongly suggests that he wasn't doing anything like that.

John the Drowner

Yesterday morning, I read this passage in Roger Hathaway's The Mystic Passion.

When Jesus went through the drowning of his human self, before John the Baptist, He knew the significance of yielding to the flood of drowning water, and that is why God spoke and said He was well pleased. Most of the people that John was baptizing were having their sins washed away, experiencing a cleansing, but Jesus was yielding the human nature to a death.

I found this striking because, though I have often heard baptism described as a symbolic death and resurrection, the figurative language tends to focus on burial ("buried in the waters of baptism"); I had never heard anyone call it a drowning before.

On the evening of the same day, I received an email with a link to a YouTube video of a conversation between John Butler and Rupert Sheldrake, and I watched most of it. Beginning at the 14:29 mark, Sheldrake proposes that John the Baptist was literally drowning people.

And I personally like John the Baptist because I think John the Baptist was really involved in powerful rites of passage. Basically, I think he was a drowner, and I think he held people under in the Jordan just long enough to induce a near-death experience by drowning.

And as you know, people who've had near-death experiences often say their lives totally changed. They've gone out of their body. They've gone into a totally different realm full of joy and light and meet dead people who are now gloriously resplendent with light, and they love being there, but they have to come back because it's only a near-death experience. And many of them have their lives changed by this. They've died, and they've been born again.

Now that's exactly what John the Baptist was doing to people. We know he was holding them underwater, not sprinkling them with water. He was actually holding him underwater by total immersion. They were transformed by this process, and it's usually considered to be just symbolic. But my view is, Why would you do something that's just symbolic when just for another minute or two underwater you could have the real thing, a near-death experience?

And I think our Lord had that at the baptism, which is when the first moment of the revelation to him of his divine affinity was, according to the account in the New Testament. So I think John the Baptist was an initiator who was leading people through a life-transforming rite of passage.

I'm not sure what I think about Sheldrake's theory, but it was quite a coincidence to run into such similar descriptions of Jesus' baptism in a single day like that.

Phantom arrivals

I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed.

-- Whitley Strieber addressing fellow close-enounter witnesses in Communion

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The proprietor of the Junior Ganymede, who wishes to be known only as "G," reports the following eerie occurrence:

I ordered a large expensive rechargeable battery last week.  It cost several hundred dollars.  Monday it came, I found it left outside on our door step.  The box was a little crumpled, was an unusual size, and had a sticker on the side proclaiming that it was a battery.  I remember looking at the sticker and thinking, huh, I didn’t think they let you ship batteries through the mail, I thought the sellers would have claimed it as ‘parts’ or something.

I came inside and put the box down on a side table without opening it.  I didn’t need it right away.  Then it slipped my mind.

Yesterday morning I did need it.  But it was not on the side table.

We convened as a family, prayed, and then looked everywhere.  I even went outside to the garbage bin in case it had been thrown away by one of the kids during their clean-ups.  After all, the box was a bit crumpled, though the battery had enough heft that I didn’t think any one could carelessly think the box was empty.

No luck.

We prayed again, and looked again.

No luck.  I left to work.

When I came home the battery was sitting on my desk charging.

You found it, I said.  The wife and kids were sitting nearby.

Instant chorus in reply–No, no, no, it was delivered.

An hour or two before I came home the doorbell rang.  My wife opened it to find a delivery man out there with a box.  He said it was a battery and she needed to sign for it since it was an expensive, fragile part; they had to be extra particular.  He advised her to handle with care.

She opened it and put it on to charge.

I went and looked at the box.  It was the exact same box I saw on Monday, complete with the slight crumpling and the battery sticker on the outside.  I hefted the battery.  It was the same heft as I recalled.

A commenter, who uses the handle Handle, adds his own, similar experience:

Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago, in my case, it was a book. I held the book in my hand and put it on the counter. I came back and in was gone. I asked my family about it, if they had moved it, but they hadn’t seen it. I described it in detail, pointed to where I put it, said, “I was holding it in my hand right here,” mentioned the unfortunate position of the barcode sticker on the cover, and they witnessed me spending half an hour searching for it in the usual, and some unusual places. No luck. I figured it would turn up eventually, and anyway, I’ve always got a big backlog stack to work through. The next day, I get a stuffed-to-bursting padded envelope in the mail, take it to the same counter, open it, and glitch-in-the-matrix level deja by, it was exactly the scene I remembered. Freaked out, I dropped the book on the counter and took a step back, and that was exactly the scene I remembered too. Barcode sticker in the unfortunate place and everything. I yell, “it’s the book!” Wife dismisses this entirely, “you’re crazy”, son takes my side, “it’s exactly like he said, and he asked us for it, and was looking for it.” He is freaked out too, but also Bill and Ted style, “whoaaa, duuude.” Wife presents a thorough and comprehensive counterargument, with facts, evidence, and logic, just kidding, she just repeats, “you’re crazy”. Eerie is right.

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This reminded me of something I had read. It took me a while to track down, since I had mis-remembered it as coming from a book by Stan Gooch. I finally found it in Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At. Having previously written about Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake turns to examples of similar abilities in human beings.

In some cases the person's arrival was preceded by a kind of apparition, or phantasm, as the Victorian psychic researchers would have called it. For example, Ann Greenberg, of Silton, Saskatchewan, Canada, was on holiday with her husband in the family cabin by a lake. One night her husband went out in the boat, but a storm blew up and he did not return.

I was alone in the cabin and very worried so I stayed awake until about 2:00 A.M., when I fell asleep on the couch. Some time later I heard my husband walk up from the dock and cross the deck to the front door. He opened the door, walked over to the couch, leaned over, and put both hands on my shoulders. Then I woke up. It was daylight, but my husband wasn't there. I looked at the clock, which read 5:00 A.M. An hour later he pulled into our bay, safe and sound. He described how he had anchored in a sheltered bay and slept in the boat. He had woken up to a calm lake and decided he could make it back. Before setting out, he'd checked his watch, which read 5:00 A.M. The bay where he'd sheltered is about an hour away by boat from our cabin.

This hearing of sounds in advance is well know in northern Scandinavia, as I discussed in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. In Norway there is even a special name for the phenomenon, vardøger, which literally means "warning soul." Typically, someone at home hears a person walking or driving up to the house, coming in, and hanging up his coat. Yet nobody is there. Some ten to thirty minutes later the person really arrives to similar sounds. People get used to it. Housewives put the kettle on as the vardøger arrives, knowing that their husbands will arrive soon.

Professor Georg Hygen, of Oslo University, investigated dozens of recent cases, and published an entire book on this subject. He concluded that the phenomenon is essentially telepathic rather than precognitive. In other words, the vardøger is not so much a pre-echo of what will happen in the future, but is related to a person's intentions. For one thing, the sounds are not always identical to those heard in advance. A person might be heard going up to the bedroom, whereas when he arrives he goes into the kitchen. Moreover, the vardøger phenomenon can still occur when a person does not in fact arrive, having changed his mind.

The Hygen book referred to is Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalfenomen (1987); no English translation appears to be available.

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The vardøger experiences recounted by Sheldrake involve the return of a person, and the premonitory hallucination is primarily aural -- although there may be a tactile component; Mrs. Greenberg felt her husband put his hands on her shoulders. (The name Ann Greenberg is a bit of a coincidence, since... uh, it begins with the letter G.) In contrast, G and Handle report visual (and presumably tactile) hallucinations prefiguring the arrival of an inanimate object. The delay between the phantasm and the actual arrival is also longer in the Junior Ganymede cases -- a day or several, as opposed to 10 minutes to an hour in Sheldrake's examples.

Despite these dissimilarities, could we be dealing with essentially the same sort of phenomenon here? Is Hygen's conclusion -- that it is not a true precognitive phenomenon but a telepathic one, related to intentions -- applicable to the experiences of G and Handle?

One reason given for Hygen's conclusion is that the vardøger sounds are not always identical to the sounds heard when the person really arrives. In G's case, too, the vardøger-like experience (let's go ahead and use that word) was not identical to what it foreshadowed. In the vardøger, he saw the battery box on the front step, took it inside, and put it on a side table without opening it. When the battery really arrived, none of that happened; it was given to his wife while he was out, she opened it, and he found it charging on his desk when he came home.

Could the battery vardøger have been triggered by the sender's intention? G wrote on October 2 that he had ordered the battery "last week" (i.e., September 21-26) and that the vardøger arrived "Monday" (September 28). In a comment to his own post, G mentions that "the vendor sent me a personal email on Sep. 18 saying they were planning on shipping that day." Since September 18 would have been before he ordered the battery, this must be a typo for September 28 -- the day of the vardøger.

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I suspect that experiences like those recounted by G and Handle are more common than we tend to assume. We filter them out with a simple "I must have been mistaken," move on, and forget that they ever happened. Or, in less dramatic cases, we never even perceive the anomalous thing at all because our brain does not consider it sufficiently probable (the Horseshoe Crab Effect). Making an effort to notice and remember such things, even if no explanation immediately suggests itself, is a worthwhile endeavor.