Featured Do you think John the Baptist was the first Baptist?

Baptist History Notebook
Chapter 2
JESUS ESTABLISHES HIS CHURCH
[p. 7]
"We have observed the persecution of truth, first of Israel and second of the church. Satan persecuted the churches of Jesus Christ first by the Jews.

This persecution is recorded in the book of Acts. It is also mentioned in some of the Epistles of the New Testament.

"Next, Satan used the Roman Empire to persecute the churches of the Lord Jesus Christ.

There were at least ten severe persecutions beginning with Nero and ending with Diocletian.

We will devote space to these in the next chapter. These persecutions resulted in the death of a very large number of Christians.

"Satan used the Roman Empire to persecute the Lord's churches while he was establishing a church of his own with which to oppose and persecute the true churches of Jesus Christ.

Much of this Baptist History Notebook will deal with the development of Satan's church (the synagogue of Satan) and its persecution of the churches of our Lord.



Christ's Church Built
Doing this, we must begin with the church which Jesus built and observe how Satan sought to corrupt it from within which resulted in a separation by the pure churches from the corrupt churches.

"And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church: and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18).

The word "church" means assembly.

The Lord said He would build "His" (My) church.

This was to distinguish it from all other kinds of assemblies.

He built His "kind" of assembly.

That which distinguishes His from all the rest are the doctrines He gave to it.

Those doctrinal peculiarities make it His kind of church.

What are those marks or doctrinal peculiarities? Dr. J. R. Graves in his book "Old Landmarkism" lists seven.

Dr. Clarence Walker, in his introduction to the "Trail of Blood" (page 5) lists seven.

Dr. D. B. Ray, in his "Baptist Succession"

[p. 8]
lists seven. To these could be added or subtracted, depending on the historian and what his purpose might be. Where one would list two doctrines under one head the next may list them separately.

I will list eight but treat primarily three in this Notebook.


(1) The church's Head and Founder is Jesus Christ (Matthew 16:18; Colossians 1:18).


(2) Its only rule of faith and practice is the Bible (II Timothy 3:15-17).


(3) Its members are to be only saved people (Acts 2:41).


(4) Its government is congregational (Acts 1:23-26 - equality).


(5) Its teaching on salvation is that it is by grace (Ephesians 2:8-9).


(6) It has but two ordinances; Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and these are symbolic (Matthew 28:19-20; I Corinthians 11:24).


(7) Its commission is inclusive (Matthew 28:16-20).


(8) It is independent (Matthew 16:19; Matthew 22:21).

Wherever, in history, in whatever age, you find churches teaching these doctrines, you have a Baptist church, no matter what name it may go by.

It matters not if we cannot, from church to church, trace it back to the First Baptist Church of Jerusalem.

The succession is there but records may hinder or stop our search. What it teaches is the important thing.

Jesus said the gates of hell would not prevail against His church so He guaranteed perpetuity.

 

next compelling question is—

DID JOHN BEGIN THE NEW TESTAMENT DISPENSATION?

The shortest Gospel, and some say the first one, begins with this meaningful statement, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (Mark 1:1).

Then the next ten verses tell of the ministry of John the Baptist, including his baptism of the Lord Jesus. This seems to place John at the very beginning, and inside, the New Testament era.

But some will object. The beginning, they say, could not have been until Christ’s death on the cross, or His resurrection, or His ascension, or Pentecost.

When did the independence of the United States begin? Was it at the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773? or at the Battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775? or at the signing of the Declaration, July 4, 1776? or at the surrender of Cornwallis, October 19, 1781? or at the signing of the peace treaty, September 3, 1783? or when the last British regulars left America, November 25, 1783?

But, does it matter when the New Testament era begins? some will ask. It does. All Christians have a right to all of the four Gospels; they are all Christian from the beginning. A well known minister gave a series of "expository messages" on Matthew and said frequently, "Now this is not for you; it is for the Jews." He suffered, and caused his hearers to suffer, from faulty dispensationalism. He relegated John the Baptist to the Jews, and deprived his great audiences of much of the Gospel. (When I asked him if he was not preaching "Bullingerism," he denied it but he also ceased his former emphasis.) It is time that John is restored to his proper place as the first New Testament preacher.

"Once for all let us discard that theory which has contributed in so many ways to a misunderstanding of the origin of Christianity, namely, that John belonged to the old dispensation rather than the new" (Wm. Arnold Stevens, Addresses on the Gospel of St. John, p. 30). "If any one affirms that the baptism of John had the same force as the baptism of Christ, let him be anathema" (Council of Trent, Ibid., p. 38). This latter dictum of Rome is typical!

John the Baptist takes an early place in Matthew, right after the story of Christ’s nativity. After Luke’s brief prologue of four verses, the story of John begins. And the fourth Gospel introduces the Baptist in its sixth verse. This prominence and primacy is not accidental.

The Baptist preached the same good gospel as did later New Testament preachers. His converts were as surely saved as later believers. (Those few in Acts 19:1-7 were NOT John’s "converts".) A careful reading of Luke 1:16, 17, 69, 77; Acts 10:37; 13:24 will indicate the genuineness of John’s gospel. The word for "preached" in Luke 3:18, used of John, in the Greek is euangelizeto, meaning evangelized, the word used ten times for preaching the gospel in Acts and eleven times in the Epistles.

Cont

 

When Peter first preached to the Gentiles, he indicated that the gospel began "after (Gk., meta, usually "with") the baptism which John preached" (Acts 10:37). The word "after" here refers not to time, but to manner or content. Robertson: "The baptism of John is given as the terminus a quo."

Paul’s first recorded sermon included a mention of the Baptist. "When John had first preached before his (Christ’s) coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel" (Acts 13:24). In fact, the last mention of Paul in Acts (28:31) is remarkably similar to the preaching of John the Baptist. No Old Testament prophet can thus compare with the Baptist, certain critics notwithstanding.

A pivotal passage is Luke 16:16, "The law and the prophets were until (mechri) John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached (euangelizetai) and every man presseth into it." John did NOT preach the Old Testament law and its ordinances. He DID preach the kingdom of God and Christ its King.

Therefore, the new dispensation had to begin with the preaching of John, the first New Testament preacher of the gospel of Christ.

This is important; it clarifies John’s position and Christ’s endorsement of him. It prevents the confusion of placing much of the New Testament back into the Old Testament.

A. T. Robertson: "Mark is justified by the word of Jesus (Matthew 11:12f; Luke 16:16) in making John the beginning of the New Dispensation. The actual outward beginning was when John lifted up his voice in the wilderness.

‘Until John,’ Jesus said . . . Luke is fully conscious that the new era opens with John" (John the Loyal), 36). "The Christian movement began with John" (Ibid., p. 52).

"John’s (ministry) was first and introduced a new age . . . It was not from the close of John’s ministry that Peter dates the new dispensation, but the beginning . . . It is a great thing to mark a new time. That John did" (Ibid., p. 286). "But with Paul, as with Peter, John is the man who introduced the new age. He first preached the baptism of repentance and it was just before the coming of Jesus" (Ibid., p. 288).

Dr. W. A. Criswell, long pastor of the great First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, wrote in his Ph.D. thesis, "John the Baptist Movement in Its Relation to the Christian Movement" (Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, Ky., 1937), "The Christian movement began with John" (p. 24). "The Gospel of Jesus Christ began with the ministry of the Baptist" (p. 25, from Bruce, Expositor’s Greek Testament Vol. I, p. 341).

Dr. R. C. H. Lenski, a Lutheran: "John was in the kingdom, for faith admitted him to it as it did all other believers.

The supposition that John belonged to the old covenant is contradicted by Jesus Himself Who described him as an object of Old Testament prophecy which ended with Malachi; Jesus thus combines John with Himself as opening the promised new covenant" (p. 414, The Interpretation of St. Luke’s Gospel. Used by permission of Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, Minnesota, copyright owners by assignment from the Wartburg Press.)

George E. Hicks: "The text, John 1:29, alone transforms John from the last of the prophets into the first and premier evangelist of Christendom" (John the Baptist, The Neglected Prophet, p. 56).

Since John is in the New Testament, then all of us who believe in Christ since John’s time may claim for ourselves the Gospel truths he proclaimed so well.

And since John’s ministry overlapped that of Christ and His apostles, then we can be very sure they were similar.

But if John is forced back into the older dispensation, or to the so-called "bridge period," then the door is open to all sorts of speculatings and compartmentalizing by ingenious dispensationalists.

When Jesus equated the baptism of John with the "counsel of God" (Luke 7:30), He endorsed both for the entire New Testament dispensation. (Our chapter six has more on John’s New Testament gospel.)

 

Entrance into the Kind of Church that Jesus Built, for membership, is water baptism.

I Corinthians 12:13;
"For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,"

That is: "For by one Spirit (the Holy Spirit of God's Governing Guiding, Leadership, and Superintendence) are we all baptized (by water, by the Authority of John the Baptist) into one body", (one local, called out, assembly, as this one in Corinth and "members in particular).

John the Baptist was "sent from God" (John 1:6) to "make ready a people prepared for the Lord" (Luke 1:17).

John baptized the material, or saved souls, from which Jesus Assembled and Founded His Kind of Church, during His lifetime and that of John the Baptist.

John baptized the disciples and Jesus into JESUS' first church.


DID CHRIST CALL JOHN THE BAPTIST THE GREATEST MAN IN HISTORY ?

An angel of the Lord had announced to Zacharias, John’s aged father, that John was to be "great in the sight of the Lord" (Luke 1:15). Some men are great in their own eyes, some in the eyes of their contemporaries, but John was to be great in the sight of the Lord.

The Baptist was to be "filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb" (Luke 1:15). Of whom else, in all sacred or secular literature, is such a statement made? This natal endowment, retained through life, would enrich his words and works with divine authority.

John was destined to turn many of his countrymen to accept the Lord as their God; he was to be "an horn of salvation"; and he would "give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins" (Luke 1:16, 69, 77).

This first New Testament man of distinction (a teetotaler!) was to have "the spirit and power of Elijah" (Luke 1:17), who was an Old Testament prophet of great renown. For John was "to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just" (Luke 1:17).

John the Baptist was "sent from God" (John 1:6) to "make ready a people prepared for the Lord" (Luke 1:17). This was a big order indeed. Among the multitudes whom John prepared for the Lord were the twelve disciples (Acts 1:22) and at least some of the "five hundred brethren" who saw the resurrected Lord Jesus (1 Cor. 15:6). That the total number was immense is indicated by the vast crowds who came to him, believed his message about Christ, and then were baptized by him (Matthew 3:5, 6)

 

I believe this is what we need to say.

John baptized the disciples, Jesus, and multitudes INTO membership of Jesus' church He built upon Himself, The Cheif Cornerstone, Rock of Ages.

John baptized the disciples, Jesus, and multitudes INTO membership of Jesus' church He built upon Himself, The Cheif Cornerstone, Rock of Ages.

This comparison of Baptist Doctrine distinctives, now, to the first church Jesus Built is why we would say, in hindsight, "We believe that this church was what would now be called a Baptist church".

This kept throwing me because Jesus church was founded by Him, FROM those John baptised.

Jesus equated the baptism of John with the "counsel of God" (Luke 7:30)

Correct.

This is the principal distinctive.

...

other threads: Twenty Proofs That JESUS' New Testament Church Existed Prior to Pentecost

The Myth Of The Universal Invisible Church EXPLODED

 

from: THE FIRST BAPTIST

"Many Bible readers are unnecessarily confused by the story of the few men in Ephesus (Acts 19:1-7) who said they had John’s baptism, but who had never heard of the Holy Spirit. But John did preach the Holy Spirit. And these men were hundreds of miles from Palestine. They likely had never heard John personally; they had only a garbled gospel, second or third hand. This incident shows how quickly the true Gospel can be perverted; how many cults arise; how divisions flourish; and how needful it is to read the Bible carefully.

A. T. Robertson wrote about Apollos (John the Loyal; p. 292ff). "The mention of John’s baptism was for the purpose of dating him, so to speak. He occupied the pre-Pentecost standpoint. There is no hint that Priscilla or Aquila taught Apollos the insufficiency of John’s baptism." And regarding Acts 19:1-7, "They betray a lamentable ignorance of important elements in the teaching of John, to such an extent that one hesitates to call them Christians at all . . . these ‘disciples’ may have been ignorant of John’s portrayal of the Messiah . . . Paul is, then, not discrediting John’s baptism, but interpreting the real significance of it . . . The rest of Paul’s explanation is in harmony with this idea . . . They are baptized afresh, not because they had only John’s baptism, but because they did not really have that . . . These men did not even have a real water baptism, let alone spirit baptism."

Because many writers fail to study this passage, Acts 19:1-7, with enough care, they make the serious mistake of saying that John’s baptism was not Christian baptism. The New Testament is thereby divided, or dissected, into fragments, and difficulties multiply accordingly. J. A. Broadus wrote with his usual wisdom on this important point (Matthew; p. 240).

"If John’s teaching and baptizing are to be set off as essentially different in kind from Christian teaching and Christian baptism, these beginning only on the day of Pentecost, then we have the strange contradiction that Christ Himself, as a teacher and baptizer (John 3:22; 4:1), did not belong to the Christian dispensation. Moreover, in Matthew 11:12 and also in Luke 16:16, our Lord speaks of the kingdom of heaven as already in actual existence, and counts John among the preachers of the kingdom of heaven, as distinct from those who merely predicted it . . . those persons (in Acts 19:5) were re-baptized because it was evident that when they previously received baptism (probably from some ignorant disciple of John), it had been without knowing what they were about, without understanding the fundamental truths of the Messianic reign, as announced by John himself. As this isolated case can be accounted for in this way, and indeed in various other ways, it is quite unwarrantable to make it the proof of a radical distinction between Christian baptism and the baptism administered by John and by Christ Himself."

All church members who have been wrongly baptized, or who were baptized before their conversion, should follow the example of these Ephesians. They should speak to a minister who understands New Testament baptism, and then obey their Lord in the way that will mean lasting satisfaction to them.

Now the record is fairly clear as to who heard John, and who did not hear him. More important, who will hear John’s message now? Some will reject him, and thus reject "the counsel of God"; others will believe him and thereby come closer to Christ.

 

Would it help you to know those men were lost?

They had received 'an immersion' as if it was the religious thing to do, but they hadn't heard about John, the message of The Gospel, or his requirement to bring forth fruit as evidence of their repentance.

They had to be talked to about the gospel and saved, first, then they received John's Baptism.

 

Gill's Exposition does not agree with me and my quick, off the top of my head, thinking. I agree, rather, with Gill.
Acts 19:1
And it came to pass, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul having passed through the upper coasts came to Ephesus: and finding certain disciples,
And it came to pass that while Apollos was at Corinth,.... Whither he came after the Apostle Paul, and where he watered what the apostle had planted, and where he became very famous and eminent; insomuch that he was set up, though not with his will, at the head of a party, in opposition to the chief of the apostles, Peter and Paul; see 1 Corinthians 1:12.
Paul having passed through the upper coasts; that is, of Phrygia, Galatia, Pontus, Bithynia, Lydia, Lycaonia, and Paphlagonia;

came to Ephesus; into Ionia, of which Ephesus was the chief city, and lay near the sea; wherefore the other countries are called the upper coasts; hither he came, according to his promise in Acts 28:21

And finding certain disciples; such as believed in Christ, made a profession of him, and had been baptized in his name, for such were commonly called disciples: these do not seem to be persons, who were either converted by Paul, when he was at Ephesus before, or by Apollos, who had been there since, and was gone; but rather some who came hither from other parts, since the apostle was at this place; though indeed his stay at Ephesus before was so short, that they might be here, and he not hear of them, or meet with them.



Acts 19:2
He said unto them, Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed? And they said unto him, We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost.
He said unto them, have ye received the Holy Ghost,.... Meaning, not the special regenerating and sanctifying grace of the Holy Ghost, for that is supposed in their being disciples and believers, but the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost, for it follows,
since ye believed? that is, in Christ; which is taking it for granted, that they had received the special grace of the Spirit of God; for this believing is to be understood of true, spiritual, special faith in Christ:

and they said unto him, we have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost; by which they could not mean the person of the Holy Ghost: for they must have known that there was such a divine person as the Holy Ghost, from the writings of the Old Testament, with which they were conversant: and from the ministry of John, into whose baptism they were baptized; who saw the Spirit of God descend on Jesus, and bore witness of it; and declared, that Christ who was to come after him, would baptize with the Holy Ghost: nor could they mean the special grace of the Spirit, which they themselves had received; but the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit of God, which they at present knew nothing of, and which were afterwards bestowed upon them: they knew that there were prophecies in the Old Testament, concerning the effusion of the Spirit in the last days, in the days of the Messiah; but they had not heard that these had had their accomplishment; they had heard nothing of the day of Pentecost, and of the pouring out of the Spirit upon the apostles then, nor of any instance of this kind since; they did not know that the Holy Ghost was yet, John 7:39 they knew he was promised, but not that he was given; the Ethiopic version, to avoid the difficulty of the text, renders it, "we have only heard that there was an Holy Ghost".



Acts 19:3
And he said unto them, Unto what then were ye baptized? And they said, Unto John's baptism.
And he said unto them, unto what then were ye baptized?.... The apostle takes it for granted that they were baptized, since they were not only believers, but disciples; such as not only believed with the heart, but had made a profession of their faith, and were followers of Christ; but asks unto what they were baptized; either in whose name they were baptized, since Christian baptism was administered in the name of the Spirit, as well as in the name of the Father and of the Son; or what attended or followed their baptism, seeing sometimes the Holy Ghost fell upon persons, either before baptism, or at it, or after it:
and they said, unto John's baptism; some think they had never been baptized at all with water baptism, only had received the doctrine preached by John, concerning repentance and remission of sins, and so were baptized unto him, professing the same doctrine he did, just as the Israelites were baptized into Moses; others think they were baptized, but very wrongly, being baptized in the name of John, and not in the name of Jesus Christ; and so, as it was not Christian baptism they had submitted to, it was right to baptize them again: but neither of these are probable, for it is not likely that they should receive John's doctrine, and not his baptism; that they should be his disciples and followers, and not attend to the more distinguishing branch of his ministry; and it is still more unlikely that they should be baptized in his name, who preached Jesus Christ to his followers, and pointed out to them the Lamb of God, and declared him to be greater than he; it seems rather that they were baptized, and that they were baptized in the name of Christ, as John's disciples were, as the apostle affirms in the following words.

 

I asked the question if John was the first Baptist.