1 Corinthians 15:29

“For else, what shall they do which are baptized for the dead? If the dead rise not at all, why are they baptized for them?”

The ἐπεί, for since, is here taken, as often, in the sense of: for if it is not so (if the dead rise not). The English translation can render this idea by: for otherwise, else. This conjunction rests, not on 1 Corinthians 15:28 only, but on the whole preceding passage, from 1 Corinthians 15:20: “If Christ risen be not the first-fruits of a harvest of glorified ones in whom God will become all in all...”

We must not confound the expression τί ποιήσουσιν, what shall they do? with the form τί ποιοῦσιν, what do they? The understood answer with the verb in the present would be: Nonsense, an absurdity; whereas with the verb in the future the meaning is: what result, what profit will they gain? Answer: none. It has been sought to explain the future in a purely logical sense: “What will every baptism be, performed under such conditions (once the resurrection is denied)?” But the following verses show that Paul's eye is really turned to the future, the future which is to follow death: and if such was the meaning of this future tense, the logical condition would have required to be more expressly indicated. The meaning is certainly the same as that of the question: τί μοι τὸ ὄφελος, what advantageth it me (1 Corinthians 15:32)? The idea therefore is: “What will accrue to them from such a baptism?” Holsten recognises this: “The future relates to the result yet to come.”

Somewhere about thirty explanations are reckoned of the expression: to be baptized for the dead. This diversity is due, on the one hand, to our ignorance of the usage to which Paul alludes, on the other, to the absence of any parallel expression to guide us in the explanation of it. The term used by the apostle was evidently well known to his readers. In their Christian vocabulary it was a sort of technical phrase.

The ancient commentators are not altogether at one about its explanation. In two of his works (Cont. Marc. 1 Corinthians 5:10, and De resur. carn. 48) Tertullian says that the apostle is here referring to the custom of baptizing a living Christian in place of another who died without baptism; but he does not think it follows from the reasoning of the apostle that he approved of such a custom. Epiphanius relates that the Cerinthians, when one of their catechumens happened to die, caused a member of the Church to be baptized in his room, that the deceased might escape the penalties of the unbaptized. Chrysostom tells the same story of the Marcionites. But these two Fathers do not think the apostle meant to refer to such a custom as existing among the first Christians. It is otherwise with Ambrosiaster: “Paul takes an example from the fact that if any one died before receiving baptism, a living person was baptized for him, because it was feared either that he would not rise again, or that he would rise again to suffer.” A very large number of ancient and modern commentators have adopted this meaning given by the Roman commentator, particularly Anselm, Erasmus, Grotius, Rückert, de Wette, Neander, Kling, Heinrici, Renan, Reuss, Edwards, Holsten. The last, as well as Kling, thinks he can connect this custom of representative baptism with the sickness prevailing at Corinth, mentioned 1 Corinthians 11:30. This connection is inadmissible; for those who were stricken with sickness were unworthy communicants, who were all baptized. As to the explanation itself, I do not think the apostle could have taken as the basis of an argument a superstitious custom absolutely opposed to his spiritual conception. Reuss himself says: “We grant that the argument in itself is extremely weak; indeed, it has probably no other object than to show the opponents guilty of self-contradiction.” But even on this supposition, what purpose would have been served by adopting this course of bad logic and of doubtful honesty? The opponents whom he sought to convince by such means would no doubt have answered that one absurdity is not proved by a greater; for, if they rejected the resurrection of the body, they would evidently reject baptism for the dead so understood. Rückert and Heinrici think that this was merely a preliminary argument, and that Paul had in view to rectify the superstitious custom from which it was drawn, when he should go to Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:34), that is to say, that he had in view then to refute himself! Heinrici supposes that this strange procedure arose from the consideration which he required to show to his colleague Apollos, who was very zealous in the matter of baptism, and who had introduced this kind of ceremony at Corinth. But we have seen that the part ascribed to Apollos by this critic is a simple creation of his imagination. It would consequently be necessary, if such was St. Paul's argument, to go the length of holding with Holsten that the apostle's spiritualism was yet very rudimentary, and that he himself had not drawn from it its last consequences. But who can believe that the man who had combated the opus operatum with such energy in his conflict with Jewish legalism, would have restored or tolerated it himself in a new form in the Churches which he had founded? The man whose spiritualism became that of the entire Church, and ours also at the present hour, certainly did not adopt in his evangelical convictions and practice an element stamped with the grossest religious materialism. Besides, we have no instance which can lead us to suppose that such a custom had a place in the life of the primitive Churches. It was not till after the apostolic period that the idea of the magical virtue of the sacraments began to corrupt the primitive spirituality. To these reasons there is added another, taken from the text itself: As the advantage of such an act must have accrued, not to those who performed it, but to those in whose behalf it was performed, instead of saying: “What shall they gain who are baptized for the dead?” Paul would have required to say: “What will the dead gain for whom such baptisms are performed?” This last reason would seem to me of itself sufficient to secure the rejection of an interpretation otherwise so incompatible with the apostle's moral dignity and with the character of the apostolic Churches. As to the sects mentioned by the Fathers, they belong to a later period, when the life of the Church had lost its primitive simplicity, both in doctrine and ritual. And it may be supposed, not improbably, that it was our very passage, misunderstood, which gave rise to the absurd practices to which we have referred.

This meaning, the first we admit to occur to the mind, being set aside, we find ourselves face to face with a multitude of explanations, no one of which has yet succeeded in gaining general approval. Certain of them may be set aside without discussion, so evidently do they do violence to the meaning of one or other of the terms used by Paul. Beza: “Those who bathe the dead before burying them;” Thomas Aquinas: “Those who are baptized to obtain the pardon of mortal sins;” Olshausen: “The new converts who are baptized to fill the blank left in the Church by the Christians who die;” John Edwards (year 1692), quoted by Edwards: “Those who are converted by contemplating the glorious death of the martyrs, as Paul himself was in consequence of Stephen's death.” Luther and Ewald explain: “Those who are baptized over the graves of the martyrs.” But the preposition ὑπέρ, over, has never this local sense in the New Testament, and such a custom belongs to a kind of devotion posterior to the time of the apostles. Besides, the argument would have proved absolutely nothing. Several commentators apply the word τῶν νεκρῶν, the dead, to the baptized themselves. So Chrysostom and the ancient Greek commentators: “for themselves as dead, that is to say, with a view to their own resurrection;” Chrysostom paraphrases τῶν νεκρῶν by τῶν σωμάτων. To the same effect Linder: “ In gratiam cinerum. ” But to give the argument any force, it would require to be established that the apostolic Church maintained a peculiar relation between the sacrament of baptism and the bodily resurrection of the baptized. The passage Romans 6:1 seq. proves nothing in this respect; for it refers only to spiritual resurrection. Then there would have been no need of the article before νεκρῶν; Paul must have said in this sense: for [some] dead (themselves as dead), and not: for the dead.

Otto has modified this meaning, applying the term the dead to the adversaries of the resurrection at Corinth. The question, according to him, is ironical: “Why, if there is no resurrection, do these people have themselves baptized to result in their being of the dead, not of the living?” The answer would thus be ironically introduced into the question. But in this sense the article would have required to be rejected. And would not this sarcasm be utterly out of place after the sublime thought of 1 Corinthians 15:28 ? Finally, the following question, in that case reproducing it a second time, would be grossly out of place. It would be much more natural, starting from this explanation of τῶν νεκρῶν, the dead, to adopt the sense of Epiphanius and Calvin, who apply the words to the catechumens threatened with death by accident or disease, and who asked baptism, as Calvin says, “either for their own consolation, or for the edification of the brethren.” In this case we must understand the words: “for the dead,” in the sense of: in view of death, or: as about to be soon gathered to the dead; as Bengel says: “ qui mox post baptismum ad mortuos aggregabuntur. ” But one cannot help feeling how forced are the two meanings thus given to ὑπέρ, especially the former.

A group of more probable explanations, approaching in meaning the words of Bengel just quoted, is that in which the term: the dead, is applied to all deceased Christians, and to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. So Pelagius and Diestelmann: “For the love of Christ; to be one day united with Him and with the faithful who surround Him in His kingdom.” But the term: they who are baptized, would require in this case to be applied to all Christians; now the οἱ before βαπτιζόμενοι denotes a special class of Christians. As is well said by Calvin: “ Non de omnibus loquitur quum dicit: quid facient qui baptizantur? ” And if Paul wished to characterize Christians in general, why speak of baptism rather than of faith? It is faith, and not the sign of faith, which opens the way into the kingdom of Christ. The same objections are opposed to Köster's meaning: “To remain united to their dead Christian relatives and friends.” This explanation has moreover against it the want of a more precise description added to the general term “the dead.”

But these last interpretations, though we cannot accept them as satisfactory, set us on the way of what seems to us the true one. Morus, Flatt, and Lightfoot (the older) have thought that in this phrase: to be baptized for the dead, the word baptized referred, not to the baptism of water, but to the baptism of blood, by martyrdom. We have two sayings uttered by the Lord, in which the term baptism is used in this meaning; the one pointing to His own death, Luke 12:50: “I have a baptism to be baptized with;” the other, to the bloody death of His disciples, Mark 10:38: “Can ye be baptized with the baptism wherewith I shall be baptized?” One can easily understand how, under the influence of such sayings, there was formed in the primitive Church a new expression such as that used here by the apostle, to denote the bloody death of martyrdom. The words: “for the dead,” would thus signify: to be baptized, not as the believer is with the baptism of water to enter into the Church of the living, but to enter into that of the dead, the word dead being chosen in contrast to the Church on the earth and to bring out the heroism of that martyrbaptism which leads to life only through communion with the dead. Thereby the article οἱ before βαπτιζόμενοι is fully explained; such baptized ones certainly form a class of Christians by themselves. The future also, ποιήσουσιν, is accounted for: “If there is no resurrection, what will be gained by such baptized ones, by their joining the ranks of the dead for the love of Christ and of the Church in heaven?” Finally, we shall see how natural on this explanation is the transition to the question of 1 Corinthians 15:30: “Why do we also stand in jeopardy every hour?” To this interpretation it is objected that there had not yet been either persecutions or martyrs in the Church of Corinth. But there had been persecutions and martyrs in the Church in general; comp. Acts 7:58; Acts 9:1; Acts 12:2; Acts 14:19; and there might have been some which are unknown to us. 1 Corinthians 15:32 of our chapter shows how many circumstances there are even in the life of the best known of the apostles of which we are totally ignorant.

The second question is a more emphatic repetition of the first. And therefore we are led to refer the proposition εἰ ὅλως...to what follows. As the first question was prefaced by the ἐπεί, the second is introduced by the subordinate proposition, which is a more emphatic development of the ἐπεί : “If absolutely the dead do not return to bodily life.”

The καί signifies notwithstanding, as in 1 Corinthians 7:21. These are two things which cannot co-exist (to remain dead, and to be baptized for them). Undoubtedly we must read ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν, for them, with almost all the authorities, connecting this regimen with βαπτίζονται, and not with κινδυνεύομεν, as Hofmann will have it.