My original intention was to produce the Simple Statement on Baptism as a poster for use at the church open day.

When I started looking at the Scriptures I found that our traditional view of baptism as a symbolical act and a witness to others with no benefit to the person being baptised other than that of any act of obedience to the Lord falls far short of what the New Testament teaches.

If we look honestly at all the New Testament references to baptism we find that, when accompanied by believing faith, baptism is of great benefit to the new convert. It seems to me that in a reaction against denominations that hold to infant baptism we have denied some of the reality of which the New Testament speaks.

METHOD

My method was first to list each word that might refer to baptism. (See below). Then produce a List of Passages containing any of these words.

Next I summarised the text of each of these passages, and sorted them into groups related to content or situation. (Verses by Category and Content).

A pass through this list enabled me to write down a series of headings and a list of verses related to them. The headings were then grouped and arranged in logical order to produce a skeleton for the Theological Statement. The text of the Theological Statement was then produced taking care to ensure that everything relevant was extracted from each passage.

I produced the Simple Statement by carefully summarising the Theological Statement. Finally this web based article was produced by splitting the paper based article up into separate web pages, and finishing off a few sections of the Theological Statement.

GREEK WORDS

Three Greek words were considered to be of possible relevance; baptizw, baptisma, and baptismoV {baptidzo, baptisma, and baptismos}. Of these the latter proved to be irrelevant, probably only referring to Jewish ceremonial washings. The other two are a verb and its derived noun. All occurrences of these three words in the New Testament are listed in the List of Passages.

A fourth word, baptisthV {baptistes}, meaning one who baptises refers only to John the Baptist, and hence is not directly relevant to the study of Christian baptism.