ACTS 8:37: FAITH AND BAPTISM

I ran across something on Google Images that caught my interest. It was apparently an ad for the book Which Bible Would Jesus Use? by Jack McElroy. The caption said “The ESV purposely omits Acts 8:37. Why is it omitted?” His answer was, “Because the translators and editors of the ESV were taught that God never wanted it in his Bible in the first place. Which is odd because...This is the ONLY time in the entire Bible where a personal confession of faith is a prerequisite for Baptism – as is clearly taught in the King James Bible. You have to personally BELIEVE in the Lord Jesus Christ FIRST.”

First off, let me state that I am quite in agreement with Mr. McElroy in his last sentence above. But I will have to take issue with pretty much everything else he claims and insinuates. Let's start with his picking on the ESV as if its translators and editors alone had unilaterally decided to omit that verse. Just looking at the translations I have in my home library, I note that RSV, J.B. Phillips, NEB, TEV, Jerusalem Bible, NIV and NRSV all omit that verse. Besides the KJV, only the Living Bible paraphrase includes it, but has a footnote indicating that a number of ancient manuscripts do not. It represents a wide consensus of almost all translators.

Secondly, McElroy insinuates that there was an ulterior motive for omitting the verse; namely to justify the continuation of the practice of infant baptism. If all the various members of all the translation committees who produced almost all of the modern Bible translations all believed firmly in infant baptism, then he would perhaps have a valid case here. But obviously that is not the case. And if they were all so set in hiding this “embarrassing passage,” then they certainly would not have bothered to include textual notes admitting that there were ancient manuscripts including this verse and then actually quoting it, which they all do. I won't bother quoting the whole verse, but you can see it in the footnotes to your Bibles, assuming that you don't have the KJV.

Next is the comment by McElroy that Acts 8:37 is the only place in the Bible teaching that faith is a prerequisite for baptism. If that were so, I would have grave doubts as to that doctrine since no major doctrine should depend on only one verse in the Bible. However, the truth is that the priority of faith before baptism is taught or strongly implied in numerous NT passages. The most exhaustive and trustworthy commentary on the subject of baptism is Baptism in the New Testament by G.R. Beasley-Murray. He has a portion of one chapter entitled “Baptism and Faith” in which he discusses this subject. Since it is nine pages long, I will not attempt to summarize his arguments. However, I do encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to read the whole thing and the passages he cites. Here are only a few excerpts:

“In baptism the Gospel proclamation and the hearing of faith become united in one indissoluble act, at one and the same time an act of grace and faith, an act of God and man. There is, indeed, much to be said for the contention independently advocated by theologians of varied schools, that in the New Testament faith and baptism and are viewed as inseparables whenever the subject of Christian initiation is under discussion, so that if one is referred to, the other is presupposed, even if not mentioned...it is undoubtedly true that in the New Testament it is everywhere assumed that faith proceeds to baptism and that baptism is for faith.”

“Faith is needful before baptism, that Christ and his Gospel may truly be confessed in it; in baptism, to receive what God bestows; and after baptism, in order to abide in the grace so freely given and to work out by that grace what God has wrought within (Phil. 2:12 f).”

Beasley-Murray quotes the unusual example of the Roman Catholic scholar Schnackenburg affirming, “Baptism without faith in Christ is unimaginable for the thinking of the primitive Church.” Schnackenburg even criticized a Baptist theologian for trying to separate conversion and baptism so as to deny their connection. Among the passages he cited were Mark 16:16; Acts 16:31; and John 1:13.

Now that those points have been briefly dealt with, what about the all-important question as to why that particular verse has been omitted from almost all modern translations? (By the way, it is not by far the only such KJV verse in the NT that is not found in in other translations. And most of the other omissions are for the same general reasons outlined below.) As you may or may not already have suspected, it all boils down to a matter of textual criticism. Therefore I will lean on the best source for such questions, Bruce M. Metzer's A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament.

First to admit is the inescapable fact that the early handwritten manuscripts of Acts are divided in their wording, with some including what we would call Acts 8:37 (Remember that the numbering of verses did not come about until millennia later.) and others including it. One must then ask, “Which is more logical, that scribes would purposely omit this verse or add it?” Metzger echoes the opinion of most textual scholars: “There is no reason why scribes should have omitted the material, if it had originally stood in the text.” Next, one could look at the wording of this verse and see if parallels in phrasing could be found elsewhere in Luke's writings. In fact, he notes that “the Jesus Christ” (literal translation of the Greek) is not a Lukan expression.

The relative antiquity of the various manuscripts also provides a valuable clue as to which ones are probably the most reliable. The earliest witness to the inclusion of Acts 8:37 in the text dates to the 6^th century, but there are earlier manuscripts that do not have it. Next is the geographical distribution of the manuscripts to consider. Those not including this verse have a wider area of distribution.

In addition, Metzger feels that the question-and-answer formulation in this addition has all the hallmarks of an ancient baptismal liturgy that a scribe wrote in the margin of his Bible and then found its way into the text when it was subsequently copied by a later scribe. Confirmation of this proposed type of scenario actually comes from the original production of the “Received Text” put together by the Greek scholar Erasmus, upon which the King James Version relied. Erasmus, Metzger explains, had one rather late medieval Greek manuscript which he mainly relied on to produce his “Received Text.” It did not include what we would call Acts 8:37. However, he found another manuscript which did include it in the margin. His reasoning was that it had accidentally been left out by a sloppy scribe, and so he added it. In that manner it then found its way into the KJV.

Here is one parting comment for those who might still wonder whether the Ethiopian eunuch believed before he was baptized, as if there were any doubt at all on that point. Metzger notes a church tradition going back to the latter part of the 2^nd century which is quoted by Irenaeus. In it was reported the fact that the Ethiopian specifically confessed his faith in Jesus Christ.