Romans 6:3

“ Or know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death? ”

The ἤ, or, or indeed, ought, according to the usual meaning of the phrase: or know ye not, to be paraphrased thus: Or, if you do not understand what I have just said (that there has been among you a death to sin), know you not then what was signified by the baptism which ye received? If you understood that rite, you would know that it supposes a death, and promises a second birth, which removes every possibility of a return to the old life. It has been generally concluded, from this mode of expression: Or know ye not...? that baptism was represented as being itself the death spoken of by St. Paul in Romans 6:2. I believe it is thereby made impossible to explain satisfactorily the whole of the following passage, especially the words: “ Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into His death.” According to these words, it is not to death, it is to the interment of the dead, that Paul compares baptism. And, indeed, just as the ceremony of interment, as a visible and public fact, attests death, so baptism, in so far as it is an outward and sensible act, attests faith, with the death to sin implicitly included in faith. As to the phrase: Or know ye not? it finds a still more natural explanation if baptism is regarded as the proof of death, than if, as is constantly done, to the detriment of the sense of this beautiful passage, baptism is identified with it. St. Paul means: “Ye know not that ye are dead...? Well then, ye are ignorant that as many of you as there are, are men interred (baptized)! People do not bury the living.” The ὅσοι, a pronoun of quantity: as many individuals as, differs from the pronoun of quality οἵτινες, a kind of people who. The point in question here is not, as in Romans 6:2, one of quality, but of quantity: “Ye know not then that as many baptized (buried) persons as there are, so many dead are there.”

Some take the word baptize in its literal sense of bathing, plunging, and understand: “As many of you as were plunged into Christ. ” But in the similar formula, 1 Corinthians 10:2: “ to be baptized into Moses (εἰς τὸν Μωσῆν βαπτιζεσθαι),” the meaning is certainly not: to be plunged into Moses. The word baptized is to be taken in its technical sense: to be baptized with water (by the fact of the passage through the sea and under the cloud), and the clause must consequently signify: in relation to Moses, as a typical Saviour that is to say, in order to having part in the divine deliverance of which Moses was the agent. Such is likewise the meaning of the being baptized into Christ Jesus, in our passage: “Ye received baptism with water in relation to the person of Jesus Christ, whose property ye became by that act.” Comp. the phrase: being baptized, εἰς τὸ ὄνομα, into the name of (Matthew 28:19 and 1 Corinthians 1:13), which should be explained in a similar manner. One is not plunged into a name, but into water in relation to (εἰς) a name that is to say, to the new revelation of God expressed in a name. It is to the God revealed under this form that the believer consecrates himself externally by baptism.

The title Christ is placed here, as Romans 1:1, before the name of the historical person (Jesus). The idea of the office evidently takes precedence in the context of that of the person. Yet Paul adds the name Jesus, which is wrongly omitted by the Vatic., for this name is closely connected with the fact of the death which is about to be brought into relief.

In this expression: being baptized into death, the sense plunged would be less inadmissible than in the preceding phrase; for an abstract object like death lends itself better to the notion of plunging into, than a personal one like Moses or Christ. But if such had been the apostle's meaning, would he not rather have said: into His blood, than into His death? We think, therefore, that here too it is more exact to explain: “ baptized with water in relation to His death.” When one is baptized into Christ, it is in virtue of His death that the bond thus formed with Him is contracted. For by His blood we have been bought with a price. Baptism serves only to give him in fact what belongs to him in right by this act of purchase. Baptism thus supposes the death of Christ and that of the baptized man man himself (through the appropriation of Christ's death). Hence the conclusion drawn in Romans 6:4, and which brings the argument to a close.