Note 1 — Chapter V · THE ASCENSION.

The impediments to the supposition that Jesus delivered to his disciples the express command to carry the announcement of the gospel to the Gentiles, have been already pointed out in an earlier connexion.1 But that this more definite form of baptism proceeded from Jesus, is also opposed by the fact, that such an allocation of Father, Son, and Spirit does not elsewhere appear, except as a form of salutation in apostolic epistles (2 Cor. xiii. 14: the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, etc.); while as a more definite form of baptism it is not to be met with throughout the whole New Testament save in the above passage of the first gospel: for in the apostolic epistles and even in the Acts, baptism is designated as a βαπτίζειν εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν, or εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ baptising in Christ Jesus, or in the name of the Lord Jesus, or their equivalent (Rom. vi. 3; Gal. iii. 27; Acts ii. 38, viii. 16, x. 48, xix. 5), and the same threefold reference to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is only found in ecclesiastical writers, as, for example, Justin.2 Indeed the formula in Matthew sounds so exactly as if it had been borrowed from the ecclesiastical ritual, that there is no slight probability in the supposition that it was transferred from thence into the mouth of Jesus. But this does not authorize us to throw the passage out of the text as an interpolation,3 since, if everything in the gospels which cannot have happened to Jesus, or which cannot have been done or spoken by him in the manner there described, were to be pronounced foreign to the original text, the interpolations would soon become too numerous. So far it is with justice that others have defended the genuineness of the baptismal formula;4 but their grounds for the assertion that it was delivered in this manner by Jesus himself are insufficient: the two opinions then resolve themselves into a third, namely, that this more definite form of baptism does indeed belong to the original context of the first gospel, but without having been so delivered by Jesus.5 Jesus had, during his life, predicted in divers ways the propagation of his kingdom beyond the limits of the Jewish nation, perhaps also had intimated the introduction of baptism to be his will; and—whether it be the fact that, as we learn in the fourth gospel, the disciples already practised baptism in the lifetime of Jesus, or that they first made this rite a sign of reception into the new messianic society after his death,—in any case it was entirely in the manner of the legend to place the injunction to baptize, as well as to go out into all the world, in the mouth of the departing Christ as a last declaration of his will.