The Meaning of βαπτίζειν in Greek, Jewish, and Patristic Literature 7 connection between water baptism and Spirit baptism, or the question whether infants were baptized in the earliest churches. A good example is W. Bieder whose entry on βαπτίζω, βάπτισμα in the Exegetical Diction- ary of the New Testament includes no explanation of the meaning of the Greek terms.12 The standard lexicons for classical and New Testament Greek, espe- cially the latter, facilitate the technical meaning fallacy. The venerable Greek-English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott and Henry Stuart Jones, whose ninth edition (with Revised Supplement by Peter G. W. Glare)13 reports three senses in the entry for βαπτίζω: 1. dip, plunge, to be drowned, (of ships) sink, flood (the city); transferred sense: overwhelm, flood, to be drenched, soaked in wine, over head and ears in debt; 2. draw wine by dipping (the cup in the bowl); 3. baptize The verb βάπτω is explained in terms of the following senses: I. 1a immerse (in a liquid), dip; 1b of slaughter; 2. colour by immersion, dye; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 1.145: “baptizo is a technical term for baptism”. George R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (orig. 1962; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerd- mans, 1979), never discusses the meaning of the Greek term; the statement that ‘the group of words connected with βαπτίζειν reflects contemporary terminology used of lustrations of all kinds practised among Jews’ (ibid. p. 27) reflects the notion that the term has a ritual meaning. In contrast, note the entry for βαπτίζω in Takamitsu Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Louvain: Peeters, 2009), 112: 1. mid. to immerse oneself: so as to wash oneself; 2. act. and fig. to affect thoroughly (with the example ἡ ἀνομία με βαπτίζει “I am thoroughly soaked with lawlessness” Isa 21.4). 12 W. Bieder, Art. βαπτίζω, in Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider, eds., Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament [EDNT] (3 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990–93), 3:192-96. The view that βαπτίζειν is a technical term in the New Testament has become an accepted view, supported and promulgated by Greek-English lexicons; note, for example, the widely used lexicon in the 19th century, based on the lexicon of A. Wahl (1822, 1825), by Edward Robinson, A Greek and English Lexicon of the New Testament (A New Edition, Revised and in Great Part Rewritten; London: Longman, 1850 [orig. 1825]), s.v. βαπτίζω: ‘to dip in, to sink, to immerse;’ 1. to wash, to lave, to cleanse by washing; 2. to baptize, to administer the rite of baptism a. Pr(oprie), i.e. literal, b. trop(ically) i.e. figuratively. Robinson argues against the meaning ‘immersion’ and for the meaning ‘ablution or affu- sion’ (for ‘Hellenistic usage’) by discussing Lk. 11:38 and Acts 2:41, emphasizing the alleged impossibility that 3000 people could have been immersed on Pentecost, as well as the Latin translation of βαπτίζω with the loan word baptizo rather then by immergo. 13 Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (New Ninth Edition Revised and Augmented Throughout by Henry Stuart Jones, with the Assistance of Rod- erick McKenzie, completed 1940, with Revised Supplement Edited by Peter G. W. Glare; Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); I use the traditional abbreviation LSJ.