BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD?? (Santamaria)

BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD?

FOREWORD

In every age, the church is tempted by a particular kind of cleverness—the kind that takes a hard saying of Scripture, detaches it from the whole counsel of God, and then builds a little machine out of it. The machine may hum and impress. It may even look compassionate. But if it is not governed by the mind of the Spirit, it will not heal; it will mislead. And sometimes it will do something worse: it will train men to trust rites more than truth, and ceremonies more than Christ.

Our subject is one of those hard sayings: Paul’s strange question in 1 Corinthians 15:29 about “those who are baptized for the dead.” The verse stands like a jagged rock in the current—unavoidable, inconvenient, and therefore irresistible to the theological engineer. Some have tried to sand it down by pretending it does not say what it says. Others have tried to turn it into a sacramental lever, a post-mortem loophole, a mechanism by which the living might alter the state of the dead. And in the history of error, few examples are more haunting than the story reported by Chrysostom: the Marcionite attempt to make Paul’s phrase into a literal proxy rite, staging a substitute baptism as if the dead could be negotiated back into grace by an acted-out exchange. Whether every detail of that report is as he tells it, the impulse behind it is tragically believable. When men lose the backbone of apostolic doctrine, they grasp for a backdoor.

But Paul’s own point is not a backdoor. It is a battering ram.

First Corinthians 15 is not about inventing rituals; it is about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and, therefore, the resurrection of His people. The apostle is not teaching a new ordinance. He is exposing inconsistency. “How do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” he asks. And then he brings forward—like a witness in court—things already present among them: their practices, their confessions, their willingness to suffer, their habits that only make sense if death is not the final word. Paul is not flattering Corinth; he is trapping unbelief in its own contradictions. He is saying, in effect, “Your denial cannot live in the same house with your Christianity. One of them must die.”

That is why this discussion matters far beyond a single obscure verse. At stake is the difference between Scripture as a living voice and Scripture as raw material for human invention. At stake is whether we will allow the resurrection to remain what it is in Paul’s preaching: not a garnish for funerals, not a metaphor for optimism, but the axis on which the gospel turns. If Christ be not raised, faith is empty, preaching is hollow, guilt remains, the dead are perished, and the saints are of all men most miserable. The apostle will not permit a halfway Christianity—one that keeps the name of Christ while surrendering the reality of His triumph over the grave.

And this is where the “grieving” language we have explored belongs in the same spiritual ecosystem. The Spirit of God is not a force to be manipulated. He is not a candle the creature can snuff out in God’s heavens. Yet the Scriptures do not speak of Him as indifferent to sin, nor do they treat holiness as optional. We are commanded not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God, not because we can injure the divine nature, but because sin is personal rebellion against the holy Presence who indwells the church, and because sin produces real spiritual darkness, real loss of comfort, real deadness of affection, real misery of conscience. The Bible refuses both errors: it refuses the blasphemy that makes God changeable like man, and it refuses the dead orthodoxy that makes sin a small thing.

So we come to this strange intersection: a disputed baptism phrase, an ancient Jewish text speaking of prayer for the dead in resurrection hope, a heretical ritual reported with disgust, and an apostle thundering that the dead shall rise because Christ is risen. It may feel like a tangle. But the tangle is instructive. It teaches us how easily men will trade the glory of revealed truth for the comfort of religious technique. It teaches us how the human heart, frightened of death, is willing to grasp at any rope—even a rope woven from a misused verse—rather than bow before the living Christ who says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

This foreword, then, is an invitation to read slowly and reverently. We will not handle Paul as if he were giving us permission to innovate. We will handle him as an apostle—sharp, orderly, Christ-centered, and relentless against any doctrine that dissolves the resurrection into fog. We will listen to the Greek words, not as magic syllables, but as witnesses to meaning. We will compare Scripture with Scripture, not to dodge difficulty, but to submit our minds to the grammar of revelation. We will consider the history, not to chase curiosities, but to see how quickly a church untethered from apostolic doctrine will drift into the strange.

And above all, we will come back to the great fixed star: Jesus Christ, crucified and raised. The church does not need secret rites for the dead. The church needs the gospel of the Living One, who died, and behold, is alive forevermore, and holds the keys of death and Hades. When that is believed—not merely repeated, but believed—the fearful ingenuity of man is exposed for what it is, and the heart learns again the sober, glorious simplicity of apostolic Christianity: “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

Guillermo Santamaria

Introduction

The passage is 1 Corinthians 15:29, sitting inside Paul’s long argument for the bodily resurrection (1 Cor 15:12–34). The whole section is basically Paul saying, “If you deny resurrection, you don’t just lose a doctrine; you blow up Christianity’s internal wiring.” Verse 29 is one of his “your own practice gives you away” moves. ()

Here is the Greek (NA/UBS style), with a straight translation:

Ἐπεὶ τί ποιήσουσιν οἱ βαπτιζόμενοι ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν; εἰ ὅλως νεκροὶ οὐκ ἐγείρονται, τί καὶ βαπτίζονται ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν;

“Otherwise, what will those do who are being baptized for/on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why indeed are they being baptized for/on behalf of them?” ()

Start with the skeleton of the sentence. Ἐπεὶ (“otherwise/since/in that case”) introduces an inference: Paul is pressing consequences. Then τί ποιήσουσιν…? is “what will they do?”—a future verb used rhetorically, not because Paul is scheduling a baptismal calendar, but because he’s asking, “What sense will this make? What will become of this practice if your premise is true?” The subject is οἱ βαπτιζόμενοι, literally “the ones being baptized.” That’s a present participle, and in NT usage it normally functions as “those who are getting baptized” (passive in meaning even if the form can be labeled middle/passive). The important rhetorical detail is that Paul says they, not “we.” He stands slightly to the side of the practice he’s invoking.

The real pressure point is the prepositional phrase: ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν. The preposition ὑπέρ (hyper) with the genitive commonly means “for, for the sake of, on behalf of,” and can sometimes carry the “in place of / instead of” flavor depending on context. () The noun phrase τῶν νεκρῶν is “the dead (ones)”—a normal Greek way of speaking of dead people as a class.

So, at the level of raw Greek, the most natural reading really is: “being baptized for/on behalf of dead people.”

Now, what could Paul mean by that? The reason this verse has generated a small library of hypotheses is that Paul gives zero backstory. He doesn’t pause to say, “Let me explain the Corinthian custom…” He just leverages it as an argument. The NET Bible note captures that feature well: Paul’s reference is “neither a recommendation nor a condemnation”; he “simply uses it as evidence from the lives of the Corinthians themselves” to support his resurrection argument. ()

That leads to the first major interpretation: Paul is pointing to some kind of vicarious/proxy baptism practiced by some Corinthians—someone living being baptized “on behalf of” someone dead. That fits the ordinary meaning of ὑπὲρ + genitive with persons. It also fits Paul’s distancing of “they” rather than “we.” And it fits his logic: “Even your ritual behavior presupposes resurrection, so why deny it?” The NET notes “most likely interpretation” goes in that general direction: some Corinthians underwent baptism as a kind of witness connected to believers who died without receiving baptism. ()

Second, there’s an ancient interpretation that tries to avoid proxy-baptism entirely by reading “the dead” as dead bodies (i.e., your body that will die and be raised), and “for” as “with a view to.” John Chrysostom is a prime example. After describing (and mocking) a Marcionite¹ misuse of the verse, he gives his own reading: Paul is basically saying, “If there is no resurrection, why are you baptized for the dead—meaning, for your dead bodies?” Chrysostom explicitly paraphrases it that way: baptism is done “with a view to… the resurrection of your dead body,” and immersion/emergence functions as a sign of descent into death and return. ()

Is Chrysostom’s move possible from the Greek? It’s not crazy, because νεκροί can be used substantively and could be heard as “dead bodies” in certain contexts, and ὑπέρ can express “for the sake of/with reference to.” But grammatically, the most straightforward sense of τῶν νεκρῶν in Paul is still “dead people,” not “dead bodies,” and Paul doesn’t include the word “body” (σῶμα) here—Chrysostom supplies it from the broader resurrection theme. Still, his reading is valuable because it highlights something undeniably true in Paul: baptism is tightly linked with death-and-resurrection symbolism.

And that link is where Paul’s broader argument makes verse 29 feel less alien. Paul elsewhere explains baptism in death/resurrection terms. Romans 6:4 says, συνετάφημεν οὖν αὐτῷ διὰ τοῦ βαπτίσματος εἰς τὸν θάνατον—“Therefore we were buried with him through baptism into death,” with the purpose that “just as Christ was raised… we too might walk in newness of life.” Even if 1 Cor 15:29 refers to some strange Corinthian custom, Paul is still operating in a world where baptism inherently gestures toward resurrection.

Third, there are “softer” readings that keep the normal Greek sense (“for the dead”) but avoid the idea of a ritual performed in place of the dead. One common proposal is motivational/causal: people are baptized because of the dead—i.e., because dead believers (martyrs, faithful saints, beloved family members) inspired them, or because hope of reunion with the dead made the gospel compelling. Greek ὑπέρ can, in some contexts, drift toward “for the sake of/because of,” so it’s not linguistically impossible. But you have to admit this is doing more reconstruction than the text itself provides. The Greek doesn’t spell out “because,” and Paul’s logic sounds more like “on behalf of” than “inspired by.”

Fourth, there’s the “replacement” idea: new converts are baptized “for” the dead in the sense of “taking the place of” deceased believers—filling up the ranks. This tries to use the “instead of” nuance sometimes carried by ὑπέρ. () It’s possible Greek-wise, but it can feel a little thin rhetorically: “People keep joining the church even though members die” doesn’t obviously require resurrection to make sense, whereas a proxy-baptism or resurrection-symbolism argument lands more directly in Paul’s “if no resurrection, why do X?” punch.²

So, where does the Greek push you if you want to be strict? It pushes you to two anchor points.

First anchor: Paul is talking about baptism (βαπτίζω) in the ordinary Christian sense, not merely a metaphor for suffering, because he uses the exact “being baptized” language and treats it as a recognizable practice in the community.

Second anchor: ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν most naturally reads “on behalf of the dead.” ()

Once you accept those anchors, the clearest explanation is: some Corinthians practiced a baptism connected to dead people (likely vicarious in some way), and Paul doesn’t stop to correct it here because that’s not his point. His point is logical consistency: “You can’t do resurrection-shaped things while denying resurrection.” The NET note is very blunt about that rhetorical function: their actions demonstrated hope for bodily resurrection even if some of their words denied it. ()

And notice how Paul immediately pivots in the next verses: “Why are we in danger every hour?” (15:30). He moves from their practice (“they are baptized…”) to apostolic practice (daily danger, suffering). Chrysostom³ even flags this rhetorical method: Paul sometimes argues “from the very things which they practice,” using the gainsayers’ own actions as witnesses.⁴ () That flow strongly suggests verse 29 is an “even you do this…” argument, not a sacramental instruction.

If you’re aiming for a careful, Bible-governed conclusion (the kind an Old School Baptist would appreciate), it’s this: whatever exactly “baptized for the dead” was in Corinth, Paul does not present it as a normative ordinance for the churches. He uses it as a rhetorical exhibit in court: “Your own behavior betrays that you already live as resurrection-people.” The main doctrine of the chapter remains crystal clear and loudly repeated: Christ is raised; therefore, the dead will be raised; therefore, Christian faith and labor are not in vain. ()

In the ancient world, “doing something for the dead” is not a weird idea. What’s weird is the specific thing Paul names in 1 Corinthians 15:29—people being βαπτιζόμενοι ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν, “being baptized on behalf of the dead.” The phrase is real Greek, and ὑπέρ can naturally carry that “for/on behalf of” sense. The question is whether Greek religion or Jewish religion offers a clear, documented parallel practice—a true “proxy baptism” rite—sitting on the shelf for Corinth to borrow.

In Greek (Greco-Roman) religion, you absolutely do find a thick atmosphere of “death + ritual + water.” Still, it’s usually aimed at the living—either purifying them from death-pollution or initiating them into rites promising a better fate beyond death. Greek sacred-law material and wider ritual culture treat death as one of the most common sources of pollution (μίασμα), alongside sex and birth, and such pollutions are conceived as clinging to places and persons, requiring purification. (OpenEdition Books) That means washings and purifications are everywhere in the religious imagination, especially around burial and contact with corpses.

You also find major mystery cults (and Corinth was not culturally isolated from this world) that explicitly trade in the terror of death and the hope of a better afterlife. The Eleusinian Mysteries are a famous example: initiates participated in rites framed in terms of symbolic “death” and “rebirth,” and the tradition explicitly links the rite to hopes of “a better life after death” and even relief “from the fear of death.” The same description notes preparatory “cleaning” in the Ilissos River as part of the Lesser Mysteries. () So, Greek religion gives you (1) purificatory washings around death, and (2) initiatory washings tied to post-mortem hope.

But here’s the skeptical bottom line: none of that is clear evidence of “a living person undergoes an immersion rite as a substitute to benefit a dead person.” It’s adjacent. It’s conceptually compatible with “rituals can matter for death’s problem,” but it does not hand us an attested pagan “proxy baptism” ceremony that we can confidently point to and say, “That’s what Corinth was doing.”

Judaism is similar in that it has lots of washing/immersion—again, mostly for the living, and for ritual impurity (טֻמְאָה), not as a post-mortem sacrament. Prof. Yonatan Adler’s survey is helpful here: tevilah is “immersion of the entire body in water for the purpose of removing ritual impurity,” and he notes that the Torah’s usual verb is רחץ (“wash”), while the specific “immerse” root טבל exists too; he also emphasizes that the archaeological mikveh installations appear in quantity in the late Second Temple period (Hasmonean and later). () Importantly for your question, he mentions very early Jewish sources referring to immersion after touching a corpse (i.e., corpse-impurity management), which is still about cleansing the living person who had contact with death. () That’s not proxy baptism; it’s purity law.

Where Judaism does get intriguingly close—linguistically and conceptually, not ritually—is in the idea of actions done “for the dead.” In Greek-speaking Judaism, you can literally see the phrase “pray for the dead” with ὑπέρ: ὑπὲρ νεκρῶν εὔχεσθαι, “to pray for the dead,” in 2 Maccabees 12:4412.44⁵ (and the context is Judas making provisions connected to the dead). () So, Jewish religion can supply a precedent for “ὑπέρ + dead” language meaning real benefit-directed action toward the dead, but it still doesn’t supply a known Jewish rite of “baptism on behalf of the dead.”

Could this passage in II Maccabees have had any influence on Paul’s Passage?

It could have, but the honest answer is: we can’t prove direct literary dependence—only a plausible line of influence.

The strongest “yes, possibly” evidence is the shared logic + shared Greek construction. In 2 Maccabees 12:44, the narrator argues that if Judas “was not expecting those who had fallen to rise,” then it would be “superfluous and foolish to pray ὑπὲρ νεκρῶν (on behalf of the dead).” (intertextual.bible) Paul’s move in 1 Corinthians 15:29 is structurally similar: if the dead are not raised, then why are people being baptized ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν (for/on behalf of the dead)? (intertextual.bible) In other words, both texts treat resurrection as the rational “engine” that makes certain actions directed toward the dead make sense.

That said, the biggest reason to be cautious is that the actions are different. 2 Maccabees is about prayer/atonement offerings for fallen soldiers; Paul speaks of baptism connected to the dead. Similar logic doesn’t automatically mean one author borrowed from the other; it can also mean both are drawing from a shared Second Temple Jewish way of arguing: “If resurrection isn’t real, this practice is nonsense.” Ketchum’s dissertation, for example, explicitly highlights that 2 Macc 12:44 frames “praying on behalf of the dead” as only sensible because of resurrection hope—exactly the sort of reasoning Paul uses in 1 Cor 15:29. ()

There’s also the practical historical question: Would Paul even know 2 Maccabees? It’s a Greek Jewish work that circulated in the broader Septuagint world, so it’s not crazy to imagine Paul (a Greek-writing Jew) being familiar with it. But Paul never explicitly quotes 2 Maccabees the way he quotes the Torah, Psalms, Isaiah, etc., so “Paul had the book open on his desk” is speculation, not evidence.

So the best, tight conclusion is: 2 Maccabees 12:44 is a very plausible conceptual parallel (and the shared phrase ὑπὲρ νεκρῶν is striking), so it could have influenced the shape of Paul’s argument or supplied familiar language in the air he breathed.⁶ (intertextual.bible) But the data we actually possess doesn’t let us say more than that with confidence—especially because Paul in 1 Cor 15:29 is likely exploiting a local Corinthian practice (“what will those do…?”) rather than teaching a Jewish liturgical custom. (intertextual.bible)

So, if you’re asking, “Could Greek or Jewish religion have seeded the idea?”—yes, they supply the mental furniture: Greek religion normalizes death-related purification and afterlife-oriented initiation; Judaism normalizes washings/immersions for impurity (including corpse-impurity) and even contains Second Temple evidence of prayer “for the dead.” (OpenEdition Books)

But if you’re asking, “Do we have historical evidence of a direct Greek/Jewish proxy baptism practice that explains Corinth?”—no solid, straight-line evidence.

And one more wrinkle: the clearest external description of anything that looks like “proxy baptism” shows up later in Christian polemics. John Chrysostom describes a (to him) ridiculous Marcionite⁷ practice of hiding a living person under a dead catechumen’s couch and baptizing the living substitute “instead of the departed,” and he explicitly says they appealed to Paul’s phrase to defend it.⁸ () That’s valuable evidence that some groups did take 1 Cor 15:29 as warrant for proxy baptism—but it’s centuries after Paul, and it may well be an interpretation created by the verse rather than a pre-existing Corinthian custom.

Net: Greek religion gives you “water + death + purification/hope,” Judaism gives you “washing/immersion + corpse-impurity,” and even “ὑπέρ + dead” in Second Temple Greek. None of them gives you a nailed-down, attested “proxy baptism for the dead” rite that we can confidently plug into Corinth like a missing Lego brick.

---

Endnotes

1. [Note text missing in source.] ↩︎
2. Were there people in Corinth who died the resurrection of the dead? Yes. Paul says it outright. In 1 Corinthians 15:12 he writes (Greek): πῶς λέγουσιν ἐν ὑμῖν τινές ὅτι ἀνάστασις νεκρῶν οὐκ ἔστιν; pōs legousin en hymin tines hoti anastasis nekrōn ouk estin? — “How do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” The phrase τινές ἐν ὑμῖν (“some among you”) is Paul’s way of saying this wasn’t the whole church, but a real faction or influence inside the Corinthian congregation.And you can see the shape of their denial from how Paul answers. He doesn’t spend the chapter proving “the soul survives death”; he spends it proving bodily resurrection—Christ’s resurrection as firstfruits, and then the resurrection of believers. That strongly suggests the Corinthian problem wasn’t “there’s no afterlife at all,” but “there’s no future resurrection of bodies.” That kind of skepticism fits the Greco-Roman air of the city, where many people could imagine the soul’s immortality but found a reanimated body either unnecessary or grotesque.Paul also signals their confusion with the questions he anticipates in 1 Corinthians 15:35: Πῶς ἐγείρονται οἱ νεκροί; ποίῳ δὲ σώματι ἔρχονται; “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Those aren’t the questions of someone who happily believes resurrection; they’re the questions of someone trying to expose it as absurd.So, historically inside the letter: yes, there were Corinthians denying resurrection (at least the resurrection of the dead generally), and Paul writes 1 Corinthians 15 as a direct counterattack—logical, pastoral, and (as Paul always is) slightly terrifying. ↩︎
3. Chrysostom handles 1 Corinthians 15:29 in a really revealing way, because he does two things back-to-back: he reports a late proxy-baptism custom he thinks is demonic nonsense, and then he insists Paul’s phrase actually refers to baptism as a sign of your own bodily resurrection, not a sacrament performed for deceased people.He’s writing in Homily 40 on 1 Corinthians (15:29–34). He starts by saying Paul sometimes argues “from the very things which they practice,” meaning Paul can use an opponent’s or audience’s own behavior as an argument for resurrection. (New Advent)Then Chrysostom brings up the Marcionites as an example of how heretics “pervert” Paul’s words. His description is blunt: they would have “concealed the living man under the couch of the dead,” ask the corpse if it wants baptism, and then the hidden living person answers “yes” and gets baptized “instead of the departed.” (New Advent)He ridicules this practice and says they defend it by appealing to Paul’s wording (“they who are baptized for the dead”). (New Advent)After mocking that, he pivots: “come let us unfold… the force of this expression.” His interpretive move is that “for the dead” means for dead bodies—the resurrection of your body. He explicitly glosses Paul’s phrase as “i.e., the dead bodies.” (New Advent)To support that, he points to the baptismal confession used in the church’s rite: candidates are told to say, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead,” and “upon this faith we are baptized.” (New Advent)So, for Chrysostom, Paul is basically saying: if there’s no resurrection, why do you get baptized at all, when baptism itself is a performed sermon of resurrection? He explains the symbolism in physical terms: “being baptized and immersed and then emerging” is a sign of descent into death/Hades and return. (New Advent)Two important takeaways if you’re tracking the “proxy baptism in Corinth” question. First, Chrysostom’s proxy-baptism story is not him saying “Corinth did this.” He’s saying a later heretical group used the verse to justify a proxy ritual—and he laughs it out of court. (New Advent) Second, his own preferred reading is not vicarious baptism at all, but baptism’s resurrection-significance: “for the dead” = with a view to the resurrection of dead bodies. (New Advent) ↩︎
4. Paul does this constantly. He’ll take something his audience already does, or already claims, and then he leans on it like a crowbar: “If you really believe what you say you believe, why are you living like this?” Or the reverse: “Your behavior already assumes my doctrine, so your denial collapses under your own feet.” You can see the method in the way he asks loaded questions: “Do you not know…?” “Why then…?” “What will you do…?” “How is it…?”—questions that only make sense if he’s appealing to their own lived practice as evidence.The cleanest example is the one Chrysostom is talking about: the resurrection debate in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul is answering people who say “there is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor 15:12). And then he says, essentially, “Fine—if that’s true, explain your own behavior.” “Otherwise, what will those do who are being baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why then are they baptized for them?” (1 Cor 15:29). He doesn’t stop and teach the ordinance; he weaponizes a practice as an argument. The logic is: your actions are already living off resurrection-hope, so denying resurrection is like sawing off the branch you’re standing on. He immediately follows with the same tactic from a different angle: “Why are we in danger every hour?” and “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (1 Cor 15:30–32). That’s Paul arguing from conduct—both theirs and his—as witness.He uses the same “your experience testifies against your theory” move in Galatians. The Galatians were being pressured into a law-plus gospel. Paul doesn’t start with abstract theology; he starts with what happened to them: “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?” and “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Gal 3:2–3). That’s classic Paul: he forces them to interpret their own conversion experience. Their lived reception of the Spirit is the evidence that exposes the error of their new “system.”He also does it in Romans 2 against moralistic Jewish boasting. He takes their public posture—teaching, preaching, judging—and then slams it against their behavior: “You then who teach others, do you not teach yourself? … You who preach against stealing, do you steal?” (Rom 2:21–22). The argument isn’t, “I have a clever theory.” It’s, “Your practice contradicts your claim, therefore your claim is hollow.” Their own conduct becomes the prosecuting witness.He does it again in 1 Corinthians 8–10 about idolatry. He appeals to what they do at the table. “The cup of blessing… is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread… a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor 10:16). Then he draws the inference from their own ritual participation: “Consider Israel… are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar?” (1 Cor 10:18). And then he lands the punch: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons” (1 Cor 10:21). The logic is built on practice: eating and drinking isn’t neutral; it’s fellowship. If you practice idol-feasts, you’re acting out a theology you claim you reject.Even where he’s defending his right to material support, he argues the same way from ordinary, accepted patterns: “Who serves as a soldier at his own expense?” “Who plants a vineyard…?” “Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple…?” (1 Cor 9:7, 13). That is Paul pressing common practice into service as evidence. He’s saying, “Your whole world already runs on this principle—why pretend the gospel ministry should be the lone exception?”So yes: the method Chrysostom noticed is straight Pauline. Paul isn’t shy about using “the very things” people do—rituals they participate in, experiences they’ve had, claims they make, patterns they accept—to expose contradictions and force consistency. He does it because he’s not trying to win a debate club trophy; he’s trying to rescue people from the kind of theology that can be spoken with the lips while the life silently testifies against it.Chrysostom says this in his Homily 40 on First Corinthians, right as he begins commenting on 1 Corinthians 15:29 (“baptized for the dead”). (New Advent)Here are two short, verbatim excerpts (both from the opening paragraph on that verse):“He takes in hand again another topic, establishing what he said at one time from what God does, and at another from the very things which they practice.” (New Advent)“No small plea… when a man brings forward the gainsayers themselves as witnessing by their own actions what he affirms.” (New Advent) ↩︎
5. Here’s 2 Maccabees 12:44 as it stands in the Greek text:εἰ μὴ γὰρ τοὺς προπεπτωκότας ἀναστῆναι προσεδόκα, περισσὸν καὶ ληρῶδες ὑπὲρ νεκρῶν εὔχεσθαι. (New Advent)A tight, literal sense is: “For if he was not expecting the fallen to rise, it would be pointless and absurd to pray on behalf of the dead.”And here’s the key clause in Brenton’s public-domain English (the “punchline” of the verse): “superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.” (ebible.org)2 Maccabees 12:44 is the narrator’s “logic clause” explaining why Judas’s actions in the previous verse weren’t sentimental theatrics but resurrection-shaped piety. In the story, Judas and his men recover fallen comrades, discover they had been wearing illicit “tokens” tied to idols, and the company turns to prayer and even sends money to Jerusalem for a sin-offering “taking account of the resurrection” (that’s v.43). Then v.44 says, essentially: if you remove resurrection hope, the whole practice collapses into nonsense. (New Advent)Here’s the key Greek of v.44 (as it appears in the Septuagint tradition): εἰ μὴ γὰρ τοὺς προπεπτωκότας ἀναστῆναι προσεδόκα, περισσὸν καὶ ληρῶδες ὑπὲρ νεκρῶν εὔχεσθαι. (New Advent)A very literal sense would be: “For if he was not expecting the fallen to rise, (it would be) superfluous and silly to pray on behalf of the dead.”The sentence is built like a classic conditional argument. εἰ μὴ γάρ (“for if not…”) introduces the premise. The verb προσεδόκα is an imperfect (“he was expecting / he kept expecting”), portraying Judas’s expectation of resurrection as a settled outlook, not a passing wish. τοὺς προπεπτωκότας is “those who had fallen” (perfect participle: they have fallen and remain in that state—dead on the field). ἀναστῆναι is the aorist infinitive “to rise” (from ἀνίστημι), the blunt verb for getting up again—exactly the kind of word you’d expect in a resurrection argument. (New Advent)Then comes the verdict on prayer-for-the-dead if resurrection is false: περισσὸν (“superfluous, pointless, doing-extra-for-no-reason”) and ληρῶδες (“silly, absurd, bordering on ‘delirious talk’”). That second adjective is wonderfully sharp: ληρός in Greek is “nonsense,” the kind of thing you mutter when you’ve lost the plot. So the narrator isn’t merely saying “less meaningful”; he’s saying “logically embarrassing.” (New Advent)The prepositional phrase ὑπὲρ νεκρῶν means “on behalf of the dead,” and the verb εὔχεσθαι is “to pray” (middle voice infinitive). So the point of the clause is not primarily to teach how to pray, but to insist that the practice assumes a future in which death is not the final full stop. If the dead do not rise, prayer “for” them is like mailing a letter to a burned-down house and insisting the address is still valid. (New Advent)That’s why v.44 is so important: it ties three ideas into a single chain—resurrection hope → meaningful intercession → a conception of post-mortem moral reckoning. The narrator is interpreting Judas’s act (collection + Jerusalem offering + prayer) as rational because the future includes resurrection. In other words, the author is doing apologetics inside the narrative: he’s defending Judas’s action against the charge that it’s either superstition or a bribe. (New Advent)Historically, it’s also worth remembering what kind of book 2 Maccabees is. It’s not a calm annal; it’s a Greek-language epitome (summary) of a longer work attributed to Jason of Cyrene, written with rhetorical punch and moral aims—very interested in temple piety, martyrdom, and resurrection faith. (wesley.nnu.edu) That matters because v.44 is not presented as a detached doctrinal treatise; it’s a narrator’s explanatory aside meant to shape how you judge Judas.Finally, this verse is one reason 2 Maccabees 12:39–46 became a major “pressure point” between traditions. Catholics and Orthodox commonly cite the passage as straightforward evidence for prayer for the dead; many Protestants deny its canonical authority while still recognizing it as a window into some strands of Second Temple Jewish belief and practice. Either way, v.44 itself is crystal clear about the logic: remove resurrection, and prayer-for-the-dead becomes περισσὸν καὶ ληρῶδες—pointless and ridiculous. (New Advent) ↩︎
6. Scholars keep noticing the “family resemblance” between 2 Maccabees 12:44 and 1 Corinthians 15:29, but they usually stop short of claiming a demonstrable, direct line of dependence (“Paul read 2 Macc and then wrote v.29”). The usual way this lands in the literature is: 2 Maccabees is a strong Second-Temple Jewish parallel showing how a ritual done for/on behalf of the dead presupposes resurrection, which makes it an illuminating background text for Paul’s argument—even if it doesn’t prove Paul is quoting or consciously echoing it. (OhioLINK ETD Center)Here’s why the parallel is so tempting. In 2 Macc 12:44, the Greek makes the logic explicit: “If he were not expecting those who had fallen to rise… it would be superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead”—and it uses the same kind of “on behalf of” phrasing: ὑπὲρ νεκρῶν (“for/on behalf of [the] dead”) with a verb of praying (εὔχεσθαι). (TIPs) In 1 Cor 15:29, Paul runs an almost identical rhetorical move: τί…; εἰ… οὐκ ἐγείρονται, τί καὶ…; (“what…? if the dead are not raised, why also…?”), and he repeats ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν twice while talking about baptism. (Bible Hub) So, at the level of argumentative shape, they rhyme.Because of that rhyme, some writers have proposed a closer connection. A classic example is the line (reported and discussed in older scholarship) that Paul speaks “in the same form” as the argument in 2 Maccabees—treating Corinthian “baptism for the dead” as analogous to a Jewish oblatio/intercession for the dead. J. K. Howard summarizes that proposal (via Stauffer) and then pushes back on it. A more recent, detailed dissertation treatment (Connor) likewise calls 2 Macc 12:39–45 “a significant parallel,” explicitly noting that the Septuagint wording about praying ὑπὲρ νεκρῶν sits strikingly close to Paul’s βαπτιζόμενοι ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν, even though the action in 2 Macc is prayer/sin-offering rather than baptism. (OhioLINK ETD Center) And you’ll also see scholars and surveys simply point out the “almost parallel statement” in 2 Macc 12:44 as a Jewish analogue that at least makes the idea of acting for the dead intelligible in a resurrection framework. (rickwadholmjr.files.wordpress.com)But here’s the sober part (the “consensus-ish” part): most careful treatments treat this as parallel/background, not proof of influence, because the differences matter. In 2 Maccabees, the act is tied to atonement/sin offering and prayer for dead soldiers (a very particular narrative and theology). In 1 Corinthians, Paul references a baptismal practice at Corinth and uses it as a wedge in his resurrection argument; he doesn’t explain the practice, endorse it explicitly, or connect it to atonement language in that verse. That gap is exactly why even authors who like the comparison tend to phrase it cautiously (“possible connection,” “significant parallel,” “Jewish referent”) rather than “source.” (OhioLINK ETD Center)So what’s the “scholarly consensus” in plain English? It’s basically this: 2 Maccabees 12:44–45 is widely used as a comparative text because it shows a Jewish pattern of reasoning—if no resurrection, rituals for the dead are pointless—and it even shares the key prepositional framing (ὑπὲρ + dead). But a firm consensus that Paul is dependent on 2 Maccabees is not there, because similarity of logic isn’t the same as literary borrowing, and the rituals/theological aims are not the same. (OhioLINK ETD Center) ↩︎
7. The Marcionites were followers of Marcion of Pontus/Sinope (mid–2nd century), an influential early Christian teacher who built a rival network of churches after a break with the Roman church (traditionally dated to 144 CE). The movement became widespread and remained active for centuries (at least into the 4th century in some regions). (Encyclopedia Britannica)What made them distinctive was their “two-gods” reading of Scripture. In the way their opponents describe them (and that’s our main evidence), they sharply separated the Creator/Judge associated with the Jewish Scriptures from the good God revealed by Jesus, arguing that the character and actions of the God of the Law and Prophets could not be the same as the Father preached in the gospel. Tertullian frames Marcion’s teaching exactly as “introduc[ing] two Gods,” one identified with the Creator and another “his own god.” (New Advent)Marcionites also became famous for an early, sharply defined Christian “canon.” Marcion circulated a collection of authoritative books centered on a version of Luke (often called the Evangelikon) and a set of Pauline letters (often called the Apostolikon), and he rejected the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. Whether Marcion “edited” these texts or inherited earlier forms is debated today, but scholars broadly agree his scriptural lineup forced the wider church to clarify what writings it recognized and how it related the God of Israel to the Father of Jesus Christ. (Encyclopedia Britannica)They were not merely an idea; they were a disciplined church movement with worship and rites. Modern scholarship stresses that nearly everything we know comes through hostile sources that sometimes smear rather than report, so we have to read carefully. Still, those sources and modern reconstructions agree that Marcionites formed organized communities, practiced baptism (in a Trinitarian form, according to reports), and celebrated a Eucharistic rite, while promoting an austere moral seriousness (often described as ascetic). ↩︎
8. Chrysostom gives that story in Homily 40 on 1 Corinthians, right when he reaches 1 Corinthians 15:29. He introduces it as an example of how (in his view) the Marcionites “pervert” Paul’s phrase, and he says he’s going to mention it—even though it’s laughable—so his hearers will avoid the “disease.” (New Advent)His description is surprisingly concrete. He says that when a catechumen dies among them (i.e., someone still under instruction, not yet baptized), they stage a bizarre substitute ritual: they “conceal the living man under the couch of the dead,” then they come up to the corpse and speak to it as if it were still able to answer, asking whether it wants baptism. When the dead person (obviously) gives no reply, the hidden living person answers “in his stead” that yes, of course the dead man wants baptism. Then, Chrysostom says, “they baptize him instead of the departed,” comparing it to people joking on a theater stage. (New Advent)Chrysostom then adds an important detail about their justification: when they’re challenged, he says they appeal directly to Paul’s wording—“they who are baptized for the dead”—as their proof-text. (New Advent) That is why he even bothers to address it: he worries “simple folk” could be dragged along by a Bible-verse used like a magic spell. (New Advent)He also argues against it on internal Christian grounds. If proxy baptism worked, he asks, why would God threaten the unbaptized at all, since the living could always “fix it” afterward? Why would Jesus speak baptism/new birth to the living (“born of water and Spirit,” John 3:5), or speak communion warnings to the living (John 6:53), if the dead can be handled by proxies? And he presses the reductio: if assent of the receiver doesn’t matter, what would prevent Greeks and Jews from becoming “believers” after death by having others do it for them? (New Advent)Then comes the punchline: Chrysostom does not accept that proxy-ritual as what Paul meant. He pivots to his own reading: “baptized for the dead” means baptized with reference to dead bodies, because in the baptismal rite (as he knew it) candidates confess “I believe in the resurrection of the dead,” and immersion/emerging is a enacted sign of descent and return—so denying resurrection makes the baptismal confession absurd. (New Advent)One skeptical note (because ancient sources deserve it): we only know this “Marcionite couch” ritual because Chrysostom reports it, and heresiological polemics can exaggerate or select the most shocking examples. Still, his account is detailed enough to show what he thought some Marcionites were doing, and exactly how he believed they tried to ground it in 1 Cor 15:29. (New Advent) ↩︎