The Emergence of the Baptismal Anointing
Final Report Abstract
While water baptism can be clearly traced back to the early Jewish, eschatological movement of John the Baptist and was taken up in a modified form by Christianity, the origins of anointing with oil remain largely obscure: Neither its exact period of origin nor the catalysts for the expansion of the initiation liturgy to include the anointing are considered to have been clarified. The project pursued the following goals: a) to identify the positive first evidence for baptismal anointing; b) to comprehensively reconstruct the complex early history of baptismal anointing up to the standardization of the imperial church in the 4th century with regard to both its ritual performance and its liturgical-theological interpretation; and c) to determine the liturgical-generative factors that motivated the supraregional introduction of baptismal anointing. Two methodological decisions were decisive for this: in contrast to the previous limitation to the so-called proto-orthodox evidence, the source base was radically expanded in order to examine the apocrypha, the so-called Gnosis, the Mesopotamian baptist milieu, epi-graphic finds, etc., which offer a much more multifaceted picture of the early history of liturgy. Furthermore, the paradigm shifts in research were adapted, accentuating the orality of liturgical performance and regional plurality. As a result, it was substantiated that baptismal anointing emerged around the middle of the 2nd century - in two variants (pre- and post-baptismal), which could not be derived from each other and were also scattered across regions. The origins are likely to have been multifactorial and included the etymologizing metaphor of baptism as "anointing (of Jesus Christ and of Christians)", which was already common in the New Testament and which was transferred to the ritual performance level; cultural borrowings from ancient bathing culture can also be identified, as the three-pole sequence of water baptism, pre/postbaptismal anointing and baptismal Eucharist is structurally analogous to a visit to the thermal baths. The ritual and theological dynamics of initiation in the 2nd-4th centuries were reconstructed in the context of the differentiation of this complex liturgy. The Valentinian findings proved to be particularly innovative because their baptism (apolytrosis) is better attested than any other baptismal liturgy; these findings were comprehensively analyzed and placed in the overall evidence. The transition to written forms in the 4th century had precursors towards the end of the oral period, which were now further developed under different auspices, e.g. through the multiplication of baptismal anointings, supraregional ex-change processes and the dramaturgical coordination of liturgical-theological motifs in the structure of the initiatio christiana.
