Batman has his Batcave and Batmobile. The Pope has his popemobile. What did John the Baptist have? Maybe the Baptistcave.
Maybe.
According to a new story, someone is claiming to have identified a cave purported to be used by John the Baptist in the first century to perform baptism.
Maybe.
Not probably. Just maybe.
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
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I wonder if the fact that there were so many pottery shards (250,000) found at the site could be interpreted as evidence of St. John (or, at the least, others at the time of the saint) would baptize a person without immersing him, i.e., that baptism by pouring would have been common?
If that were true, that would seem to cast doubt upon the interpretation of various New Testament passages by some Protestants who claim that baptism in the time of Christ and John was always done through immersion and therefore conclude that if we want to be a New Testament Church then we are obligated to regard immersion as the only valid form of baptism.
But I suspect that even if such an argument was plausible given what we know about the cave in question, we shouldn’t hang our collective hats too much on it. If we did, we certainly wouldn’t have learned the lesson of the supposed ossuary of James and all of the folks who were so quick to make so many conclusions based on its supposed discovery.