seraphim reeves wrote:Yes, the word "baptizo" (Greek) was directly imported (as many words are) into various tongues spoken by Christians, because the word itself has a lot of "content" attached to it.
Well, yes, didn't I say that? The point is not that it happens; the point is that this importation happens so far back that it doesn't seem to me to be that clear that the use of the word within the Gospels themselves isn't a sort of self-importation.
When you say that
However, I do not see how this weighs in against the fact that the etymology of this word, the reason it was chosen to describe this evangelical Mystery in the first (and most important) sacred writings of the Church (the Greek New Testament), points to precisely how said rite is supposed to be performed - immersion.
you are claiming a knowledge that you don't have, and which everyone knows that you don't have. The evangelists didn't leave a record of why they chose words such as "baptiso" and "ekklesia". They only left the words themselves. Therefore this should not be called "fact", but only "speculation".
I would also submit that the importing of this term into St.Jerome's Latin Vulgate included not simply the invisible significance which the Church attaches to "baptism", but also its form - unless you seriously believe St.Jerome himself, or his contemporaries, considered anything but immersion to be the normative, Apostolic manner of birthing sinners into the grace of the New Covenant.
But now you are sliding along those every lines of meaning that you wish to deny everyone else. "Norm" has a huge variety of senses, centering around "usual", not "required". It's precisely the difference between "we wouldn't do it that way" and "We deny that it can be done that way." What you are doing is amplifying the notion of "usual" into a sense of immutable obligation, and the motivation seems plain to me: you want to make the church smaller.
