Neil is a fellow attorney. He and I have, well, been in touch, I don't know how many years, 10 years or so, a very committed brother out in California. And yeah, he's asked an interesting question of looking at the Jewish practice and is quoting from the Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud. My one response on that, Neil, I think it's, there's a lot of validity of trying to see what Jews practiced in Jesus ' day.
And that's one of the things when I was working on the Matthew commentary was reading Philo and Josephus to see what they were saying because they were both contemporaries. Well, Philo was a contemporary of Jesus. Josephus would have been a contemporary of Paul and on Beyond Paul's lifetime. They didn't really shed any light on it. Now, the Talmud, it dates actually to 500 AD. I'm really hesitant to quote it to say, this is what people did in Jesus Day, and that the Jews kept the traditions perfectly for 500 years.
Particularly, you know, when people say, well, 25 years after the apostle John died, well, we can't pay attention to what the early Christians are saying. I mean, that's, you know, that's 25 years later. And it's like, wow, so you think the Christians didn't hold onto anything for 25 years or 50 years, but somehow the unbelieving Jews who rejected Christ, yeah, whatever they're doing 500 years later is what they were doing in Jesus ' time. I'd rather doubt that.
But your point is valid about, yeah, looking at historical evidence of Jewish practices. And of course, yeah, I agree with what you're driving at of baptism on the profession of faith, of people who are coming knowingly to baptism. So I'm not dismissing your line of argument. I would just personally think going to the Talmud is not a valid way. A lot of people go there. I'm very familiar with that line of argumentation on all kinds of topics.
To me, it's just not valid to say the Jews kept something perfectly for all those centuries and where the Christians were unable to do the same thing. Yeah, thank you for that summary. So just to clarify on his question, it looks like I didn't quite get all the question there, at least the reference to the Talmud. Because this is the question I've had. Was baptism the standard process for proselytizing people into Judaism at or before Christ? Is that the question there?
Yeah, and I didn't, Neil, did I miss something? Because reading your quote from the Talmud, I didn't see any reference to bad. Yeah, that's what I was missing in that. So maybe we can do a follow-up with that later. Yeah. And I do know, I mean, there was a form of baptism in the days of John the Baptist. I've been to the Qumran community. They had seven, I think, what are called mikvahs, where Jews would go down into the water, come back up. They did it several times a day.
It was a ritual cleansing, very different from what John the Baptist had of repent. None of the Jewish baptisms had anything to do with repentance. It was all about ritual cleansing. So I don't think there was baptism when converting a proselyte. I have seen no evidence myself. But yeah, if you have something to send later on, I'm always happy to look at that. And I think the early Christians speak of, don't they speak of Naaman as kind of like an example of baptism of some sort? I don't know.
I remember that coming up at some point, but Exactly. They quote him all the time. And of course, that wasn't on the conversion. It was on leprosy that, yeah, he baptized seven times, a symbol of perfection and leprosy being a symbol of our sins. And he came out of the water cleansed. So yeah, they all point that as a prophetic type of baptism. Good point.
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