Two Christians are born of the Spirit. One believes they are baptized in the Holy Spirit, the other believes they're baptized by the Holy Spirit, incidentally He, a person of the Godhead, the very power of God. Both have received the Spirit come upon them. What is your point of consequence, or is this just playing with words, which is alright, if that's what turns your crank, but I'm not seeing an issue of consequence?
Good question.
When we translate BY the Holy Spirit, we are giving the agency of the Baptism TO the Holy Spirit - iow It is the Holy Spirit Who is DOING the Baptism...
When we translate IN the Holy Spirit, we are giving the agency of the Baptism TO the one DOING the Baptism IN the Holy Spirit...
The Baptism of Paul of Tarsus by Ananias is a good example. He was struck blind on the road to Damascus by Christ, and led to a room on Right Street there, where he had been fasting for three days... And God came to Ananias to send him to Paul for the purpose of restoring his sight and for giving Paul the Holy Spirit... So he laid hands on Paul, and something like scales fell from his eyes, and he received his sight, and arose... And upon arising, he was baptized BY Ananias, wherein he RECEIVED the Holy Spirit...
Now you can say of this that it was the Power of the Holy Spirit that baptized Paul, and that is true... But it MUST be said that it was Ananias who DID the Baptism of Paul... Who GAVE Paul the Holy Spirit... Because that is what the text tells us... The Baptism was NOT given to PAUL BY the Holy Spirit, but BY Ananias IN the (Power of) the Holy Spirit...
Now the early Church even unto this very day acknowledged the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, but except in extreme cases, done at the hands of, eg BY, the Servants of God who were IN the Body of Christ, as Ananias is described baptizing Paul into Christ... But it did not understand the Holy Spirit to be going around baptizing people by Himself, but only at the hands of His Servants in Christ's Holy Body, the People of God, the Ekklesia of Christ...
So it is a distinction having great import... When the Holy Spirit fell upon the Cornelius party at Joppa, only then did Peter baptize them in water into the Body of Christ... Peter, like Ananias, was a Servant of Christ, who baptized into Christ, as was Paul baptized into Christ, by a Servant of Christ within the Body of Christ...
What's consequential is that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is not impugned, which, IN or BY, one can wonder of your statement there's no Holy Spirit baptism in Acts 10 in some way. See what I mean? You had me thinking this is where you were going.
Well, if you believe that it is the Holy Spirit doing "spiritual" baptisms of people into the Body of Christ apart from the Servants of Christ baptizing them, my language will give you pause... But what I am proposing in this exercise with the text is to simply let the text speak for itself, and then let our interpretation of its words speak for OUR selves... A theological discussion can then ensue regarding the meaning and implications of the words of the text that form a basis for the discussion...
By the way, to those saying this is strictly a text exercise, it was a doctrinal, interpretation statement, involving the Holy Spirit, made, that strays from any strict presenting of text, and this prior to offering any evidence, at that. We can't, out of one side of our mouths, say this is simply a raw translation exercise, to not be commented on, yet predicated by a questionable doctrinal statement, involving the Holy Spirit! Perhaps it would be better to save these claims to later, then, and do your translating, first, to be consistent with your own rules?
I do not think that such sequencing would be honest on my part, nor do I think that doing so would give textual neutrality in translating the words... Textual neutrality in translation is a matter of maintaining literal meanings in English according to Greek sentence structures, and when this is not possible, to show why and do the best one can... This is the only way, apart from fluency in speaking and thinking in Koine Greek, that we can have a textual basis for our diverging opinions on the meaning of the text...
I would be very open, for instance, to anyone ELSE doing what I am doing here, where that would be the purpose of translating... So often now, in arguments, we see translations that are theologically driven, and thereby altered from the Greek to which they are supposed to be faithful... And by doing this, we are giving ourselves the means to "check the text" in a way that a hundred parallel English comparisons simply cannot do...
This is how one can know first hand, from the Greek, even using Strong's numbers, what the Greek actually says...
I must say that I did not imagine that this method would prove so controversial... We are only laying out the Greek into a bare bones literal English translation... That should not be controversial...
Arsenios
