BAPTISM

After giving Nephi and others the power to baptize and forbidding “disputations among you,” and before again commanding them not to have “disputations among you concerning the points of my doctrine, as there have hitherto been,” the Book of Mormon Jesus instructs people on the baptismal prayer and to baptize by immersion. In doing so, he takes on one of the most controversial issues of Joseph Smith’s day, leaving “nothing to speculation,” as Edwin Firmage Jr., a graduate in ancient history at UC Berkley, noted in an essay. “Every word and action is specified in detail,” he wrote, and “fills a definite gap” in the New Testament, which lacks “explicit divine instruction.” The intent seemed to be to “settle matters of controversy once and for all,” but since the Book of Mormon does not record any disputations about baptism prior to Jesus’s arrival, BYU Professor Noel B. Reynolds concluded that there must have been “some earlier (and unreported) disputations.”

Despite his intent to remove all doctrinal uncertainty, Jesus leaves a lot to be desired on the question of baptizing children. The LDS practice is to baptize at age eight even though there is no record in the Book of Mormon of baptizing eighty-year-olds. Perhaps they are intended to be included in mass baptisms, but only adults are mentioned. Indeed, Mormon writes to Moroni that baptism is for “those who are accountable and capable of committing sin.” Mormon calls the baptism of little children a “solemn mockery before God.” In the first year after the founding of Mormonism, no one under thirteen years of age was baptized, no doubt reflecting this sentiment. In fact, the origins of this controversy reach back to the sixteenth century when Anabaptists insisted that since Jesus was baptized at age thirty, so should we. Seventeenth-century Baptists required converts to be twenty years old, although the average of today is fourteen. The concept of “believer’s baptism,” “adult baptism,” and “creedal baptism” was so important that adherents were willing to give their lives for it, and did. The LDS Church allowed child baptism beginning in November 1831, so whatever else the Book of Mormon produced in the minds of believers, it was not doctrinal consistence surrounding the proper age of baptism.

Mormon fails to say at what age people are no longer “little children” and become “accountable and capable of committing sin,” but King Benjamin may have seen “infants” and “little children” as synonymous: “The infant perisheth not that dieth in his infancy; but men drink damnation to their own souls except they humble themselves and become as little children.” This is the position of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, which states as “Latter-day Saint doctrine” that children under eight “are considered ‘infants’ or ‘little children’ and are not required to be baptized.” “Little children” are also portrayed in the Book of Mormon as understanding words and speaking, so little children are not limited to tiny infants.

Whatever is meant by “little children,” Firmage finds it “puzzling” that the ban on baptizing them is only mentioned at the end of the Book of Mormon, since the Nephites had been baptizing for over 500 years and the issue could “scarcely have been avoided.” In Joseph Smith’s day, “the issue was very much alive” and in contention among the Baptists, Calvinists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Universalists. The “reference to ‘disputations’ makes great sense in the context of New York revivalism.”