LENT DAY 34: What ever happened to verse 37?

 Day 34 Saturday - Apr 1, 2023; Mar 23, 2024; Apr 12, 2025

See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized? -Acts 8:36

There is a major variant among the different ancient copies of Acts that we possess. Some of them include a verse after the eunuch asks this question that reads: And Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.” And he replied, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” (Acts 8:37). If you have a King James Bible, for example, it will include that verse. But most translations (including the one we’ve used for this devotional and the one we use on Sunday mornings in the congregations I serve) will relegate verse 37 to a footnote that mentions how some manuscripts include it. A lot of times these little variations in the copies of the text are rather unnoticeable. But this one changes the story a bit. Either Philip’s response to him asking what prevents him from being baptized is that Philip stops the chariot and baptizes him or Philip responds by adding a confession of faith. Which is it?

If you bank everything about baptism on this one verse, you’re going to have to hope you get the answer right. So when we realize that a text has a possibility in a major variation from the way we have it, we should at least acknowledge the possibility of that other variation may be the correct one. If our faith truly is built up in the Word of God and not our opinions of the Word, we need to be humble enough to acknowledge we don’t always grasp its truth rightly. 

This is why in the church it is important to not take passages only in isolation, or build up too much of an interpretation on only one verse. Scripture interprets Scripture. Let the Bible guide you in the way to understand a passage. It is the wider biblical view of baptism that causes me to read this one Sacramentally. While I can see how with verse 37 someone could make a case for Believers Baptism, it is these other verses on baptism that we look at in this devotion that say baptism is ultimately not about our confession of faith but about God’s gracious sharing. 

That doesn’t mean confessions of faith don’t matter. We confess our baptismal creed week, in week out. We ask parents to teach it to their children who are baptized. We have seen that even if faith is not necessary to be baptized, baptism makes it necessary. How else will we believe anything about baptism’s power?

So while this devotional has assumed with our modern critical manuscripts that verse 37 is a later addition to the text and should not be used to change the meaning of the story absent it, it's worth taking one devotion to consider the opposite, and let it remind us that even we who do not promote believers baptism still know how important a thing faith is for baptism.

Lord, I don’t always have the answers as I come to your Word. But I come anyways. I come that you may speak to me through the sacred scriptures. Use your whole Word to help me understand the parts that are more difficult. When it comes to my baptism, use each promise I read about it to give me faith for the next one. Amen.

This post is a part of my daily Lenten devotional on Baptism. You can read more about it here.