Who was the founder of Baptism?

Answer 1

You could say that it was John the Baptist because he was the firt to properly baptise people.

He also baptised Jesus.

John the baptist was not the first Baptist. Many people tend to think that Baptism is a purely Christian Thing, However, this is not the case. In Jewish Tradition there are three forms of Baptism:

1: by Women to attain purification following the completion of their menstrual cycle.

2: by Jewish men to attain a form of ritual purity.

3: as part of conversion to Judaism.

The symbol of water to cleanse and purify has been in human tradition for a long time. John the Baptist was merely performing that what had been in Jewish teaching and tradition for many many years.

The symbolisation is that the person will clean themselves, or wash themselves before entering a new way of life, or to make themselves pure in order to move into a spiritual state of grace. Many Christians like to distance themselves from the Jewish way of life, thinking that they are new and the completion of the Jewish tradition. Yet in doing so they forget their very roots, after all, Jesus was a Jew.

Answer2: The Jews performed cleansing rites upon themselves. The baptism John performed, though, was not a kind of ritual bathing familiar to the Jews. That John came to be known as the Baptizer indicates that the immersion he performed was different. Jewish religious leaders even sent a delegation to him to inquire: "Why . . . do you baptize?"-John 1:25. The cleansing required by the Mosaic Law had to be repeated as often as a worshipper became unclean. This was not true of the baptism John performed nor of that later practiced by Christians. John's baptism indicated repentance and a rejection of a former life course. Christian baptism symbolized the fact that a person had dedicated himself to God. The Christian did so once, not over and over again.

The ritual bathing performed in the homes of the Jewish priests and in the public baths close to the Temple Mount bore nothing more than a superficial resemblance to Christian baptism. The respective meanings of these immersions were completely different. The Anchor Bible Dictionary observes: "A scholarly consensus holds that John [the Baptizer] did not take over or adapt any particular baptism from his milieu," that is, from Judaism. The same can be said of the baptism practiced in the Christian congregation.