In his recent monograph, Uro (2016, pp. 92–7) analyzed John’sbaptismin
the framework of costly signaling theory. Although baptism on the surface is
much less costly than, for example, male initiation rites, nevertheless it involves
aspects that make it difficult to undergo without commitment. Such an aspect,
according to Uro, is the act of public confession. Baptism took place individually
but in the presence of the community (which presupposes that at least some of
John’s followers formed a more or less permanent group). The costliness of
public confession in the New Testament has been assessed by Rikard Roitto
(2012, 2014), who concluded that a submissive confession of wrongdoing
between equals in antiquity (a practice reflected in 1 John 6:15) involved a
loss of perceived social status. Uro goes on arguing that John the Baptist was
accepted by his followers as a man of God and thus confessing one’ssinsbefore
him was less costly than confessing before equals. The lower costs of the ritual,
Uro concludes, indicate lower coherence in the Baptist’s group than in the
community that practiced the confession described in 1 John (cf. Irons 2001,
p. 1999; see above in this section).
Taking a slightly different perspective, one can observe that John the Baptist
took an existing ritual (ritual immersion) andincreasedthe cost of participa-
tion by adding the confession of sins as part of the ritual. One also has to ask
what benefits came with the membership of each group under consideration.
Arguably, being a trustworthy member of both the local and wider Jewish
community was vital for Jewish people and ritual immersion was just one of
many religious rituals and requirements that signaled such commitment. By
increasing the costs somewhat, John practically put a price tag on the belief in
an immanent divine judgment. Presumably he was not the only one to preach
such a thing (e.g., Horsley & Hanson, 1985) and people could choose his ritual
because it entailed relatively low costs. In the Christian group practicing the
confession mentioned in 1 John 6:15, in contrast, the structure of rituals and
thus the costs assigned to individual rituals could be completely different from
the respective structures and costs in both the Baptist’s group and a traditional
Jewish community. In that case, some Jewish rituals (such as circumcision)
could be already abandoned and replaced by new ones (such as the Eucharist),
and confession was not merely an additional item on the list of religious
obligations. Thus the coherence of both groups could be comparable in spite
of the difference in the costliness of a particular ritual. One also has to take
into consideration multiple group memberships and loyalties, which are
typically less prominent in either tribal societies or the communes featured
in the above-mentioned empirical studies but were part of everyday life in
Roman society. Emerging Christian communities could be experimenting
with different combinations of costly rituals, where the cost of the ritual was
only one of the relevant factors. Members of those communities still wanted
to remain good Jews, good Romans, and possibly good members of other
social groups and associations and thus allocated their time and resources
102 Cognitive Science and the New Testament