bathing

• religious ceremonial before Prince’s arrival

66:5.21Be­fore the Prince’s ar­rival, bathing had been an ex­clu­sively re­li­gious cer­e­mo­nial. It was in­deed dif­fi­cult to per­suade prim­i­tive men to wash their bod­ies as a health prac­tice. Lut fi­nally in­duced the re­li­gious teach­ers to in­clude cleans­ing with wa­ter as a part of the pu­rifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies to be prac­ticed in con­nec­tion with the noon­time de­vo­tions, once a week, in the wor­ship of the Fa­ther of all.

• belief deformed babies were result of careless b.

84:1.4Many early peo­ples as­so­ci­ated ghosts with the sea; hence vir­gins were greatly re­stricted in their bathing prac­tices; young women were far more afraid of bathing in the sea at high tide than of hav­ing sex re­la­tions. De­formed or pre­ma­ture ba­bies were re­garded as the young of an­i­mals which had found their way into a woman’s body as a re­sult of care­less bathing or through malev­o­lent spirit ac­tiv­ity. Sav­ages, of course, thought noth­ing of stran­gling such off­spring at birth.

• Greeks practiced ritual of

85:4.1Man­kind has wor­shiped earth, air, wa­ter, and fire. The prim­i­tive races ven­er­ated springs and wor­shiped rivers. Even now in Mon­go­lia there flour­ishes an in­flu­en­tial river cult. Bap­tism be­came a re­li­gious cer­e­mo­nial in Baby­lon, and the Greeks prac­ticed the an­nual rit­ual bath. It was easy for the an­cients to imag­ine that the spir­its dwelt in the bub­bling springs, gush­ing foun­tains, flow­ing rivers, and rag­ing tor­rents. Mov­ing wa­ters vividly im­pressed these sim­ple minds with be­liefs of spirit an­i­ma­tion and super­nat­u­ral power. Some­times a drown­ing man would be re­fused suc­cor for fear of of­fend­ing some river god.

• religious ceremonial before Prince’s arrival

87:6.12Wa­ter was re­garded as the best pro­tec­tion against ghosts. Holy wa­ter was su­pe­rior to all other forms, wa­ter in which the priests had washed their feet. Both fire and wa­ter were be­lieved to con­sti­tute im­pass­able bar­ri­ers to ghosts. The Ro­mans car­ried wa­ter three times around the corpse; in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury the body is sprin­kled with holy wa­ter, and hand wash­ing at the ceme­tery is still a Jew­ish rit­ual. Bap­tism was a fea­ture of the later wa­ter rit­ual; prim­i­tive bathing was a re­li­gious cer­e­mony. Only in re­cent times has bathing be­come a san­i­tary prac­tice.

• Jesus refused to go to public baths

132:4.5He talked with a Ro­man sen­a­tor on pol­i­tics and states­man­ship, and this one con­tact with Je­sus made such an im­pres­sion on this leg­is­la­tor that he spent the rest of his life vainly try­ing to in­duce his col­leagues to change the course of the rul­ing pol­icy from the idea of the gov­ern­ment sup­port­ing and feed­ing the peo­ple to that of the peo­ple sup­port­ing the gov­ern­ment. Je­sus spent one evening with a wealthy slave­holder, talked about man as a son of God, and the next day this man, Claudius, gave free­dom to one hun­dred and sev­en­teen slaves. He vis­ited at din­ner with a Greek physi­cian, telling him that his pa­tients had minds and souls as well as bod­ies, and thus led this able doc­tor to at­tempt a more far-reach­ing min­istry to his fel­low men. He talked with all sorts of peo­ple in ev­ery walk of life. The only place in Rome he did not visit was the pub­lic baths. He re­fused to ac­com­pany his friends to the baths be­cause of the sex promis­cu­ity which there pre­vailed.

• Jesus refused to go to public baths

133:3.6When in Rome, Ga­nid ob­served that Je­sus re­fused to ac­com­pany them to the pub­lic baths. Sev­eral times af­ter­ward the young man sought to in­duce Je­sus fur­ther to ex­press him­self in re­gard to the re­la­tions of the sexes. Though he would an­swer the lad’s ques­tions, he never seemed dis­posed to dis­cuss these sub­jects at great length. One evening as they strolled about Corinth out near where the wall of the citadel ran down to the sea, they were ac­costed by two pub­lic women. Ga­nid had im­bibed the idea, and rightly, that Je­sus was a man of high ide­als, and that he ab­horred ev­ery­thing which par­took of un­clean­ness or sa­vored of evil; ac­cord­ingly he spoke sharply to these women and rudely mo­tioned them away. When Je­sus saw this, he said to Ga­nid: “You mean well, but you should not pre­sume thus to speak to the chil­dren of God, even though they chance to be his erring chil­dren. Who are we that we should sit in judg­ment on these women? Do you hap­pen to know all of the cir­cum­stances which led them to re­sort to such meth­ods of ob­tain­ing a liveli­hood? Stop here with me while we talk about these mat­ters.” The cour­te­sans were as­ton­ished at what he said even more than was Ga­nid.