Should you be baptized?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Matthew 28:19 makes baptism constitutive of the church's foundational mission: the risen Jesus commissions the eleven to "make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Paul, in 1 Corinthians 1:14-17, appears to push in the opposite direction: he thanks God he baptized almost no one at Corinth (only Crispus, Gaius, and the household of Stephanas, which he adds as an afterthought in v. 16), and concludes, "For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel." Read flatly, Matthew's Jesus centers the rite while Paul marginalizes it.

Several features sharpen and several soften the tension. On the sharpening side, the triadic baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19 is unattested in this developed form anywhere else in the New Testament. Acts uniformly reports baptism "in the name of Jesus" or "of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 2:38; 8:16; 10:48; 19:5), and Paul likewise knows only baptism "into Christ" (Rom 6:3; Gal 3:27). The earliest extra-canonical witness, Didache 7, contains the triune formula but also preserves the older single-name practice in Didache 9:5, suggesting the trinitarian wording was crystallizing in the late first or early second century — the period most critical scholars (Davies-Allison, Luz) assign to Matthew's final form, c. 80-90 CE. The Matthean commission, on this analysis, reflects the liturgy of Matthew's community projected back onto the lips of the risen Jesus, a standard feature of post-resurrection appearance narratives.

On the softening side, the harmonization defended by Blomberg is genuinely strong and should not be caricatured. Paul did baptize; he simply did not regard administering the rite personally as the heart of his commission. His statement in 1 Corinthians 1:17 is occasioned by a specific pastoral problem — the Corinthians were forming personality cults around the persons who baptized them ("I am of Paul; and I of Apollos," 1:12), and Paul deliberately distances himself from baptism precisely to deflate those factions. The verb "sent" (apesteilen) places the remark within Paul's division of apostolic labor, not within a theology that rejects the sacrament. Indeed Paul's most sustained theological statement on baptism, Romans 6:3-4, treats it as the believer's incorporation into Christ's death and resurrection — hardly the language of a man who thinks baptism dispensable. So at the level of practice and theology of the rite, the two texts are reconcilable: both presuppose baptism; they differ on emphasis, and the difference is explained by Paul's polemical setting (Fitzmyer, Conzelmann).

The residual, irreducible tension is narrower but real. If Paul had received and accepted a dominical command obliging him to baptize all nations, the rhetorical disavowal of 1 Corinthians 1:17 would be a strange way to argue, since it sets his own sending against a command of the risen Lord. The more economical reading is that Paul wrote in the mid-50s without knowledge of the Great Commission in its Matthean form, which represents a later development of the tradition (Ehrman). That conclusion is an inference from silence and remains a judgment about probabilities rather than a demonstration.

Where the critical reading lands: largely harmonizable at the level of mission and practice (hyperbole plus differing emphasis), with a genuine but narrower historical tension over whether the Matthean baptismal command was known to Paul.