When most people tell you about early Christianity they make it sound like everything was pretty much like it is today except the early Christians were more 'primitive' and 'humble' than us.
I don't because it isn't true.
Christianity by its very nature must have developed out a form of Judaism. It must have attempted on some level to present the gospel and its holiest sacraments as a 'solution' to the crisis in Jewish faith that occurred after the destruction of the Jewish temple c. 70 CE.
I don't know how people can't see that 'Mark' - the guy that wrote the original gospel - was essentially trying to fill the void in contemporary Jewish life at that time.
As such it is idiotic to project many of the developments to these original sacraments in a later period.
When Mark established Christianity with his gospel, there was only one gospel and that was the way the Evangelist intended it.
He wasn't getting 'tweets' from God telling him that more evangelists would come after him.
Mark wrote the gospel to fill the void in contemporary Jewish life after the sacrificial system which had governed Israel for centuries had disappeared.
Of course Jews always employed mikva'ot for ritual purity. The Samaritans had a prominent cult called the Dositheans who seemed to have a form of water immersion which was much closer to what would later emerge in Christianity.
There are stories in Abu'l Fath that as soon as someone underwent this 'magical' water immersion they became 'sons of the Apostle.'
There can be no doubt that the Dositheans simply 'baptized into the Father.' In other 'one dunk,' come out of the water and the presto - you're a new person.
A relationship must exist between Dosithean water immersion and the Christian sacrament. The fact that most scholars aren't aware of the Dosithean tradition shouldn't interest us.
The proper question is why would Dositheus be identified by Hippolytus as the first Christian heretic? One might also suppose that 'Simon Magus' is one and the same with Dositheus, but that's another argument entirely.
Whatever the case I find it hard to argue with the idea that baptism began as a 'one dunk' water immersion. By the time of Irenaeus and his followers it is a 'three dunk' water immersion.
Indeed how is it possible for anyone to seriously argue against the idea that our 'three dunk' water immersion ritual came after the original 'single dunk' practice of being baptized only 'into the Father'?
You see if Christianity developed from the Samaritan practice it begins to look remarkably similar to what one must imagine was the original 'Monarchian' or 'Patripassian' practice.
One dunk can only mean a water immersion 'into the Father.' There was no Trinity yet introduced into the formula.
It is noteworthy that the Marcionites are consistently connected with the Monarchians - i.e. those who emphasized that Jesus was the presence of the Father rather than the Son. To this end it is noteworthy that Cyril of Jerusalem identifies them as rejecting the trinity and Cyprian of Carthage makes clear that the Marcionites did not baptize into the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit:
let us examine in the meantime about Marcion alone, the mention of whom has been made in the letter transmitted by you to us, whether the ground of his baptism can be made good. For the Lord after His resurrection, sending His disciples, instructed and taught them in what manner they ought to baptize, saying, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." He suggests the Trinity, in whose sacrament the nations were to be baptized. Does Marcion then maintain the Trinity? Does he then assert the same Father, the Creator, as we do? Does he know the same Son, Christ born of the Virgin Mary, who as the Word was made flesh, who bare our sins, who conquered death by dying, who by Himself first of all originated the resurrection of the flesh, and showed to His disciples that He had risen in the same flesh? Widely different is the faith with Marcion (Letter 72:1, 3-26, To Jubaianus)
The point is that I can't help but think that in its purest form Christian baptism was arranged so that:
(a) initiates were baptized only into the Father as sons
(b) the gospel originally identified Jesus as initiating a particular disciple into this sacrament.
(c) the baptism was developed on 'behalf of the dead' (1 Cor 15:29) in other words transforming mortals into immortals by wedding them to angels because that disciple started his initiation from a dead state (as in Secret Mark LGM 1)
Everything developed later among Irenaeus and his circle was ultimately artificial and deliberately formulated against the original doctrine.
That's why again Dositheus (and Simon)- both Samaritans - were identified as the first heretics of the Christianity. They preserved the original ground out of which the central sacrament of the faith developed.
