Baptizo is a violent little word, and English has spent five centuries making it polite. It does not mean to sprinkle, to dab, or to pour a handful over a forehead. It means to plunge, to submerge, to push a thing down under until the water has closed over it completely. Greek writers used it for a sunk ship and a drowned man. It is the intensive of baptō, to dip, and the intensive is the whole point: not touched by water, buried in it.

The KJV did not translate the word. It transliterated it, carried the Greek sound straight across into English as "baptize," and once a word stops meaning anything in the reader's own tongue, you can pour whatever practice you like into the empty shell. So the church filled it with a font and a few drops, and the drowning went out of it.

Restore the word and the Jewish thing underneath it stands back up. When the Greek Scriptures needed a verb for what Yochanan was doing in the Jordan, and for what Naaman did when he went down seven times, the Septuagint's own translators reached for baptizo (2 Kings 5:14). It is the Greek dress of the Hebrew taval, to immerse. Baptism was never a new rite. It was the mikvah said in Greek, and the word remembers what the font forgot: you go all the way under.