The Origins of Infant Baptism

A few miles east of Jericho, there's a

spot on the Jordan River traditionally

identified as the very place where Jesus

was baptized by John the Baptist. And if

you visit there today, chances are

you'll see groups of Christians

gathering there, dressed in white robes,

standing barefoot in the shallows,

waiting their turn to be baptized. But

if you know a thing or two about

Christianity, you'll know that baptism

often doesn't look like this. For the

majority of Christians today, especially

in Catholic, Orthodox, and some

Protestant traditions, baptism usually

involves baptizing infants. Sometimes

baptism involves just a few drops of

water sprinkled or poured over the

baby's head and others it's full

immersion. Infants are dunked three

times in a baptismal font. No matter the

method though, it's a far cry from the

image of a grown adult being immersed in

a flowing river. These two scenarios

show how the central initiation ritual

of Christianity looks different

depending on the church tradition and

cultural context. And one of the most

significant differences is the age of

the one being baptized. And this is not

just a minor theological footnote. It's

been a source of intense debate in

Christian history. For example, in early

modern Europe, a group called the

Anabaptists rejected infant baptism

altogether, insisting that only adults

who could make a personal confession of

faith should be baptized. For that

belief, many of them were arrested,

exiled, or even executed. So, if

baptizing Jesus as an adult is the most

recognizable symbol of this initiation

ritual, where did the practice of

baptizing babies come from in the first

place? In the earliest decades of

Christianity, Christians modeled baptism

after ancient Jewish purification

practices, particularly those of John

the Baptist. The word baptism itself

comes from the Greek baptizo, meaning to

be immersed or plunge. It can also mean

to dip, as in dipping a sponge into

water or a blacksmith dipping a heated

metal rod into water. Though in ritual

context, the term often refers to ritual

washing. Ancient Judaism included a

range of water-based cleansing rituals,

including washing your hands before

eating, the Jewish high priest bathing

his body before entering the Holy of

Holies in the Jerusalem temple, and

bathing after entering a state of ritual

impurity for a variety of reasons. Many

synagogues and private homes during the

lifetime of John the Baptist were even

equipped with a mikvah, a ritual bath

designed for full body immersion for

ritual cleansing. What you're looking at

here is an example from the town of

Magdala on the shores of the Sea of

Galilee, an ancient mikvah roughly

contemporaneous with the lifetime of

Jesus. We see an early variation of

these customs in the practice of John

the Baptist who called people to repent

from sin to prepare them for the coming

kingdom of God. Those who responded to

his message were immersed in water, not

to cleanse themselves after entering a

state of ritual impurity, but because

they wanted to signal their response to

his call. John's practice diverged from

earlier Jewish purification rituals in

two key ways. First, it was administered

by someone else, unlike most Jewish

purification rituals which were

self-administered. Second, it was

apparently performed only once, a single

decisive transformative act that signals

entry into a religious community rather

than a ritual that's meant to be

repeated regularly to maintain ritual

purity. Now, John the Baptist wasn't the

only Jew in the first century innovating

new communal water rituals that signal

moral transformation. Around the same

time, another Jewish group was

developing its own purification rituals,

living in a desert settlement near the

Dead Sea at a site called Kuman. This

group is associated with the Dead Sea

Scrolls, which were discovered nearby,

along with evidence of a highly

organized Jewish sect. Many scholars

associate the Kuman community with a

Jewish sect called the Essins, described

by the first century Jewish historian

Josephus as a group deeply concerned

with purity, piety, and separation from

broader society. According to Josephus,

new members of the Essins had to undergo

a ritual bath in cold water before they

were allowed to participate in the

community's meals. And one of the

scrolls discovered at Kuman called the

community rule seems to have been their

community handbook. And it offers a

parallel description of how new

initiates were spiritually and ritually

purified. For it is through the spirit

of true counsel concerning the ways of

man that all his sins shall be

expedated. And when his flesh is

sprinkled with purifying waters and

sanctified by cleansing water, it shall

be made clean by the humble submission

of his soul to all the precepts of God.

Like John's baptism, these practices

framed water purification as a symbol of

moral renewal and readiness to join a

holy community. The Kuman settlement

also included multiple stepped pools,

likely used for various ritual

immersions. So John wasn't innovating

out of nowhere. Like the Essins at

Kuman, he was reworking existing Jewish

ideas about water and purity. But his

version did set the stage for Christian

baptism as a one-time publicly performed

initiation into a community. But where

do the babies come in? According to most

scholarly treatments of this issue,

Christians originally baptized new

members as adults and most often with

full immersion. And when we look at the

earliest Christian writings, we do see

that the people being baptized are

adults. A key example is the story of

the Ethiopian unic in Acts chapter 8. In

that story, one of the earliest

Christian evangelists, Philip,

encounters an Ethiopian court official

traveling home from Jerusalem. The man

is reading from the book of Isaiah and

seems puzzled by what he's reading.

Philip joins him in the chariot,

explains how the passage relates to

Jesus, and then preaches the gospel to

him. Moved by the message, the unic then

points to a body of water and says,

"Look, here is water. What is to prevent

me from being baptized?" And so, Philip

baptizes him on the spot. There's no

mention of family members or children,

just one adult convert dunked. The

scholar Everett Ferguson advocates for

this view, arguing that adult baptism

was the original norm with infant

baptism a later development. According

to him, infant or childhood baptism

arose later only as an emergency measure

when an infant or young child was facing

imminent death. According to Ferguson's

model, a major shift occurred in late

antiquity because of influential

thinkers like Augustine of Hippo, who

helped to popularize the doctrine of

original sin. the idea that all human

beings, even newborns, inherit the guilt

of Adam and Eve. Ferguson writes, "With

the victory of Augustine's arguments,

original sin became the reason for

infant baptism in the Western church.

And once this idea took hold, the logic

behind baptism shifted. Baptizing babies

wasn't just about precaution anymore. It

became a theological necessity.

According to Ferguson, by the fifth and

sixth centuries, infant baptism had

become the standard practice throughout

much of the Christian world, and it

would remain the norm throughout the

Middle Ages and beyond until the

Protestant Reformation sparked a major

revolution. Like I mentioned at the

start, reformed groups like the

Anabaptists rejected infant baptism

altogether, insisting that true baptism

required personal belief. They claimed

that this was a return to the original

model of the early church, and this

resulted in the diversity of baptismal

practices we see today. So we can call

this the adult full immersion with

exceptions model. Now Ferguson doesn't

deny there were exceptions. For example,

he acknowledges that the early Christian

text called the dedicay mentions how you

can practice baptism either through

immersion or pouring. But for him, adult

full immersion baptism was clearly the

norm. But in recent years, scholars have

started to think that those so-called

exceptions were actually more common

than we thought. In a direct response to

Ferguson, the scholar of early Christian

art and architecture, Robin Jensen,

cautions against the idea that there was

ever a normative way that early

Christians practice baptism. Our

earliest evidence, whether textual,

artistic, or archaeological, just

doesn't support that kind of neat

narrative. The evidence from the 2nd to

7th centuries paints a picture of

diversity of how people were baptized

and who was being baptized. So, for

example, it seems that a lot of babies

were being baptized long before

Augustine and not only in emergency

cases. Explicit references to infant

baptism show up as early as the late 2nd

or early 3rd century CE in the writings

of Tertullian, one of the earliest Latin

theologians of Christianity. In his

treatise on baptism, Tertulan does not

introduce infant baptism as some sort of

new innovation. Instead, he complains

that it's already a common practice, and

he's concerned that children are being

baptized before they are able to know

Christ. This is a problem for Tertullan

because he worries that someone being

baptized too early might later fall into

sin and jeopardize their salvation.

Baptism, after all, is meant to be a

one-time unrepable cleansing. So,

sinning after baptism could have serious

spiritual consequences. His advice,

well, delay baptism until a child is old

enough to understand the faith and live

it out. He writes, "So let them come

when they are nearer maturity, when they

are learning, when they are being taught

what is that they are coming to. Let

them be made Christians when they are

able to know Christ. Why should the

innocent one rush to the remission of

sins?" Now, Tertullian clearly opposes

infant baptism, but the very fact that

he argues against it tells us something

important. He references the baptism of

little children and mentions sponsors

giving promision or binding guarantees

on behalf of the child's future conduct.

That not only shows that the practice

was already well established in North

Africa by his lifetime, but it also

shows that it was not in response to the

child's imminent death. There's not much

use making a binding guarantee of the

child's future conduct if you're

expecting the child to die soon. So, it

seems that Tertullan was not responding

to a new or fringe idea. He was pushing

back against something that many

Christians around him were already

doing, and that bothered him. Other

early Christian theologians around this

time such as Cyprien, origin of

Alexandria and the writer of the

lurggical text called the apostolic

tradition also describe infant baptism.

And in the case of Cyprien, he expresses

clear support for it. Writing to a

fellow bishop named Fidus in the 250 CE,

Cyprien responded to a concern. Fedus

had questioned whether it was

appropriate to baptize infants before

the 8th day after birth, drawing on the

biblical precedent of circumcision,

which was traditionally done on the

eighth day. Cyprien rejected this

comparison, saying that baptism was not

bound to that timeline and should not be

delayed. In fact, he argued that a

newborn should be baptized immediately.

For Cyprien, divine grace and the gift

of the Holy Spirit are not measured by

age. So, in his view, delaying baptism

would just be denying a newborn access

to God's mercy. He writes, "And

therefore, dearest brother, this was our

opinion and counsel. No one ought to be

hindered from baptism and from the grace

of God which we think is to be even more

observed in respect of infants and newly

born persons who on this very account

deserve more from our help and from the

divine mercy. In other words, Cyprien

saw baptism not as something to postpone

until a child could understand it but as

an act of mercy. For him, even the

youngest newborns were in need of divine

grace and withholding baptism even just

for a few days meant withholding the

very means of divine mercy. Also writing

in the 200s, the theologian origin

writes, "In the church, baptism is given

for the remission of sins and according

to the usage of the church, baptism is

given even to infants." In his

commentary on the book of Romans, he

even claims infant baptism was a

practice received from the apostles

themselves. And finally, the apostolic

traditions, which may also date to the

3rd century CE, explicitly says that

little children are to be baptized even

before they're able to speak. And they

shall baptize the little children first.

And if they can answer for themselves,

let them answer. But if they cannot let

their parents or someone from their

family answer for them. So those are

among the earliest explicit mentions of

infant baptism with Tertullan probably

being the oldest mention. But the

practice may reach back even earlier

than figures like Tertullan or Cyprien

perhaps as far back as the 2nd century

or even the first century. The

theologian Irenaeus writing the late 2nd

century approvingly mentions infants and

small children who are born again in

God. Now, it's a brief and ambiguous

statement, but many scholars interpret

that phrase born again in God as a

reference to infant baptism. We also

find tantalizing hints in the New

Testament book of Acts, our earliest

extended narrative of Christian baptisms

dating to the late 1st or early 2nd

century CE. Acts describes the baptism

of entire households. Now, whether that

included babies or children is left

unsaid. Now, some scholars have argued

that the silence of early Christian

sources on infant baptism is evidence

that it didn't yet exist. But scholars

have pointed out that early Christian

texts are actually pretty silent on

baptismal details in general. For

example, the sources generally reference

new converts being baptized. But we

don't have any specific descriptions of

baptizing teenagers or adults that were

born into a Christian family, though it

almost certainly was happening. So, the

absence of detailed commentary on infant

baptism doesn't necessarily mean it was

not practiced. It just means that much

of everyday life in Christian

communities just wasn't written down.

One thoughtprovoking interpretation of

the silence comes from the scholar

Steven Nicolleti. In a 2015 article,

Nicoleti doesn't try to force the early

Christian sources to say more than they

actually say. The book of Acts simply

says families. We can try to read

between the lines and say that probably

includes babies and kids, too. But it's

hard to squeeze more data out of that

simple sentence. Rather than asking why

the New Testament doesn't mention infant

baptism, he asks what that silence might

actually tell us. Nicolleti suggests

that the reason early Christian texts

don't mention infant baptism might

actually be pretty simple. Nobody

thought it was a question worth asking.

In the Greco Roman world in the first

century, it was completely normal to

assume that children would be initiated

into their parents' religion. It was not

something people debated or explained.

It just was. And when a speaker and

listener share a certain set of

assumptions, those assumptions don't

need to be stated. To illustrate the

point, Nicolleti compares it to the US

Declaration of Independence. It famously

declares that all men are created equal

and yet says nothing about slavery, even

though slavery was deeply entrenched in

the colonies that wrote and signed the

document. To us today, this seems like a

contradiction. But at the time, the

document's authors and readers shared a

set of unspoken presuppositions, namely

that enslaved people didn't count among

those equal men. So to a historian, the

silence on slavery is not evidence of

confusion at the time or that slavery

didn't exist. It's evidence of shared

consensus. In the same way, Nicolleti

argues that the silence on infant

baptism in the New Testament may not

reflect uncertainty or disagreement or

that no one was doing it, but rather a

shared presupposition. Children would

obviously be brought into the Christian

community along with their parents using

the Christian initiation ritual of

choice, baptism. He backs up his

argument by looking at the cultural

context of initiation rituals during the

first century CE. In Judaism, Jewish

boys were circumcised on the eighth day

after birth as a mark of entry into the

covenant. There was no later ritual to

bring them officially into the faith.

They were simply in. Girls, while not

circumcised, were likewise considered

full members of the religious community

by virtue of being born to Jewish

parents. Passages from the compendium of

Jewish law called the Mishna say that

kids were expected to participate in

temple festivals in Jerusalem as soon as

they could walk. Nicolleti argues that

because baptism quickly became the

Christian right of initiation,

functioning as the moment when someone

entered the church and the Christian

life, it would have made sense for

Jewish converts to extend that right to

their kids. The same logic applies from

converts from Greco Roman backgrounds.

In the Roman Empire during the first

century CE, infants were often ritually

initiated into civic and social life

through a naming ceremony called the da

celestrius held around the 8th or 9th

day after birth. It involved naming the

child purification rights and formally

incorporating them into the household

which was functionally a religious

institution at the time. Kids took part

in state rituals. They sang in festivals

and they helped with the household

cultic activities. In other words,

religious activity was something

children grew up participating in as

part of their family and civic identity.

So when Greek and Roman parents

converted to Christianity, they also

probably expected their kids to be

included in the same way. Ultimately,

Nicolleti asks a simple question. What

were they doing with the babies? The

church had to do something with the kids

of converts. Throughout the first

century, Christianity began expanding

rapidly through both Jewish and

non-Jewish converts. And as we've seen,

converts brought their entire households

into the faith. What happened to the

babies? Were they left uninitiated,

delayed until adolescence? We don't know

because we don't get any debate about

this in the earliest Christian sources.

We don't get letters from Paul to the

churches fretting over what to do with

the toddlers. That silence, he argues,

probably means there was no dispute,

just a broadly shared assumption that

the kids of Christian parents were

included in the community from the

start, which is what we see when we

consider other initiation rituals of the

time, both in Judaism and in traditional

Greco Roman families. Of course,

Nicollet's argument isn't without its

problems. Arguments from silence can cut

both ways. Maybe the early sources don't

mention infant baptism simply because it

wasn't practiced and no one thought to

note its absence. So no, he doesn't

solve the debate over infant baptism in

the apostolic age once and for all. But

he does offer a pretty simple reframing

of the silence in our sources. In the

first century world, baptizing babies

would not have been weird. Across Jewish

and Greco Roman cultures, kids were

routinely initiated into their family's

religion from birth using an initiation

ritual. So if early Christians did not

baptize their kids, that would have

surprised at least some segments of

society and likely would have sparked

debate. But we don't see that, just

silence. And for Nicolleti, that silence

might reflect quiet agreement. So some

scholars argue it's plausible that

infant baptism was a fairly common

practice by the second century if

Irenaeus is indeed referencing it and

maybe even earlier in the first century

if entire families were indeed being

baptized at once, kids and all. Though

at the very least, the practice was

apparently widespread enough by around

200 CE to be referenced by Tertullan,

Cyprien, and origin. Now, to be fair to

Ferguson, he's not entirely wrong. The

earliest baptismal practices we know of,

those of John the Baptist, involved

adult participants. The dedicay, one of

the earliest Christian texts, instructs

both the one being baptized and the

baptizer to fast beforehand, something

babies can't exactly do. And in the

first few centuries of Christianity, the

movement was still expanding primarily

through adult conversions, which

naturally meant that most baptisms were

of adults. Really, the entire debate

comes down to this murky roughly 150year

gap in our evidence between John the

Baptist and Tertullan. Trying to

pinpoint when infant baptism first

emerged and more importantly when it

became routine enough to be recognizable

as a widespread practice. By the time of

Tertullan in the early 3rd century, it

clearly wasn't the majority practice we

see today. But it also wasn't exactly

new either. Tertulan, Cyprien and origin

were reacting to the baptism of infants

and young kids, not introducing it.

Tertullan criticizes it. Cyprien defends

it and origin describes it as not

particularly out of the ordinary. Their

testimony suggests that the practice was

at least familiar, perhaps even routine

in some Christian communities and not

only in the case of emergencies. Origin

Tertullian and the apostolic tradition

don't frame it like that. Tertulan does

not mention emergency at all. In fact,

he assumes that children are being

baptized in ordinary circumstances and

his concern is precisely that it's

happening too casually. Also, origin

refers to the baptism of infants as a

general usage of the church without

suggesting that it was only reserved for

dire circumstances. In both cases, the

tone suggests a level of regularity

rather than exception, which complicates

the idea that early infant baptism was

solely a response to crisis. Now, while

we lack definitive evidence for

widespread infant baptism before these

writers, as I mentioned, there are

suggestive earlier hints like the

baptism of entire households in the book

of Acts and 1 Corinthians or Irenaeus's

reference to infants being born again in

God, which may reflect first century

family-based baptismal practices that

included babies and kids. At the very

least, the evidence points to a more

diverse and regionally varied baptismal

landscape than Ferguson's model allows.

Instead of one norm with rare

exceptions, the early Christian world

may have always contained a spectrum of

baptismal practices shaped by theology,

pastoral concerns, and the messy

realities of lived religion on the

ground. The archaeological evidence of

baptismal fonts also points to a

diversity of practice. Baptismal fonts

being the basins or receptacles for

baptismal water. In a modern Baptist

church, a baptismal font may look like a

full-sized bathtub or small pool

designed for adult immersion. In a

Catholic or Orthodox church, you're more

likely to see a smaller ornate basin.

Ferguson argues that fonts became

smaller in the 500 CE as Christian

communities shifted toward baptizing

infants rather than adults. In his view,

earlier, larger fonts with steps and

deeper basins were designed for adult

full immersion, while smaller, more

shallow fonts reflect a ritual now

centered on sprinkling or pouring water

over babies. But this interpretation

raises some problems. For one, it

assumes that large fonts can't be used

for infants and smaller fonts can't

accommodate adults, which is not

necessarily true. The logic only holds

if you assume that full immersion of

adults was the standard mode of practice

across the board. But as we've seen, the

evidence suggests a wider range of

practice from the beginning. In other

words, a baby could be dunked in a

larger basin and an adult could be

sprinkled standing or kneeling in a

smaller one. Surviving fonds from the

300s and early 400s tend to range from

about 1 to 3 m wide and around 1 m deep.

But in her research, Dr. Jensen notes

that a lot of the earliest baptismal

fonts found in the archaeological record

are very small, complicating the idea

that full body immersion of adults was

really all that widespread. Jensen

argues that the material evidence

suggests a wider range of baptismal

practices were already in use by the 3rd

century, including baptism by pouring

and the baptism of babies. The oldest

surviving baptismal font ever discovered

comes from Duro Europus, a Roman

frontier town in modern-day Syria, dated

to the mid-3rd century CE.

Contemporaneous with the lifetimes of

origin in Cyprian. The baptistry

includes a painted chamber and a

built-in basin measuring approximately 1

and 1/2 m long, 1 m wide, and just under

1 m deep, about the depth of a modern

standard bathtub. While this size would

have allowed a person to step in and

kneel or crouch, it likely was not large

enough to permit full body immersion by

reclining or laying flat unless you were

a particularly small person. A pair of

4th century baptismal fonts from the

site of Balalis Mayor in Tunisia are

also tiny. One less than 50 cm deep and

the other about 75 cm deep. Consider

also this example from Milan and this

one from Naples dating to the 300s and

400s respectively. They're very shallow,

barely deep enough to cover someone's

knees, let alone immerse an entire

adult. The Milan basin is 55 cm deep,

and the Naples one is only 45 cm deep.

And even for the fonts that were deeper,

they were designed with steps and narrow

basins, making it hard to imagine

someone being fully submerged without

some serious gymnastics. Believe me,

I've tried. This is the baptismal font

in St. John's Basilica in Ephesus,

likely from the 400s or 500 CE. And I

can't really see how I could be fully

immersed based on some experimental

archaeology using my adult human body as

a test case. Even if we account for the

fact that people in late antiquity may

have been shorter on average than today,

many of these fonts would not have been

deep enough to fully submerge an adult

without effort. The deeper ones would

have been about hip deep and may have

required crouching down and curling up

to achieve anything close to full

immersion. And even then, with

difficulty depending on the steps and

the width of the basin. All of this

leads Dr. Jensen to conclude both

archaeological remains and iconography

from the early church indicate that

baptismal immersion was probably less

common than documents indicate. Scholars

now suggest that in many cases early

Christians may have been practicing

partial immersion, standing or kneeling

in a baptismal font while water was

poured over them, which is how the

baptism of Jesus is sometimes depicted

in early Christian art. Moreover, the

archaeological record doesn't show a

clean chronological break as Ferguson

suggested when baptismal fonts

supposedly were getting smaller to

accommodate babies. As we've seen, small

fonts existed well before Augustine, and

large adult-sized fonts continue to be

built after his lifetime. The font at

Boleria, in Tunisia, for example, is

about 1.5 m deep, and the font at

Calibia, in Tunisia, measures over 1 m

deep. The same design is seen in other

fonts from this period like this

enormous basin near Pompei which spans

5.5 m across. So Jensen concludes thus

the size or depth of fonts cannot offer

reliable evidence for a general

transition to infant baptism across the

board in the fifth or sixth century any

more than it can preclude or prove that

baptism was always administered either

by submersion or ausion. The

archaeological record reinforces what we

see in the textual sources. Early

Christian baptismal practice was not

uniform. Full immersion or partial

immersion, sprinkling or pouring,

crouching or kneeling, natural flowing

water outside or baptismal font inside,

infant baptism or adult baptism. They

all seem to have coexisted on some level

at least from the 3rd century to the 6th

century and possibly earlier. Which

brings us back to the doctrine of

original sin. For Ferguson and other

scholars, this has been viewed as a

watershed moment. But we've seen from

figures like Tortullon and Origin that

Christians were baptizing infants in

non-emergency situations centuries

before Augustine's lifetime. This has

led some scholars to question just how

decisive Augustine really was in the

story of infant baptism. Maybe original

sin was not the initial reason for the

popularity of the practice. Some

Christian parents, for example, seem to

have explicitly rejected the doctrine

entirely. In a fifth century epitap from

southern France, the parents of their

deceased child identify him as sinless

and worthy of eternal bliss. Worthy

child, innocent, undarkened by the filth

of sin, little Thudosius, whose parents,

impurity of mind, intended to bury him

in the holy baptismal font, was snatched

away by shameless death. Yet the ruler

of High Olympus will give rest to any

member lying beneath the noble sign of

the cross, and the child will be heir to

Christ. These parents acknowledge their

desire for their child to be baptized,

but they apparently rejected the logic

that such baptism was necessary for the

child's salvation. Now, to be fair,

Cyprien, who was writing back in the

250s, does seem to lay early groundwork

for the logic that Augustine would later

systematize. In the same letter we

quoted earlier, he defends baptizing

babies, saying they've contracted the

contagion of the ancient death at birth.

But is this original sin theology? Well,

not quite. What's being inherited here

is death, not sin. And in the same

letter, Cyprien indicates that infants

themselves remain innocent. But the

scholar Maxwell Johnson does say we see

the beginnings of a theological

justification for infant baptism based

on the inherited consequences of Adam's

sin. Regardless, the latest studies of

early Christian baptism emphasize that

the shift to infant baptism as the

dominant mode of initiation in

Christianity was a gradual evolution,

not necessarily spurred by any

particular theological change. So why

did infant baptism first emerge and grow

so popular? The truth is we just don't

know. The earliest centuries of

Christian practice are murky and the

motivations behind any particular ritual

like infant baptism are not clearly

spelled out. But based on the available

evidence, scholars have proposed a few

plausible explanations. One theory is

that infant baptism might have

functioned as a replacement for Jewish

circumcision. Remember that this analogy

shows up in that letter of Cyprien. The

bishop he was writing to apparently

argued that baptism should be delayed

into the eighth day to match the timing

of circumcision. Cyprien rejected that

timeline, but the fact that Fedus made

that comparison at all suggests that

some early Christians saw infant baptism

as a parallel practice or maybe even a

replacement practice. There were also

probably personal and social

motivations, too. Parents may have

wanted their children to be officially

initiated into the church regardless of

any specific belief about sin. Baptism

could simply mark a child's inclusion in

Christian life, a sign that they

belonged. In this sense, the practice

was not driven by theological doctrine.

It was shaped by family tradition and

communal identity. And then there's the

reality of high infant mortality in the

ancient world. Baptism may have offered

reassurance to grieving parents.

Whatever one believed about the

sinfulness of the baby. Again, this

seems to be Cyprien's motivation in his

letter. He's not really concerned about

sin. He's concerned about death. So, the

act of baptism may have been seen as a

kind of protection, reflecting a broader

cultural anxiety about death, the

afterlife, and making sure one's kid was

properly cared for in this world and the

next. Now, if you want to go deeper into

early Christian history, I recently sat

down for an in-depth interview with Dr.

Tom Schmidt. He wrote a new book,

Josephus and Jesus, that's making waves

in my corner of religious studies. See,

in a famous passage, the Jewish

historian, Josephus mentions Jesus of

Nazareth, but most scholars think the

passage has been tampered with or

outright forged by later Christians. But

Dr. Schmidt makes the case that it's

authentic, and he even argues that

Josephus may have had direct access to

eyewitnesses of Jesus's trial and

execution. We get into all of it.

Ancient sources, Christian reception

history, and what it means for our

understanding of the historical Jesus.

And that interview is already available

early on Nebula. Nebula is a streaming

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dive into some of the most creative,

thoughtful content online. Thanks,

everyone.