While a proponent of infant baptism, David F. Wright, commenting on the appeal to Polycarp's "eighty-six years I have served [Christ]" in The Martyrdom of Polycarp as evidence for infant baptism in the late-1st/early-2nd century wrote that:
Nothing more definite can be
deducted from two other first-person testimonies as long Christian lives in the
later second century—Polycarp’s ‘Eighty-six years I have served [Christ]’ and
Polycrates’ ‘I have now lived in the Lord sixty-five years’. The latter belongs to AD 190-91, which enables Jeremias to conclude that Polycrates ‘was baptized
as a child about A.D. 125’. Polycarp’s martyrdom is variously dated between 153
and 177, which would give an infant, perhaps baby, baptism for Polycarp in the
first century. The discussion of such statements between Jeremias and Aland is
inconclusive, although in his later book Jeremias concedes that some of them
show only that the persons concerned ‘were not first converted as adults, but
were Christians already from their youth up’. He makes no mention of a
reference introduced into the discussion by Aland from 1 Clement (c. AD
96) to certain Christians who ‘have walked among us from youth to old age
unblameably’, where on no reasonable chronology can απο νεοτητος specify the years of babyhood (1
Clement 63:3 [cf. 65:1]). Such testimonies can more confidently be held to
reflect the baptism of teenagers or children as believers (cf. Hippolytus’ parvuli
who can speak for themselves), than baby baptism. (David F. Wright, “The
Origins of Infant Baptism—Child Believers’ Baptism?” in Infant Baptism in
Historical Perspective: Collected Studies [Studies in Christian History and
Thought; Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2007], 9)
