Wednesday, April 27, 2022

David F. Wright on Polycarp's "eighty-six years I have served [Christ]" and the Question of Infant Baptism

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)