WRIGHT Out, In, Out: Jesus' Blessing 205
We are reminded that, whatever historical conclusions we reach con-
cerning the early development of the practice of baptizing babies, evidence
of liturgical formulation to cater for it scarcely emerges before the end of
the patristic era, perhaps not until the sixth century. For some time before
this, and certainly for much of the fourth century and well into the fifth,
the majority of children born to Christian parents had not been baptized
but were enrolled in the catechumenate at birth. The commonest ritual for
this purpose was sealing with the sign of the cross, but Augustine, who is
the best-known witness to this observance, knew that he had also been
seasoned with salt. What we can scarcely trace as yet is the use of laying
on of hands, and with it the possible reading of one of our three Gospel
passages, for such infant dedications during a century or more that seems
almost not to have known infant baptism. Cyril of Alexandria appears to
distinguish between the chrism of the catechumenate and the chrism of
baptismal initiation for new-born babies.^62 As we have noted, other suit-
able Gospel verses might equally have served such occasions of infant
dedication. There are, then, at least hypothetical possibilities to be borne in
mind as a spur to investigation of an obscure phase in the emergence of
paedobaptism as the normal baptismal practice.
The fortunes of Mk 10.13-16 par. may be said to have come full circle,
or at least be completing full circle. In the early centuries only marginally
linked with the baptism of young children, and applied by a few Fathers to
one or another non-baptismal form of blessing or dedication, it secured its
liturgical place in the awkward assimilation of infants into a catechu-
menate for responsible believers, in the weeks before Easter. As infants
came to monopolize baptism, and it increasingly took place on demand
throughout the year, their catechumenal induction collapsed into an imme-
diately pre-baptismal church-door sequence. The Protestant Reformers
unified elements of this pre-baptismal observance with baptism itself within
the congregational context. No doubt Mk 10.13-16 par. had its own appeal
to them as Anabaptists challenged them to furnish their 'Scripture-alone'
justification for baptizing babies, but unwittingly they took it over from an
1958), pp. 164-66; Dondeyne,^4 La Discipline', pp. 774-77; Chavasse, 'L'Initiation a
Rome dans Fantiquite et le haut moyen-age', in Communion solennelle etprofession
defoi (Lex Orandi, 14; Paris: Cerf, 1952), pp. 28-31; H.O. Old, The Shaping of the
Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992),
pp. 6-9.
- Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, on John 11.26 (PG, lxxiv), col. 49;
and P.E. Pusey (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872), II, p. 276.