WRIGHT Out, In, Out: Jesus' Blessing 195
would have had little force. But that some in the Carthaginian Christian
community took it to warrant baby-baptism is, I judge, beyond doubt. Ter-
tullian's writings frequently allow us to glimpse informal debates about
the interpretation of Scripture among local believers.
Yet not everything is straightforward. On another occasion than this
essay, Tertullian's famous but frustratingly elusive text deserves more
detailed re-examination. At approximately what age, for example, did he
think baptism appropriate? Ill-shaped modern discussion is inclined to set
only 'adult' over against 'infants', so that the other category Tertullian
addresses here, the unmarried, both virgins and widows, may have too
quickly encouraged the assumption that delay until adult years is his
concern throughout. Perhaps too the Cullmann-Jeremias hypothesis of a
KcoAueiv-formula ('What hinders baptism...?') merits revisiting in this
context, for in the majority of its alleged occurrences, including its earliest
patently baptismal one, in Acts 8.36, it has to do with the baptism of
believers, not of very young children. As too often in the consideration of
the early history of Christian baptism, a preoccupation with paedobap-
tism's origins may have slanted the enquiry prejudicially. In this instance,
starting out on the trail of a supposed 'hindrance-formula' from Mk 10.14
par. may have unhelpfully limited the conceivable options. On the face of
it, one of the strangest features of this paragraph in Tertullian's De
baptisrno is his interpreting 'Forbid them not to come to me' in terms not
of parvuli in any obvious sense of the noun (pace Pocknee) but of, let us
surmise, young teenagers or older. Did the 'KcoAueiv-formula' function atfirst only with believing respondents? Was it this formula that later sug-
gested a connexion between the Synoptic narrative and the baptism of
infants—when, ex hypothesis it became more common in the later second
century? Are developments of this kind behind Tertullian's puzzling text?
Many interpreters, to be sure, have no trouble making sense of the
passage, and especially of the role of Mt. 19.14. They might be less con-
fident if they were aware how exceptional among the Church Fathers is
this association between the Gospel pericope to which it belongs and
infant baptism. The only other witness is the Apostolic Constitutions
noticed above. The commonest treatment of the text finds the key in the
phrase 'for of such—not "of these"!—is the kingdom of heaven' (Mk
10.14 par.), combined with citation of another of Jesus' sayings which
makes childhood a pattern for his disciples. Clement of Alexandria turns
to the training of the children in his Paidagogus (Instructor) 1.5, immedi-
ately declaring that 'We are the children'. He quotes Jn 21.4-5 and Mt.
19.13-14, and then asserts that Mt. 18.3, 'Unless you are converted and