Arguments Like Ephraim

“Perhaps at the outset I may be able to reassure the baptist reader by saying there will be no ‘babies of the Philippian jailer’ arguments . . . Arguments from silence not only do not establish the point they seek to establish, they do help establish the reputation of paedobaptists in making desperate and valiant attempts to find something in the New Testament that teaching infant baptism. And besides, the youngest child of the Philippian jailor was a fourteen-year-old girl. (‘And where did you get that?’ ‘In the same verse where she was babysitting the three infants.’) Although the general New Testament practice of household baptism is related to the subject of infant baptism (obviously) . . . arguments from such incidents are by no means a champion of the paedobaptist exegetical cause. At best, such arguments should be like Ephraim, helping to join in the pursuit later on” (To a Thousand Generations, p. 10).