Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer

Let's give some more historical, uh, evidence.

So this is a Lutheran scholar, H.A.W. Meyer.

He says this: "The baptism of children of Christians, which of no trace is found in the New Testament, is not to be held as an apostolic ordinance, as indeed it encountered early and long resistance," he's talking about in the history of the church, "but it is an institution of the Church, which gradly aro- gradually arose in post-apostolic times in connection with the development of ecclesiastical life and of doctrinal teaching, not certainly attended before Tertullian," we've referenced him, "and by him still decidedly opposed, although defended by Cyprian, only becoming general after the time of Augustine in virtue of that connection." And so what you see here is whether you take the quote we read earlier that said it didn't really become, like, prevalent till the 700s, 8th century, or these historians that say it was Augustine, you see that a lot of these people show that this developed later.

This is, uh, Philip Schaff.

Um, he said that, "Infant baptism is essentially excluded by the language of the commission." Now, he's a Lutheran scholar.

I believe he believes in infant baptism.

Uh, Meyer, in his commentary on the New Testament, uh, he's a very respected Lutheran commentator.

He said, "Matthew 28, uh, 19 contains ethical instruction that must accompany baptism.

And finally, Silva brings us to the modern era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He highlights men like H.A.W. Meyer, who was essentially this pedantic but brilliant scientist of the text.

He was.

He pioneered the strict grammatical historical method, exhaustively cataloging every possible grammatical option for every single word.

And then you have J.B. Lightfoot, the incredibly lucid British master whose historical reconstructions of the Roman world and the early church are still considered foundational today.

So we have a chain of interpretation Chrysostom's native intuition, Aquinas's canonical connections, Calvin's theological synthesis, Meyer's grammatical precision, and Lightfoot's historical rigor.

Okay, I have to play devil's advocate here.

Go for it.