“For this reason, moreover, the Church received from the apostles the tradition of baptizing infants too.”
– Origen, Commentary on Romans, (ca.244 A.D.)
“Origen could, of course, have been wrong about the apostolic origins of infant baptism. He was writing, it must be recalled, the best part of two centuries after the time of the apostles, and not all rites which people in Origen’s time claimed to have received from the apostles were in fact apostolic in origin. But Origen was a well-travelled man. By the time that he wrote his Commentary on Romans that infant baptism had been received from the apostles, Origen had lived in Palestine as well as his native Egypt, and he had visited both Rome and Athens. Evidently, he had seen nothing in his extensive experience of the church to make him qualify this statement, or even argue for it. If the baptism of infants had been introduced only in recent years, or was only practiced in one area of the church known to him, it seems highly unlikely that Origen could have made such a sweeping claim for it. Origen possessed one of the most acute and questioning minds of the early church. If he could say, as an established point of reference which did not need the support of argument, that infant baptism was practice received from the apostles, then at the very least we must conclude that infant baptism was so thoroughly established and so widespread by the early third century that belief in its apostolic origin could pass without question.”
– Children in the Early Church, W. A. Strange, pp. 88-9.
spes clara 