*** Baptist history only goes back to around 1600, so I guess Christianity began around than because you see the rest of us are apostates. ***
It seems that your statement above is Biblically absolutely dead wrong in the first part, and partially Scripturally correct on the second part, of course. Why?
By the command of The Christ, His fully committed followers were ordained to make more disciples from all tribes of people; to immerse in water these new disciples individually, for a public sign of total commitment to The Father, to The Son, and to The Holy Ghost conjointly; and to congregate those disciples for public instruction in continually watchfully guarding all the commands of The Christ from any corrupting change whatsoever throughout this age. There The Christ avowed He would always stand with them in this effort.
Immersionists have constituted the visible Bodies of The Christ since the birth of the local church of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost; where, subsequent to gladly receiving the instruction of Simon Peter that day, about 3,000 responsible souls repented of sin, accepted immersion in water as a sign, were added to the Jerusalem local church as new regenerated disciple-believer constituents, continuing in the doctrine of the apostles, in The Fellowship, in The Breaking of The Bread, and in the prayers.
The resurgence of immersionists in the 1600s as baptisers of responsible adults is only a reconstitution of the local assemblies which follow the pure New Testament doctrine as demonstrated on Pentecost. These 1600s baptisers rejected the corruption of the statist Roman religion, as well as that of its illegitimate daughters, who sought to reform the Roman religion rather than to reject it completely.
One corruption of all of those religionists was subscribing to the Roman-innnovated “baptism” of unqualified, irresponsible, unbelieving, unregenerated infants, which changed the position of those infants not at all, and was never commanded by The Christ. Doctrinally correct disciple-believers have never practiced infant-baptism nor attributed any merits to it.
So — yes — those, who imagine that infant “baptism” creates new Christ-followers, are pursuing deep apostate error and malpractice. Such apostasy clearly indicates a departure away from The Faith once delivered to the saints, away from those whom The Christ has summoned to meet together to bear the good fruit of more immersionist-discipled-believers, and away from The Fellowship of The Holy Ghost.
That makes the numbers of observable practitioners of The Faith even smaller than that estimated by most of Christendom. Eh?
Is that worth thinking a bit about? Should one not muse, “Am I in The Faith?”
Baptism by immersion is the norm among all Eastern Christians. As a Melkite Catholic, I can say with confidence that we baptize both infants and adults by immersion.
The Western Church save for the Church of Milan discarded baptism by immersion for some reason in the 13th century. But it has made a comeback in some Roman Catholic parishes as an option.
Don’t cite the Bible because the problem is with how you interpret it. The issue goes far beyond baptism by immersion though.
Your interpretation of the Bible with regard to the sacraments and what baptism means is revisionist.
There is more continuity between the Catholic and Orthodox episcopate of today and the apostles because of unbroken apostolic succession than there is between a Baptist congregation and the apostles.
There are fundamental differences even among Baptists about what we Catholics would call core dogmatic issues such as predestination, free-will, etc. Every time Baptists open their mouths to pontificate about scripture, it is subjective.
That’s why Catholics and Orthodox appeal to tradition, so we know how to properly interpret scripture as it has been interpreted at all times, in all places, by all.
Plus, we follow a more mystical and more monastic approach to our faith than the West. We don't teach purgatory in the classical Western sense, our bishops refrain from any discussions about indulgences, and our ways of doing things are a lot older than the West.You mean infants who haven't earned the right to salvation by working for it? Oh, perish the thought that God would save the unworthy and freely justify the unjust through grace ... appalling! Scandalous! For as Paul says somewhere, "If you haven't worked for it, it's not grace." /s
BTW, no matter what else you say about it, it's definitely not true that infant baptism is "Roman-innovated". Justin Martyr says that there were old women living in his day who had been baptized by the apostles -- he wrote around AD 150. Origen says that the church received the custom of baptizing infants from the Apostles.
The Armenian and Ethiopian churches, who were never obedient to Rome or Constantinople nor under the Roman yoke politically, both baptize infants.