David Perry - Cyprian's letter to Fidus: a new perspective on its significance for the history of infant baptism

The letter of Cyprian to Fidus has long been held up as unimpeachable evidence that to be baptised as an infant was normal practice in the early Church. Aland said: of the letter “…we must conclude that infant baptism at this time in Africa was not only a Church rule but a Church requirement”. But what if that evidence does not relate to normal practice? it means that all infant baptisms before the late fourth century were baptisms of necessity and explains why, as D F Wright pointed out, “we cannot give the name of anyone before the fourth century not in an emergency situation who was baptised as an infant”. 

My paper demonstrates that letter 58/64 refers to a baptism which is neither routine nor clinical. It is an emergency or precautionary baptism of people of all ages, including infants, in exceptional circumstances. How exceptional we can gauge by reading Cyprian’s De Mortalitate alongside letter 58/64. Once we accept that a plague was raging at the time Cyprian wrote his treatise and Fidus wrote to Cyprian and Cyprian replied, we find everything falling into place. Once the plague ceased, the normal catechumenal and baptismal disciplines will have restarted. The traditional reluctance to baptise clinically will have reasserted itself, as we see in the case of St Augustine’s childhood illness and as affirmed in the Canons of Neo-Caesarea (c. 314CE).

If what I have brought to light is accepted, Cyprian’s letter 58/64 will no longer serve as evidence for the baptism of healthy infants in the middle of the 3^rd century CE.