infant baptism: The case for a pandemic origin

The author proposes "to connect the emergence of infant baptism with the ground-shaking experience of the Antonine Plague. The so-called Antonine Plague, which was probably smallpox, devastated large swaths of the Roman Empire in the late 160s. Arduini cites Christian writers who first mention the baptism of babies to argue that the documented appearance of this new religious practice coincides with, or rather follows, the Antonine Plague. The rationale behind infant baptism was simple: to guarantee salvation for the babies before they could be ripped from their parents' arms by the merciless disease".