“Historians” – I wish that there was a better name or classification for these people, because many of them are more like editors of history, re-writers and redactors of history, than they are recorders of historical facts. It doesn’t matter what country, what era or what language, historians are often a very biased people, trying to promote their prejudice rather than to disseminate the truth. And since Baptists have historically been among the most hated people on earth, historians have depicted them in the most dishonest ways.
For example, someone two or three centuries ago, declared that immersion did not exist in England until the Baptists introduced it in the 1640s. Negligent historians have repeated that claim ever since. But the facts are that – not only Baptists, but almost everyone else in England, immersed – believers, non-believers, adults and babies for at least a century and probably fifteen centuries before that.
I have read that the members of the Assembly which created the famed Westminster Confession of Faith, came within one vote of demanding immersion as the Presbyterian form of baptism. 1534 Parliamentary documents prove that, as a reaction to Roman Catholicism, immersion was law, “and those who were not baptized (immersed) were to be treated as outlaws.”
But the Presbyterians and Anglican had not counted on the growth of the Baptists, who not only immersed, but immersed only adults and older children as they professed faith in Christ. In response to those Baptists, on his day (January 3) in 1644 a new law was passed, and in it was a description of a proper baptismal service – “The minister is to demand the name of the child, which being told him, he is to say (calling the child by name) I baptize thee in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. As he pronounceth the words, he is to baptize the child with water; which for the manner of doing it is not only lawful but sufficient and most expedient to be, by pouring or sprinkling of the water on the face of the child, without adding any other ceremony.”
Prior to that time, in 1644, everyone, but the Roman Catholics, baptized by immersion. And at that time sprinkling became law in Great Britain. It is an utter lie to say that the Baptists came up with that idea about that time. Immersion of the believer has the practice of the Baptists and Baptistic people since the very days of the New Testament.