John Lightfoot (1602–1675) and the Significance of Jewish Sources for the Defence of Infant Baptism

This article contends that the importance of post-biblical Jewish legal sources for the development of the case for infant baptism in England has been significantly underestimated. Focusing on the Westminster Assembly debates on baptism, it demonstrates how John Lightfoot’s interventions shaped contemporary understandings of that rite’s historicity. Lightfoot’s later work is shown to have further entrenched a conception of infant baptism as a development upon the proselyte baptism of the Jews. The study of Jewish texts thus emerges as having been an essential means of buttressing doctrine in mid- to late seventeenth-century England.