at death, showing that baptism was administered in extremis. ‘In all probability in these cases the parents were pagan.’27 Aland knocks some sizeable holes in this construction.28 The inscriptions in question date from the third century. In order to avoid irrefutable evidence of the non-observance of infant baptism so soon after it is first unambiguously attested, Jeremias advances the anachronistic notion of pagan parents requesting, and succeeding in securing, the baptism of their dying children,