How catholic baptism started?

Answer 1

I take it you are talking about how infant baptism got started.

The TheologicalDictionary of the New Testament says of the period following the death of the apostles: "Alien elements came in from the outside world. Hitherto these had been carefully held in check by the filter of prophetic and N[ew] T[estament] religion. But now, using external agreement as a channel, they came in full flood. Baptism became a syncretistic mystery."(syncretistic: = blending from many other religions.)

Jesus taught that it is the redeeming value of his own blood that washes away sins. But as early as the second century C.E. the pagan idea that baptism washes away sins and brings about "regeneration" crept into the Christian congregation. Illustrating this are the comments of Justin Martyr, of the second century C.E., concerning candidates for baptism: "They are brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated." "We may . . . obtain in the water the remission of sins formerly committed."

To what did this blending of pagan beliefs with The Bible's teaching about baptism lead? Greek scholar A. T. Robertson explains: "Out of this perversion of the symbolism of baptism grew both pouring as an ordinance and infant baptism. If baptism is necessary to salvation or the means of regeneration, then the sick, the dying, infants, must be baptized."

The religious historian Augustus Neander wrote of the early Christians: "Faith and baptism were always connected with one another; and thus it is in the highest degree probable . . . that the practice of infant baptism was unknown [in the first century C.E.]. . . . That it first became recognised as an apostolic tradition in the course of the third century, is evidence rather against than for the admission of its apostolic origin."-History of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church by the Apostles (New York, 1864), page 162.