It has often caused the present writer some admitatio that in 1 Cor 1 : 14-17 Paul appears to show such reluctance to baptise but upon reading Kildahl’s The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues an insight into the situation was suggested to her.
In 1 Cor 1 : 14-15 Paul declares:
I am thankful (or I thank God) that I baptised none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptised in my name.
Such a statement is not found elsewhere either in the Pauline Corpus or the rest of the New Testament, or to my knowledge in Christian writings: this would suggest that a special situation in Corinth warranted such reluctance. One main peculiarity of the Corinthian Church was its overenthusiasm and its stress on the gift of tongues. The Acts of the Apostles demonstrates that on extraordinary occasions the baptism of candidates was either preceded or followed by glossolalia. That ‘tongues’ might have accompanied baptism in Corinth also is suggested by the fact that Paul, after listing the spiritual gifts (1 Cor 12 : 4ff), emphasises the unity of the Body, which is the Church, by using a phrase occurring only once outside the Gospels and Acts ‘in one Spirit were we all baptised into one body’ (1 Cor 12:13).