Answering on your own grounds, the Matthew passage fails to provide what is necessary to the interpretation you drew for the 1 Cor 1 passage: namely, that NO mention of family (women and children) occurs, yet we should be able to infer their presence--because in the gospel passage is explicit MENTION of them (if you subscribe to the interpretation you are insisting upon). Your application to 1 Cor 1 then requires inference piled on inference, not a safe course for strict exegesis.

Furthermore:
1) My point was (and is) that the figures provided indicate that the crowd was calculated by numbering the men, and therefore whomever else was there would have been negligible.

2) No. "Beside" does not mean there must have been women and children there. Saying so will not make it so. The language can just as easily (and faithful to the meaning of the term) mean that they were "apart from" or "without" women and children. I suppose there may well have been a few there, but the very fact that they are NOT counted indicates that whatever their presence amounted to, it was negligible to the crowd size. Let us not reduce the actual FIGURE given to an obscure detail.

3) To rephrase the issue (borrowing from Richard Bacon), Would there be any reason for there to be large, migrating crowds of mainly male travelers at any time during the year in Palestine? Why yes, there would be: whenever there were the three feast days in Jerusalem, and all the males were required to attend.

4) Therefore, the fact that there was a "boy" (male) in the crowd has little bearing on the interpretation as I judge it, since the number given is "general", and the boy is "male". He could just as easily have been a child of 12 or younger traveling with the men, or even if he was 13 or more, he was still a "boy" relatively speaking; and in any case may be rounded into the number of men.

To conclude, I cannot see how it is a reasonable course of exegesis to bring an a priori to 1 Cor 1 and infer household baptisms for Crispus and Gaius, and BY Paul (that is Paul's point, after all--'this is what I myself did'). I would say especially since a household is mentioned just afterward! Are not distinctions in Scripture just as vital as associations? Of course they are.

__________________
Rev. Bruce G. Buchanan
ChainOLakes Presbyterian Church, CentralLake, MI


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