<p>18:8 <i>And <em>Crispus</em></i>- See on :7 <em>He departed from there</em>...</p><p><i>The ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord with all his family</i>- It was common for the household to follow the religion of the head of the family. But the call of Christ was to individuals, and Paul in 1 Cor. 7 speaks to situations where a marriage was divided between believer and unbeliever. So the records of whole household baptisms, all at the same time, every member of the household, with not even one remaining in the previous religion, are hard to square with the idea of individual calling and each responding at their own time. Especially when there was a culture of a household following the religion of the family head. My conclusion would be that there was no compulsion or conscious pressure placed on the household members to be baptized into Christ; but they all chose to be. That said, their motives would inevitably have been mixed, and they would have been under psychological pressure to follow the rest of the group. Despite this, there is no evidence that the early preachers sought to investigate the detailed knowledge or motivation of baptismal candidates; they simply baptized anyone who desired it in such missionary contexts. It is true that there is reason to think that one of the Gospel records was learnt by some of the candidates, but this would not have been universally the case.</p><p><i>And many of the Corinthians<em>, hearing, believed and were baptized</em></i>- An exemplification of how faith came by hearing the word of God (Rom. 10:17). It seems strongly likely that Paul wrote Romans from Corinth, so he would have had this example in mind when he wrote those words in Romans 10. But &quot;the word of God&quot; refers therefore not to the entire Bible but to the message of God in the Gospel of His Son.</p>