Matthew 3:6 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Were baptized. — The Greek tense implies continual succession. Crowd after crowd passed on, and still they came confessing their sins — i.e., as the position of the word implies, in the closest possible connection with the act of immersion. The Greek word (sometimes used for “confessing” in the sense of “praising,” as in Luke 12:8), always implies public utterance, and included, as the plural of the noun seems to show, a specific mention of, at least, the more grievous individual sins.