The first Christian writer of substance to work in Latin, active at Carthage around the turn of the third century, and the man who supplied much of the vocabulary Western theology has used ever since. Words such as trinitas, persona and substantia enter Christian argument in his hands, in prose that is combative, legally trained and frequently very funny. He wrote against pagan magistrates, against Marcion and against Praxeas, and in later life he associated himself with the New Prophecy, the rigorist movement usually called Montanism. The church that inherited his vocabulary never canonised him, and he remains the most quoted North African Christian who is not a saint.
Facts
Disputed
Lifespan or FloruitThe source states neither date is fixed, giving these years as approximate estimates. How Its Legacy Is ContestedWhether he formally left the church at Carthage for the New Prophecy, and whether a separate body of Tertullianists ever existed, rests on a single passage in Augustine and is read in opposite ways. 2 Timothy D. Barnes's Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Clarendon Press, 1971) examines the ancient evidence, chiefly Jerome's later claim, for Tertullian's association with and eventual break from the mainstream church over the New Prophecy (Montanist) movement. Barnes's method is historical and philological, reading Tertullian's own later writings for their tone toward the established church against Jerome's explicit claim of formal schism, and finds scholars split into named camps: some accept Jerome's account and read a formal break with the Carthaginian church, while others hold Tertullian's New Prophecy sympathies operated as a rigorist current inside the existing African church rather than as a separate sect he left it for. Attestation
HistoricityAttested; a large body of his own writing survives, though almost nothing external about his life does. Life
Lifespan or FloruitAbout 155 to about 220. Neither date is fixed. 2 Origins
Place of OriginCarthage, in Roman North Africa 1 Terminology
Term CoinedTrinitas, the Latin word for the doctrine of the Trinity, together with the theological use of persona for the three and substantia for what they share 1 Publications
Notable PublicationApologeticum, Adversus Praxean, De Baptismo, De Carne Christi, De Spectaculis 1 Learn More
The Latin Christian Vocabulary Begins Here
Before Tertullian, Christians in the western half of the empire who wanted to argue theology did it in Greek. He wrote in Latin, and because there was no Latin for what he wanted to say he made it. Trinitas, the word for the doctrine, is his. So is the use of persona for the three and substantia for what they share, a formula the councils of the fourth century inherited and which survives in the creeds recited today. He also gave Latin sacramentum in its Christian sense, taking a word for a soldier's oath and applying it to the rite of initiation.
The style is unmistakable: short hammering sentences, forensic structure, a taste for the reductio and for insult. He had been trained in rhetoric and probably in law, and the Apologeticum is built like a defence speech, addressed to provincial governors, arguing that Christians are prosecuted for a name rather than for any act anyone can produce.
He is also frequently misquoted. The phrase credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd, is not his. What he wrote, of the death of Christ, was that it is certain because it is impossible, in a passage about the scandal of the incarnation. The tag is later, and it has done a great deal of work standing in for a position he did not hold.
The New Prophecy and the Question of a Sect
In the last part of his life Tertullian aligned himself with the New Prophecy, a movement that had begun in Phrygia around Montanus and two women, Prisca and Maximilla, and that claimed continuing prophetic utterance, expected the end shortly and demanded a harder discipline: no second marriage, no flight in persecution, longer fasts. His later works argue exactly those positions and speak of the psychici, the merely soulish, meaning the mainstream church.
What that alignment amounted to institutionally is not clear. Augustine, writing two centuries later in the same province, says there was a separate body called the Tertullianists which returned to the Catholic church in his own day. Modern scholarship is divided about whether that is reliable, and about whether Tertullian ever formally left the church at Carthage at all, since the New Prophecy in Africa may have operated as a rigorist current inside it rather than beside it.
The consequence for his reputation was permanent. He is quoted constantly and he is not a saint, and the later tradition handled him by taking the vocabulary and leaving the man. Jerome lists him among the illustrious writers and repeats a report that he was a presbyter, which the works themselves nowhere confirm.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The Latin vocabulary in which the doctrine is stated, one substance and three persons, is largely his.
He wrote at Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, and is the first Christian author of consequence to write in Latin.
Belongs to Tradition
Transmitted Its Concept To
Jerome reports that Cyprian read Tertullian daily and asked for him as the master.
Sources
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