Tertullian

Background

Tertullian (c. 155–220) of Carthage was the first major Christian author in Latin and the most forensically gifted of the early apologists — his works read like a jurist's briefs, and much of Western theological vocabulary (including trinitas) descends from his coinage. His Apology defends Christians before the Roman magistrates; his Prescription Against Heretics deploys the Roman legal praescriptio — an objection that settles standing before argument on the merits — against heretical use of scripture. Late in life he aligned with the Montanist movement, a turn the wiki's canon article candidly weighs against his claim that the catholic church's judgment is self-authenticating.

Positions held in this wiki

• Canon Formation — New Testament — the eponymous proponent. Asked "which books are scripture?", Tertullian answers the prior question — whose are the scriptures: "With whom lies that very faith to which the Scriptures belong. From what and through whom, and when, and to whom, has been handed down that rule, by which men become Christians?" (Prescription 19, as reconstructed in the article). Apostolic churches prove title by publicly checkable succession registers (Prescription 32), and heretical scripture-collections are demonstrably derivative: Marcion, "that shipmaster of Pontus, the zealous student of Stoicism," lived "not so long ago" and began as a believer "in the doctrine of the Catholic Church, in the church of Rome" (Tertullian, Prescription 30); he "expressly and openly used the knife, not the pen" (Prescription 38) — excision presupposes a prior authoritative corpus.

Key works in our corpus

• The Prescription Against Heretics — in corpus complete. Chapters 15–19 (the standing argument), 30–32 (lateness of heresies; succession registers), 37–38 (possession of the scriptures; Marcion's knife vs. Valentinus' pen) are the canon article's textual basis.
• Apology — in corpus complete. The classic public defense of Christianity against the charges of atheism and disloyalty; notes the apostles who "by Nero's cruel sword sowed the seed of Christian blood at Rome" (Tertullian, Apology 21).
• Against Marcion, Against Praxeas (source of the mature trinitarian vocabulary) — not in corpus.

Principal critics

• Adolf von Harnack — the genetic objection: Tertullian's confident possessive gesture toward the scriptures is precisely the voice of the new "church of doctrine and of law" (Canon Formation — New Testament, view 2). Critical scholarship also presses the partly retrojective character of his neat episcopal registers.
• Protestant and critical scholars press the circularity-relocated objection: the church certifies the scriptures, but the church's own charter is known substantially from those scriptures.
• His own Montanism is the standing internal objection to his ecclesial criterion.

See also

• Irenaeus of Lyons — the succession-and-rule argument in its Greek original.
• Athanasius of Alexandria — the fourth-century list-issuer whose canon presupposes Tertullian's ecclesial logic.
• Marcion of Sinope — the adversary against whom the praescriptio was sharpened.