Confessor Tertullian

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, known as Tertullian, was an early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis. According to Saint Jerome, he was a native of Carthage and the son of a centurion in the service of the proconsul. He flourished in the late second and early third centuries. Tertullian received a thorough education in the rhetorical and legal culture of the Roman world, which is reflected in the dense, allusive, and often aggressive style of his surviving works. He is the earliest Christian writer of substance whose works are in Latin, and he is frequently described as the father of Latin theology.

After his conversion to Christianity, Tertullian composed a large corpus of treatises. These include apologies addressed to Roman officials and to the pagan public, polemics against Gnostic and Marcionite teachings, and works of moral and disciplinary instruction for the Christian community. In the Apologeticus he defended Christians against charges of atheism, incest, and disloyalty to the empire. In Adversus Marcionem and related works he argued for the identity of the God of the Old Testament with the Father of Jesus Christ and for the reality of Christ's flesh. He helped fix Latin terms such as trinitas, persona, and substantia in Christian usage. Whether he was ordained a priest, as Jerome asserted, remains debated among modern historians.

Later in life Tertullian embraced the New Prophecy associated with Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla. The movement's emphasis on continuing revelation, fasting, and opposition to second marriage appealed to his rigorist temperament. Because of this association, later Catholic tradition did not number him among the saints; he has no feast day in the Roman Martyrology and was never the object of formal canonization or beatification. He addressed two books, Ad uxorem, to his own wife, which demonstrates that he was married; the name of his spouse and whether they had children are not recorded. Nothing certain is known of the circumstances or place of his death, which is usually placed sometime after the year 220, most likely in Carthage.

Despite his eventual Montanism, Tertullian's earlier writings exercised a lasting influence on Latin Christianity. Cyprian of Carthage was said to have read him daily, and later African and Western theologians drew on his vocabulary and arguments even while rejecting his schismatic period. His works remain primary sources for the history of the church in Roman North Africa, for the development of Christian Latin, and for second- and third-century debates over doctrine, discipline, and the relation of the church to the Roman state.