Persecution of Tertullian's Carthage - Religious Freedom Institute

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This is the second in a seven-part series based on a paper the author submitted for a Masters of Religion (MRel) programme in Middle East and North Africa Studies with the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Beirut entitled “Analysis of and Applications from the Writings of Tertullian about Persecution for Today.”

During the time when Tertullian was writing, the Church in North Africa was experiencing significant growth. However, and possibly in correlation to the growth, the persecution of Christians was also increasing. At the end of the 2^nd Century, Tertullian wrote Apologeticus (The Apology), one of his most famous works. The Apology served both as a complaint against the persecution Christians were experiencing, a defence of Christian beliefs and ethics, and a polemic against the beliefs and practices of the Pagans. In the Apology, we get a sense of the various forms of persecution Christians in Carthage were enduring for their faith.

Vulgar Slander Against Christians

Tertullian complained that salacious rumours were proliferating suggesting that Christians engaged in human sacrifice and cannibalism – devouring children – as well as incest. The details of these rumours are striking, with reference to a peculiar assertion that Christians had trained dogs to extinguish the lamps so that they could engage in incest without being seen.

Monsters of wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite in which we kill a little child and then eat it; in which, after the feast, we practice incest, the dogs—our pimps, forsooth, overturning the lights and getting us the shamelessness of darkness for our impious lusts. This is what is constantly laid to our charge, and yet you take no pains to illicit the truth of what we have been so long accused.[1]

The particular slander referenced is so bizarre and vulgar that we might assume that either overstated in its propagation or simply a rhetorical embellishment. However, we see the same details referenced in the Octavius, a dialogue between a Pagan called Caecilius Natalis and the Christian Octavius Januarius, written by Marcus Minucius Felix, a 3^rd Century Christian apologist. The character, Caecilius, slanders Christians with similar claims about their practices. About child murder, he says, “Shame on them! – They thirstily lick up the child’s blood and eagerly divide his limbs.” And then he goes on to allege incestuous orgies, at which “A dog, fastened to a lamp, is encouraged by some pieces of meat thrown to it to spring violently beyond the length of its chain. The lamp, which would have been an inconvenient witness, is overturned and extinguished; after this riot and indecency reign supreme.”[2]

Scapegoating

Tertullian’s complaints assert that Christians were being blamed for calamities and natural disasters. He laments their predicament:

If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence, straightway the cry is, “Away with the Christians to the lion!”[3]

These comments might be interpreted as rhetorical flourish or exaggeration, but there were several examples of Christians being scapegoated by the authorities of Ancient Rome. The most infamous instance followed the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD. Tacitus, the Roman senator and historian, states that the fire was started under Emperor Nero’s instruction. He suggests that rumours began to circulate identifying the Emperor as the perpetrator. According to Tacitus, Nero, therefore, pinned the blame on “a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians” who were convicted in “vast numbers” and “punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty.”[4]

Another source that reinforces the evidence of Christian scapegoating in the Roman Empire is the Address to Demetrianus, the Proconsul of North Africa, by Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, written around 252 AD. Bishop Cyprian was so notable in his courageous, compassionate and faithful response during a terrible plague in the middle of the 3^rd Century, that the plague itself became known as the Plague of Cyprian. In his treatise to Demetrianus, he rails against the scapegoating of Christians by the proconsul which it seems included not only the plague but also wars and famines. Not only did Cyprian refute the claim that Christians were to blame, but he went further, turning the blame back onto the Romans, stating that it was in fact the fault of the Pagans for not worshiping the One True God. He wrote, “For these things happen not, as your false complaining and ignorant inexperience of the truth asserts and repeats, because your gods are not worshipped by us, but because God is not worshipped by you.”[5]

Another accusation presented against Christians regarded sacrifices. This relates to the scapegoating because the Pagans suspected that it was the refusal of the Christians to offer sacrifices that resulted in such misfortunes. Tertullian lays out the charges, ““You do not worship the gods,” you say; “and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.” … So we are accused of sacrilege and treason.” His response was direct. “We do not worship your gods, because we know there are no such beings.”[6] The parallels with the fabrications that Tertullian references are clear.

State Execution

Carthage witnessed some of the earliest Christian martyrdoms. There are notable stories amongst them such as the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas which dates to 203 AD. It is not impossible to imagine that Tertullian himself was a witness to the executions of these women in the amphitheatre, along with their brothers by faith, Saturus, Revocatus, Saturninus, and Secundulus.[7]

About ten years after he wrote the Apology, the threat of persecution was again brought into sharp focus when “during the reign of Caracalla, Scapula, the proconsul of Africa, ordered that Christians in Carthage be suppressed.”[8] In his polemical address, Ad Scapulam (To Scapula), written in around 212/213, Tertullian refers to Scapula’s “utmost cruelty” and “bloody deeds.”[9] And in the Apology, Tertullian writes of the persecutions of the state as “extreme severities inflicted on our people” and to the sentences of “swords, and flames, and crosses, and wild beasts.”[10]

Mob Violence

The state is not the only perpetrator of violence against Christians in 3^rd Century Carthage. In the Apology, Tertullian complains, “How often, too, the hostile mob, paying no regard to you, takes the law into its own hand, and assails us with stones and flames!” He alleges that these mobs even desecrate the bodies of deceased Christians, “[they] tear them…from the rest of the tomb…cutting them in pieces, rending them asunder.”[11]

It should be remarkable to us, from a historical if not a spiritual perspective, that the themes described by Tertullian and his near contemporaries, in relation to the persecutions against Christians in the early centuries, are evident in the persecutions experienced by Christians today – sadly, as enduring as Tertullian’s legacy. I’ll draw some of these parallels in the following article, while exploring the ways in which Tertullian sought to take a stand for his fellow Believers.

[1] Tertullian, The Apology (Beloved Publishing, 2014), 14.

[2] Marcus Minucius Felix, The Octavius, trans. John Henry Freese (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: Macmillan, 1919), 42.

[3] Tertullian, The Apology, 66.

[4] Tacitus, Annals, trans. John Jackson, XV (Harvard University Press, n.d.), 283–85.

[5] Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, An Address to Demetrianus, trans. Robert Earnest Wallis (Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886), sect. 5.

[6] Tertullian, The Apology, 20–21.

[7] Wilken, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom, 11.

[8] Wilken, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom, 13.

[9] Quintus Septimus Tertullian, The Address of Q. Sept. Tertullian to Scapula Tertullus, Proconsul of Africa, trans. Sir David Dalrymple (1790), https://www.tertullian.org/articles/dalrymple_scapula.htm.

[10] Tertullian, The Apology, 55.

[11] Tertullian, The Apology, 61.

Miles Windsor serves as Director of Strategic Campaigns, International Strategies, at the Religious Freedom Institute. The article series is based on a paper that Windsor submitted for his Masters of Religion (MRel) programme in Middle East and North Africa Studies, with the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS Lebanon) in Beirut entitled “Analysis of and Applications from the Writings of Tertullian about Persecution for Today.” The original paper focused on the writings of Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus (Tertullian of Carthage), identifying parallels between historic and contemporary persecution experiences and responses, with analysis.