Tertullian: An Introduction — David Bercot — Ep. 105

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're here with David Burso. Thanks again for doing this. I think this is, I don't know, our sixth episode together or something. It's always fun. I enjoy doing them. This is great though, like honestly. So you are well known for having written a lot of books about early church history, early church fathers, and we've never done episodes on that. So today we want to do, I guess, more of a profile of an early church figure, Tertullian. So how do we even know about him? Like what writings do we have about him? How do we even know he existed? He left a large volume of writings.

I mean, it's, well, just, yeah, this is volume three of the Antonicene Fathers. Okay. This is, I mean, small print. Oh my. Okay. This is all Tertullian. Plus there's another quarter volume in addition to this one. Okay. So we've got lots of his writings. So if we knew nothing else, and actually we don't know a whole lot else, yeah, we've got his writings. They speak, yeah, for who he is. He's one of those figures we don't have to be guessing about.

Well, can you give us a bit of an overview of his life? Like, yeah, just kind of a broad stroke picture of his life. Yeah. It will be very narrow because unlike some of the others, we have very little auto, well, either autobiographical or biographical information on him. In his writings, he says things that, you know, okay, this guy was not raised a Christian 'cause he talks about in my past, one, you know, this or that. So we know, okay, he was, you know, a pagan. It's obvious from his writings. He's an educated man. He knows a lot about history. He can talk about laws with knowledge. He knows a good bit about philosophy. He's not, he's kind of very anti-philosophy, but he knows a lot about it.

He knows both Greek and Latin. He lived in Carthage in North Africa. He was in Rome at times, but most of his writing, most of his life that we know him, he's in Carthage, North Africa. Most of his writings are like 190 to 210. It's about a 20-year window there, but boy, he turned out a lot during that time.

So we have a lot of his writings then, but what are some, maybe some common threads you see of certain things he emphasized as in, quote, what would be a hill he would die on? Die on. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, before I get there, let me just give a little bit more 'cause then that, I think that answer will make more sense. I was gonna read a quote. This is from Philip Schaff, the church historian who has a thick volume on the Prenicene writers. He says this, it's fairly favorable. I wasn't sure what he would have to say about Tertullian. But he says, "Tertullian is the father of Latin theology and Latin church language and one of the greatest men of Christian antiquity.

We know little of his life except what is derived from his books and from the brief notice of Jerome in his list of illustrious Christians. But few writers have impressed their individuality so strongly in their books as this African father. In this respect, as well as in others, he resembles St. Paul and Martin Luther." Now he would've had an issue being grouped with Martin Luther, I am sure, but he would not have wanted to have been compared to Paul. But I think what Schaff is meaning, both Paul and Luther had the strong, fiery kind of personalities, and Tertullian is that way. His writings, he is not gentle on anything. He's not lackadaisical. If he writes about something, he's full of passion when he writes.

We did a book of just his writings years ago. It's called "A Glimpse at Early Christian Church Life." It's not in print now because people didn't like it 'cause he grates you. I mean, he, you know, he doesn't say things nicely. I mean, he just, he puts them out there. If you're not already convinced, he's gonna step on your toes. You know, so, so yeah, that book didn't prove to be as popular. So we finally let it go out of print. But yeah, he's important because he's maybe the first, or certainly the first prominent Christian to write in Latin. Before him, they wrote in Greek. I mean, like the New Testament, I mean, Paul writes in Greek even when he's writing to the Romans.

Tertullian realizes, well, particularly in North Africa, most of them are Latin speakers down there. And it's like, okay, Christianity can't be locked in the Greek language. You know, I mean, the Bible had been translated into Latin by then, but most writing was still in Greek. So he has to invent a vocabulary. A lot of these words, they're Greek words.

They are words that don't exist outside the New Testament. So how do you come up? You have to invent a word. English, having been influenced so much by Latin, yeah, his words have influenced us. I mean, the classic example would be Trinity. He's the one who coined that word. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Yeah. In Latin, Trinitas, you know, and that's, yeah, that's where we get Trinity. And it's one of the things that makes his writing a little easier to read. I mean, if he wasn't so grating on you. When I had first started reading the early Christian writings, I struggled. I mean, they were, they were for me, you know, very difficult. I'd never read anything like that.

And I remember trying Irenaeus, trying different people, and I would go for maybe a week or something. It's like, oh, this is torture. You know, I finally pick up Tertullian and it's like, okay, he's pretty easy to understand. You know, 'cause he thinks the way, you know, that we Westerners do, and he's very logical the way he lays things out. Some books say he was an attorney. There's no evidence of that at all, but he would've made a good one. He's good at argumentation, very logical when he lays out his argument. This guy would've been ready to die on lots of hills. I mean, I think everything was for him a do or die kind of thing.

It's amazing he did not die as a martyr. I mean, if anybody should have, I mean, just 'cause he's, I mean, he doesn't worry about stepping on people's toes. And what I mentioned about being a Latin writer, he's not real speculative. He tends to be meat and potatoes kind of writer. The perfect contrast would be between him and Origen. Origen loves to speculate, loves to, what if, what about this? You know, in his theology. Now he's, they're both equally orthodox. They would teach the same things on the basics. Origen loved to say, okay, here is what the church is defined. Now all this out here that the church hasn't defined, let's talk about that. What the what ifs, you know, you don't see much of that in Tertullian.

Origen also loved to, when reading the Old Testament, see prophetic types. I mean, we all see that there's a lot of legitimate prophetic types in the Old Testament. You know, like Abraham and Isaac, you know, picturing the father and the son, you know, when he was offering him up. Well, Origen, in every incident, I mean, he sees a prophetic type. He sees a prophetic type here. You know, you don't see a lot of that in Tertullian beyond what all of the early Christians would've seen, you know, and talked about. So he, like I say, he's very practical. His, you know, big one, of course, is his love for Jesus Christ and his desire to represent Christianity to the pagans, particularly the educated pagans.

So he wrote, probably his apology is the most famous. He explained what Christians believed, what the pagans were saying about them, all the false rumors and what was true, what wasn't, why Christianity makes the most sense beyond everything. He coined the phrase, well, it's often quoted differently than the way he put it. He said, "The blood of the martyrs is seed." You know, it's often quoted as the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, you know, but he said, "The more you mow us down, the more we grow. The blood of martyrs is seed." So, but his apology, now it's not brash. I would say it is not designed to irritate, but he does an excellent job.

And when I read that, boy, it just was such a glimpse into life back there in the second century, you know, the year 190, 95, what the pagans are believing, what they're doing and how they're looking at Christians and then what the Christians are actually doing. That was to me just a really classic work. So he was ready to die on that hill, but he never did. Okay.

Another favorite theme of his, it's not that he believed any different. Some of the writers, like Schaff, he says, well, he was kind of as inclined as an ascetic. Well, I would say no more than Origen or any of the others. It's just that he hammers it on it maybe a little bit more, but things like staying separate from the world. I mean, everything dealing with luxury, with that they would've all taught, the whole church would've taught this. But he definitely goes after some of these issues where Christians are beginning to compromise. He would've made a good Anabaptist. Okay. You do not compromise.

Boy, here's the line. And for example, all the, he makes a list of all the different professions that he's not making a standard like, you cannot be this. He's just saying, how are you gonna be a Christian and be this? Like a school teacher. Yeah. In a public school. Okay. So they bring in the pagan gods. What are you gonna do? Okay. They have this day when they're supposed to talk about this God. What are you gonna do as a Christian? What about when they're all wearing, you know, this certain, you know, flower or something because it's such and such a day? What are you gonna do? And he points out a lot of things like that where maybe, you know, some Christians were saying, well, okay, you know, I'll kind of just go along, stay in the background, you know, whatever.

So he's a very much no compromise. And like I say, as Anabaptist, yeah, we would fit in pretty good with his line of thinking. He's equally strong against heretics. Marcion, he wrote five books. Now a book would've been the length of a scroll. When they say a book, that's what they're usually talking about. Marcion, sometimes he's grouped with the Gnostics. Sometimes he's not. The Gnostics would've believed they had all of this special knowledge and stuff that isn't in the Bible and all that. Okay. Marcion didn't claim that, but one of the aspects of Gnosticism was they said the God of the Old Testament's not the God of the New Testament. Oh. Yeah. This age-long issue of how do you harmonize the Old Testament and the New?

I mean, the old, your war and, you know, people are swearing oaths and all that, and you get to the New Testament and war's forbidden. You don't swear oaths. There's no divorce and all that. You know, people like Calvin said, well, there isn't any difference. You know, the Old Testament morality is still our morality. And if you think that the Sermon on the Mount says something different than what Moses said, you're misreading the Sermon on the Mount. Well, that's not correct. There is that clear difference, which the Gnostics saw, but their solution was, okay, that must've been a different God then. You know, it's just, it's too different. Well, boy, that creates all kinds of problems.

Well, yeah. So now you've got two gods. Now they viewed him as some kind of lesser being, not anything at the same level as the true God. But then all these prophecies that are in the Old Testament, so are you saying these are from a different God, but they're prophesying about Christ? You know, so Tertullian takes that and he really hammers Marcion. So what do you do with this? And Marcion is having to explain, well, no, Isaiah's not really talking about Jesus and all of this, you know, and you're having to throw all of this stuff out. But wait a minute, Paul then quotes Isaiah and, you know, so now what do you do? And Jesus quotes him.

Well, then Marcion had to play with the New Testament and take out these quotes from the old and just all kinds of stuff. So Tertullian had no patience with that. Now Marcion was put out of the church. I mean, he's not somebody in the church. He's a, you know, a heretic. But Tertullian, he gathered a lot of followers. So Tertullian goes after him. I mentioned he coined the word Trinity. Okay.

The work in which he coined it was a work against what's in theology known as modalism. We know it today usually as oneness. The people who believe that Jesus and the Father are the same, one and the same, you know, it's Jesus is God, the Father's God. Yeah. There's just one God. Sometimes he calls himself Jesus. Sometimes he calls himself the Father. You know, well, that's heresy. And Tertullian, yeah. So he wrote a whole tract on that, which is extremely valuable because in the process of pointing out their errors, he's explaining what the church believes. And so it's one of our clearest, earliest explanations of the Trinity. In fact, I read that, you know, my background is Jehovah's Witness.

And so the Trinity was always something like, man, when I left the Witnesses, okay, I'll accept this, but it makes no sense. Well, then when I read Tertullian, it's like, oh, now I get it, man. This makes sense. You know, and so it's a really, to me, you know, valuable writing.

Now there was a hill he, not literally, but spiritually died on, and that was Montaunism. Now that was a movement that started in the late 100s, late second century. It was this man in Phrygia, which would be modern-day Turkey. His name was Montaunus. And he claimed to be a prophet. Okay. And he would prophesy, he would go into these ecstatic trances, you know, and do these prophecies, which the church didn't disbelieve in prophets, but they were gonna put it to a close test. But now that manner of prophesying was not something Christian prophets ever did. The church didn't just immediately reject him, but they sent a group of leaders there to kind of look at the thing.

And there were two prophetesses with him. And apparently they made all kinds of prophecies about the end of the world and the new Jerusalem was gonna come down there in Phrygia and all this. And of course, that would've ever happened. Well, Tertullian's temperament, you'd think that'd be the last kind of group he would be attracted to, but for some reason he was really attracted to them. When he first got interested, they were part of the church. You know, these were people within the church. Now eventually the church rejected the whole thing and I guess they were put out of the church at some point. When he got interested, it was more just like a movement within, you know, he still went to the same church as everyone else.

It was just something kind of his personal following. Later in his life, his last three or four writings, he has really gone over whole hog with them. And now he's criticizing the general mass of Christians, the Orthodox Christians, and he calls them the natural man, you know, what Paul talks about, the natural man versus the spiritual man. The Greek there is actually the soulful man or the soulish man. So he calls the church that he doesn't say they're not Christians. It's just that they're not spiritual. We're the spiritual ones. They were stricter than, as strict as the early church was, the Montaunists were even stricter. So that would've appealed to his temperament, that aspect of it, you know.

Through his writings, we know a lot about them because we see what they were saying, not from their enemies, but from somebody who's writing, you know, as one. As far as we know, he died as a Montaunist. I mean, they were Orthodox in their theology. It's not like, yeah, he wasn't a Christian or anything. It just, they were one of those movements that had some good aspects to them and they were off base on other things, you know. And despite that turn at the end of his life, he was very well respected. And like I say, his writings were read.

He's mentioned by a couple of them, of the later writers. Eusebius mentions him, Jerome. So we know he was respected and, you know, read. He probably in the Latin-speaking Roman world, you know, of the fourth, fifth, and going on to the Middle Ages, you know, he would've been one of the most widely read early Christians, you know, because in the West, hardly anyone would've read Greek after, say, the year 400 or 500, you know. So Latin would've been what they were all reading. And so here you have this Latin writer, you know. So I'm very curious then, how did he view the scripture? Like, can you give some examples of how he read the Bible and ways he interpreted it?

I'm not gonna be able to give you an example, but I can tell you, okay, if that's good enough. I've told you a little bit about the contrast between him and Origen. So he's, you know, not inclined to go off on speculative things. Like the rest of the church, he would be so representative of all of them. Whatever the Bible teaches, he takes it literally, he takes it seriously, and we do it. We don't try to argue around it. We don't try to come up with, well, what about this? Well, what about that? No, Jesus said do it. So you do it in a right way. I mean, he's not off base on that in the least bit, but he would really be a nice representative because of, like I say, being a Latin writer, being a little bit more readable.

His writings are a very important witness to the early Latin Bibles. Okay. This would've been before the Latin Vulgate that became the dominant Bible during the Middle Ages. And it's valuable for also comparing manuscripts, you know, about, say, how did the Bible originally read? Because I mean, you know, 95% of everything in every manuscript is the same, you know, and the differences are usually very minor. But yeah, sometimes you wonder how did it read? Well, when you have a very early Latin translation, it gives you a clue, well, whatever they translated from, this is how that read, you know, way back in the year 190, you know. So his writings give us some important evidence that way.

Plus some of his writings are in Greek. So it's nice that he understands both languages and he can discuss some of the differences. And he'll say, now the Greeks say this, but you know, now we Latins say, you know, well, I'll give you one. And that's, boy, this is a little deeper, but the Greek word in the Lord's Prayer, we say, give us this day our daily bread. And the Greek word is epi ousia. Okay.

It doesn't mean daily. It doesn't even remotely mean daily. Ousia means substance or nature. Epi means more than or super. So it's like, give us our supernatural bread. It's a word, there isn't an English equivalent and there wasn't a Latin equivalent. Now he didn't do the Latin Bible. Whoever did it is like, I don't know how to translate this. So they put daily. And that's where we get, give us this day our daily bread. But that's not what Jesus said. Now I'm not advocating, well, let's start changing how we pray the Lord's Prayer.

It's hard to change something that's been that ingrained for, you know, so long. But now Jerome, actually in the Latin Vulgate, I think it's in Luke, he puts daily bread. And then in the other one, he does put super substantial, you know, more than natural or whatever. He has to create a Latin word, you know, for it. I mean, you could say supernatural, but I don't know if that would be the best, but that would be the closest maybe in English without creating a word for it. So that would be an example where it's neat him knowing both languages and he can talk about that when he talks about the Lord's Prayer. It would've never crossed my mind until I got into all of that.

And it's like, wow, this is neat having early witnesses in both Greek and Latin. So giving us the background and some of the things he taught and the things he, you know, analyzed in his writings, in your opinion, how can Tertullian contribute to present-day conversations? What does he bring to us today that's of value in our own walks as believers? You know, a lot of what I've said would bear on that. I would say if you were gonna take one early Christian writer, you know, a pre-Nicene writer, to get a window into early Christianity, into the primitive church, probably Tertullian, if you were gonna pick any single individual, he would probably be, if I had to pick one, it would probably be him.

Not because he's necessarily my favorite character or that, but he deals with so many practical issues: war, political involvement, the head covering, modest dress, wow, entertainment. I talked about, you know, the Lord's Prayer, baptism. I mean, all of these practical kinds of things. So when you're reading Tertullian, you're reading a lot about daily life among Christians during those early centuries. To me, it's so valuable for the church today to have that kind of witness that is, like I say, things are laid out logically. You can read it. I'm not saying it's light reading or that sort of thing, but it is readable. You know, if you've got, let's say, a high school reading level or beyond.

For me, it was a wake-up call, not just him, but all of the early Christians of like, hey, Jesus meant what he said. They would've said, yeah, he did mean everything he said. Well, I mean, everyone would say that today, but I mean, they really meant it. Yeah, Jesus said this. He means it. You know, and Tertullian would be such a spokesman for that viewpoint. He's our Lord. You know, what he says, this we need to do. And we don't start getting into gray areas. Well, maybe it's okay. I fudge here, you know, and I fudge here a little bit, you know. And he would say, no, we don't. And he was absolutely right because then after Constantine, yeah, then everybody is fudging.

And then pretty soon the whole institutional church just kind of melds into the world, you know. So the commentary that I've just worked on on Matthew, I quote Tertullian, I quote him most next to, or Origen the Most, Tertullian the Second of the pre-Nicene writers. Like I say, he's usually saying something that, okay, this really helps on the subject. You know, some of the other writers, when I read the whole paragraph, I see what they're saying. It maybe helped me as a commentator. Okay. I understand how they're understanding this, but to quote this, to include a quote from them that would help my reader, yeah, they're not very quotable that way. Usually Tertullian, yeah, he's very understandable.

You know, I can pull a quote from him and yeah, I think my reader will be able to grasp this. As one of the more famous early Christians, yeah, the church today owes him a lot and yeah, should be a lot more familiar with him. So maybe it's something where we can encourage, hey, if you wanna start reading the early Christians, maybe this would be a good place to start. I would say if you're gonna start anywhere, yeah, you probably couldn't do much better. His apology, you know, it's very readable. It covers a whole lot. You learn about their Christian beliefs, but you learn about the pagan world. You learn about how Christians lived.

Yeah, great work for that type of insight. That's really interesting. I've personally, I've never read any of his works. So now this is, you're like, oh, I should probably do that. Just when you were gonna read the Matthew commentary, now instead you're gonna go home and read Tertullian. Okay. Actually, I'm pretty sure I'll read your book first. I'm kidding.

Wow, thanks so much for sharing, David. This was very enlightening, actually. Yeah. Wow, wonderful.