Tertullian

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Tertullian

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus; c. 155 AD – c. 220 AD

Tertullian was called "the father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology" by some. Tertullian originated new theological concepts and advanced them to as an early Church doctrine. He is most famous for being the first writer in Latin known to use the term trinity (Latin: trinitas).

Tertullian according to some was a trained lawyer and an ordained priest. Those assertions rely on the accounts of Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History, II, ii. 4, and Jerome's De viris illustribus (On famous men) chapter 53.

Jerome also claimed that Tertullian's father held the position of centurio proconsularis ("aide-de-camp") in the Roman army in Africa.

Like Origen, Tertullian is one of our Church Fathers who is not considered a saint. This is because in later life, he embraced the Montanist heresy (also known as “New Prophecy”), which accepted visions from certain new prophets who claimed inspiration from the Holy Spirit.

Tertullian, besides being the first to coin the term Trinity, was also the first to introduce a view of "sexual hierarchy". He believed that those who abstain from sexual relations should have a higher hierarchy in the church than those who do not. This was the birth of celibacy. Because he saw sexual relations as a barrier that stopped one from a close relationship with God he was misogynist in his views. See Married Monks


Mentions of Tertullian


From the examination of the Trinity:

In his writing about Genesis chapters 1–3, Theophilus expresses the Trinity as follows:

"In like manner also the three days which were before the luminaries, are types of the Trinity, of God, and His Word, and His wisdom."

But this statement of Theophilus was not what became a "doctrine of the Trinity" until the church writer Tertullian (AD 160–225) began the first application of the term Trinity to explain something about the Nature of God or is not.

Tertullian a proponent of the Nicene doctrine originated new theological concepts and the term "Trinity" advanced the development of this new doctrine. He is the first writer in Latin known to use the term trinity (Latin: trinitas).[1]

"The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost [are] three … not in condition, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in aspect; yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as He is oneheresies6" God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Tertullian [2]

...

We must reference the term "trinity" in relation to Tertullian because Jesus never mentioned the term "trinity" itself.


Tertullian is not insisting people must "believe in" any of the the different doctrines concerning the Trinity but he is saying we need to not "deny" God the Father, His obedient Son, nor the Holy Spirit which is consistently the same where ever it listeth.

Tertullian is simply saying you cannot deny one without denying them all because he sees them as all in agreement.

Whatever Tertullian means by the the term is a matter of speculation or conjecture.

What does it mean to deny the "trinity"?

Does it mean to deny a doctrinal ideology?

Tertullian is simply saying you cannot deny one without denying them all because he sees them as all in agreement.


The pages mention "Tertullian"

Vows

Even the Church father Tertullian clarified that "Nazarene" was derived from Nazarite," a "class of Jewish ascetics," who existed long before the Christian era, as mentioned in the Old Testament(Numbers 6, Judges 13, Judges 16)".

As was stated in the article concerning the Long Hair of Jesus there is little to no evidence that Nazareth ever existed as a town at or before the time of Christ.

Suetonius

Tertullian wrote of Nero being the first Emperor to murder Christians: "We read the lives of the Cæsars: At Rome Nero was the first who stained with blood the rising faith" Tertullian, Chapter XV. He depended upon the writings of Suetonius to make this comment.

Corban

"In Cyprian the church chest is not called area, as in Tertullian, but carbona. It is also designated in the Apostolical Constitution...The corban had then already forfeited the character of church chest. The latter had become the fund of the poor, and as such remained in the Church, to give every one who entered the house of God the opportunity of also thinking of the poor."[3]


Married Monks

Katharine M. Rogers claims in The Troublesome Helpmate that, "The foundations of early Christian misogyny — its guilt about sex, its insistence on female subjection, its dread of female seduction — are all in St. Paul's epistles."

Others will say the misogyny accusations degrading women is not really there in Paul's writings.

In Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction K. K. Ruthven argues that the "legacy of Christian misogyny was consolidated by the so-called 'Fathers' of the Church, like Tertullian, who thought a woman was 'a temple built over a sewer' and 'the gateway of the devil'.

Sabbath

Besides Irenaeus, Tertullian also spoke of Jesus rightly restoring the Sabbath to its proper meaning and function:

“Thus Christ did not at all rescind the Sabbath. He kept the law (Ten Commandments) thereof . . . He restored to the Sabbath the works for were proper for it."[4]


Seneca

"If you wished to be loved, love." Lucius Annaeus Seneca

That avarice was the “extreme greed for wealth or material gain” at the expense of your neighbor that moves the socialist toward a welfare state. Romans had spoken of and warned Roman society from Polybius to Plutarch and Seneca was no different.

Early Christians were fond of Seneca and his writings, and authors like Tertullian referred to him as "our Seneca." This was because he was not against religion but superstition. Superstition is used to unmoor our understanding from the wisdom of God. We are warned against the same in the Bible's reference to “fables[5] which is translated from the Greek word “muthos” from which we get the word myth.

Pontius Pilate

Non-canonical Christian literature such as the Gospel of Peter or the Acta Pilati mentioned by Eusebius, Justin the Martyr and Tertullian exonerated Pontius Pilate. But there is a lot more written about him in history in both Latin and Greek. He was considered a saint for centuries and still has churches named after him and his wife.


Origen

Origen wrote De principiis to be an ordered statement of Christian doctrine. He believed every Christian is committed to the rule of faith laid down by the Apostles and the God of both Old and New Testaments.

Origen believed in the Creator and the Lord and the Holy Spirit but there was no teaching of the Trinity which would be pushed by some bishop of the First Nicene Council.

Origen said these three were "homoousios" which does not mean they were "one in the same being" but actually meant "of the same kind of stuff as". It was a common word used in Greek and also by the Gnosticism

The Latin word Trinitas, would be coined by Tertullian.

Acts of John

All this is late: but an old story, known to Tertullian and to other Latin writers, but to no Greek writers, said that either Domitian at Rome or the Proconsul at Ephesus cast John into a caldron of boiling oil which did him no hurt.

Theology

  • Justin the Martyr (about 100 to 165): "For the true spiritual Israel ... are we who have been led to God through this crucified Christ."[6]
  • Hippolytus of Rome (martyred 13 August 235): "[The Jews] have been darkened in the eyes of your soul with a darkness utter and everlasting."[7]
  • Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 240 AD): “Who else, therefore, are understood but we, who, fully taught by the new law, observe these practices,—the old law being obliterated, the coming of whose abolition the action itself demonstrates ... Therefore, as we have shown above that the coming cessation of the old law and of the carnal circumcision was declared, so, too, the observance of the new law and the spiritual circumcision has shone out into the voluntary observances of peace.”[8]
  • Augustine of Hippo(354–430) follows these views of the earlier Church Fathers, but he emphasizes the importance to Christianity of the continued existence of the Jewish people: "The Jews ... are thus by their own Scriptures a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ."[9]
  • Others also supported forms of these perceptions like Origen, Luther and modern theologians like Karl Barth and his "theology of the Word".

Persecution

Early Christians were fond of Seneca and his writings, and authors like Tertullian referred to him as "our Seneca." This was because he was not against religion but superstition.

Patristic

They often divide the writers into those before and after the Constantine's Council of Nicaea held in 325 AD and those who were the Latin (Like Tertullian, Cyprian, Jerome, Ambrose of Milan, Gregory the Great and Augustine of Hippo) and Greek (Like Justin the Martyr, John Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria) authors. The designation of "father" or even "pope" was something that was applied later by the Roman Church which did not gain real dominance within any "christian" movement until the inquisition and the rise of king late in the 1000s.

Polycarp

Polycarp is mentioned by Irenaeus[10], who heard him speak in his youth, and by Tertullian, that he had been a disciple of John the Apostle. Jerome wrote that Polycarp was a disciple of John and that John had ordained him bishop of Smyrna.

Baal

... the Septuagint, and in its Latinized form Baal in the Vulgate. The feminine form is baʿalah[11] (Hebrew: בַּעֲלָה‎[12] or the Arabic: بَعْلَة‎ or even the Celtic healing-god Belenus or the female Belena)[13] meaning "mistress" in the sense of a female owner or mistress of the house[14] and mistress of witchcraft.[15]


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Footnotes

  1. "Tertullian, Originator of the Trinity", From Logos to Trinity, Cambridge University Press, pp. 190–220,
  2. On the Prescription of Heretics Book by Tertullian.
  3. Christian Charity in the Ancient Church By Gerhard Uhlhorn
  4. Tertullian, Book IV, Chap 12, Vol 3 Ante-Nicean Christian Library, (Boston, 1997) p. 362.
  5. 1 Timothy 1:4 Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.
    1 Timothy 4:7 But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness.
    2 Timothy 4:4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
    Titus 1:14 Not giving heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth.
  6. Justin Martyr, Dialogue With Trypho 11, in Ante-Nicene Fathers 1:200.
  7. Hippolytus, Treatise Against the Jews 6, in Ante-Nicene Fathers 5.220.
  8. An Answer to the Jews, Chapter 3
  9. Augustine, The City of God 18.46, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2:389.
  10. "I could tell you the place where the blessed Polycarp sat to preach the Word of God. It is yet present to my mind with what gravity he everywhere came in and went out; what was the sanctity of his deportment, the majesty of his countenance; and what were his holy exhortations to the people. I seem to hear him now relate how he conversed with John and many others who had seen Jesus Christ, the words he had heard from their mouths."
  11. 1 Samuel 28:7 Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath <01172> a familiar spirit, that I may go to her, and enquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, [there is] a woman that hath <01172> a familiar spirit at Endor.
  12. 01172 בַּעֲלָה‎ BeitAyinLamedHey ba‘alah [bah-al-aw’] from of 01167; n f; [BDB-128a] [{See TWOT on 262 @@ "262b" }] AV-mistress 2, hath (a familiar spirit) 2; 4
    1) mistress, female owner
    2) sorceress, necromancer (noun of relationship)
  13. Tertullian, writing in c. 200 AD, identifies Belenus as the national god of Noricum, the federation of Celts. As late as the third-century emperors Diocletian and Maximian dedicated votive inscriptions to Belenus. The soldiers of Maximinus Thrax, who laid siege to Aquileia in 238, reported seeing an appearance of the god defending the city from the air.
  14. 1 Kings 17:17 And it came to pass after these things, [that] the son of the woman, the mistress <01172> of the house, fell sick; and his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him.
  15. Nahum 3:4 Because of the multitude of the whoredoms of the wellfavoured harlot, the mistress <01172> of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts.


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