10. General Introduction To The Texts
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE TEXTS
This series aims at making key selected texts by the major Fathers available in English. Just what is a key text? When I was deciding what texts to translate for this volume, I was guided by words that Timothy Barnes wrote back in 1969: ‘Modern scholarship has been unjustly selective in its treatment of Tertullian. Some of his works …receive lavish and repeated investigation… Yet other works, ultimately of no less importance, suffer almost total neglect.’ (Barnes 1969:105). This has always been the case when we consider the vast number of manuscripts of Apology that survive compared with the few for most of the other treatises. A work like Apology is popular not only because it has information relevant to historians of Christianity but also, particularly, for what it may reveal about the Roman political world for the broader and more numerous body of historians of classical antiquity itself. History has always tended to focus on political rather than social or even religious themes, and on the famous rather than the unknown. This has contributed to Tertullian’s Apology long being his best-known work. As our interest today shifts away from the political, which dominated scholarship in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, other treatises by Tertullian that reveal something of the internal life of Christians are taking centre stage.
Ever since the English translation of the complete works of Tertullian in the late nineteenth century in Ante-Nicene Fathers, more recent English translations have appeared in a number of series: Loeb, Fathers of the Church, Ancient Christian Writers, and Oxford Early Christian Texts. Yet there are still about half a dozen treatises that have received no complete English translation in the twentieth century. It is a truism of Australians that we are drawn to support the underdog and in this I am no exception. My scholarly interest is drawn to neglected texts. Are such texts really so unimportant and undeserving of attention? Why have they been relegated to obscurity?
One of the criteria in my selection of texts, therefore, was to choose from among those that had received no full English translation in the twentieth century. A more comprehensive picture of our author and his interests and the development of his thought occurs when we take into account not only his most popular works but also his lesserknown ones.
Another criterion was to select treatises that represent the three broad divisions found in Quasten. Rather than selecting Apology as representing Tertullian’s interaction with non-Christians, I have chosen Against the Jews. The relationship between Christians and pagan political authority is an important one to scholarship, but so too (and increasingly so in recent decades) is that between Christians and Jews. Tertullian’s Against the Jews has not yet taken its full place within the anti-Judaic Christian literature because of the controversy that has surrounded its authorship and integrity. Obviously, it is my hope that by including it in this volume its place in Tertullian studies and in the study of Christians and Jews will be recognized more fully. I have chosen Antidote for the Scorpion’s Sting as representative of Tertullian’s controversial treatises dealing with Christian heresy. This work not only pits him against the Gnostics but also provides us with insight into his belief about martyrdom, a topic of interest across many scholarly spectra. Finally, I have chosen On the Veiling of Virgins to represent his moral and disciplinary works. Interest in women in ancient Christianity has certainly been a field of scholarly interest in recent generations and Tertullian has received his fair share of feminist critique, as he wrote a number of works that had women in the spotlight. Perhaps because of its narrow subject (virgins rather than women in general, and then, more specifically, why virgins should be veiled) it has not received the attention that some of his other treatises have received.
In addition, these works span his literary career. Against the Jews may be dated early, Antidote for the Scorpion’s Sting to his middle years, and On the Veiling of Virgins from his later Montanist years. The style of writing noticeably changes as well, from a verbose to a very terse one. In deciding upon my own style of translation, it was my wish to capture something of the flavour of Tertullian’s Latin: sometimes aphoristic and witty, sometimes long-winded and disjointed, sometimes brief and obscure. I debated long and hard about whether to make the translation more ‘user-friendly’ but, in the end, decided that where Tertullian’s Latin was just as ambiguous and capable of misinterpretation for its original readers it ought to remain so in English. The rule of thumb that context decides meaning does not always apply with Tertullian so if a reader of my translation does not follow the argument I can only hope that it is not because of a fault in the translating but because of the complexity of the original. Yet, I have included other comments in square brackets as needed to complete the sense of what Tertullian wrote. Sometimes Tertullian, quite deliberately I think, chooses his words or constructs his sentences in such a way that they are open to several different meanings. While his comments lack the usual indecency of double entendre, they often may be more pointed than they first appear to those who do not read too deeply and, on the other hand, could be explained away innocently to those who did read them at their most pointed. Furthermore, in translating I have avoided the use of gender-specific language about God. I have done the same with people unless it is very clear that Tertullian meant a specific sex.
I did not want to produce an expanded version of Stevenson’s New Eusebius dedicated to Tertullian alone. The latest edition of that volume has twenty-two selections from Tertullian from nine different treatises (Stevenson 1987:157–77). A third criterion in my selection was to offer complete treatises in translation. It is only with an entire text that one can appreciate an aspect of Tertullian that is central to understanding him as a writer—his rhetorical skill in constructing, developing and presenting an argument. One of my interests here has been to present these works as written pieces imbued with an oratorical perspective and to arrange them in such a way that their rhetorical structure shines through. Tertullian was a skilled debater and full texts are the only way to do justice to his ability.
The numbers is square brackets represent the pages in the Latin edition of Tertullian in the first two volumes of Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina. The division into chapters and sections follows the divisions in those volumes. While the texts in Corpus Christianorum form the basis for the translation, I have utilized other, more recent critical editions that have been published, together with translations in other modern languages, to emend the Latin text I used. It has not been possible in this volume to note all such technical matters.