3. Scripture And Tertullian
3
SCRIPTURE AND TERTULLIAN
Scripture was authoritative for Tertullian. Although he did not write commentaries on biblical books, he used Scripture as his primary source material in almost every chapter of every work (the only exception being his apologetic works that were designed for pagan readers). In this, he was no different from most other early Christian writers. 1
Most books of both Old and New Testaments,
The reference in Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs 10 to Speratus carrying books and letters of Paul is taken as proof that Latin versions of at least parts of the New Testament existed before Tertullian. By the middle of the third century, it is clear that Cyprian, in Carthage, and Novatian, in Rome, were using well-established Latin versions of the Scriptures. In the surviving manuscripts of Latin translations of the Bible that were made before or independently of Jerome’s Vulgate and which date to between the fourth and thirteenth centuries (known as Itala, or in the Old Latin Vetus Latina), there seem to be two forms of the texts: one African and the other European. The Greek text they translated seems to be the Western text (as in the fifth-century Codex Bezae) of the New Testament and Lucian’s version of the Septuagint. Given the fact that so many individuals made their own translations, the family similarities can be explained by adaptations based on earlier versions (which explains African traits in European versions) or on a shared Christian Latin vocabulary. The African versions of the Old Latin seem to be earlier than the European.
Tertullian’s quotations from the Scriptures constitute the earliest extant Latin witness. The question of what version of the Scriptures he used has long been debated. Did he translate from Greek to Latin himself or did he make use of an already existing Latin text? If he had a Latin text, are we able to detect it in one of the surviving later versions of the Old Latin? Finding the answer requires the highly specialized skills of textual critics and the conclusions that they have reached are painstaking, complex, difficult to follow and, not surprisingly, not uniform.
We can find statements from scholars that Tertullian did not have any access to Latin New Testament manuscripts. Thomas O’Malley, on the other hand, concludes that ‘there is no doubt but that Tertullian is in contact with Latin renderings of some parts of the Scriptures’ (O’Malley 1967:62). In the 1930s, Aalders investigated Tertullian’s use of the gospels. In one article on Tertullian’s use of Luke’s Gospel outside the context of the Marcionite controversy, he compared 121 instances of Tertullian’s quotations from Luke with several Old Latin versions. His conclusion was that there are many examples in which Tertullian’s text was quite distinct from the Old Latin versions, indicating that he was offering his own translation. In other, fewer instances Tertullian has a translation that agrees with one or other of the African Old Latin versions. Not all of these instances were judged to be coincidence. However, in some of these cases, Tertullian did not depend upon his Old Latin text slavishly; sometimes he corrected or improved the Latin, obviously with his eye on a Greek text.
What complicates matters is that in his treatise against Marcion, Tertullian made use of Marcion’s version of Luke, the only gospel that Marcion accepted. His principle was to use Marcion’s own version of Luke back against him (Against Marcion 4.6.1–2). This heretic and schismatic had come to Rome from Pontus in the middle of the second century. He believed that there were two gods: the inferior creator god of the Old Testament and the superior God of the New Testament. For Marcion, only Luke’s Gospel was free from Judaizing tendencies, at least after some editorial adjustments. Here the question is whether Tertullian had Marcion’s gospel in Greek and made his own translation or had it in Latin already. Some scholars accept that Tertullian had such a Latin translation, which was probably made in Rome (e.g. Higgins 1951),
The consensus would seem to support the position endorsed by O’Malley; Tertullian generally made his own translation from the Greek but, where a Latin translation existed (not all the scriptural books having been translated into Latin at the same time), he made some use of it. The debate is about the degree of that ‘some use’. With Marcion’s version of Luke’s Gospel, he depended, to some extent, upon an already existing Latin translation.
If these comments say something about the complex question of what texts of the Scriptures Tertullian used, the next issue to be addressed is about how he interpreted those texts. We can begin by considering what he had to say about it himself. First of all, Scripture belongs to the church and not to heretics who had no right to use them (On the Prescriptions of Heretics 15.3). They not only altered the text but also its meaning to suit themselves. A Christian should not enter into debate with a heretic about the meaning of a passage of Scripture because both sides would claim to be right and a third party would not be able to distinguish orthodox from heterodox interpretation (On the Prescriptions of Heretics 17.2–18.3). What guaranteed the validity of the Scriptures was their conformity with the rule of faith (regula fidei). We may understand this as a kind of oral credal summary (Countryman 1982). It became the criterion by which the Scriptures could be evaluated, for it was the faith that existed before the written record (On the Prescriptions of Heretics 19–21; 37). Those who had handed on and received the faith would be those who possessed true Scripture. We find in Tertullian the priority of Tradition over Scripture (to use the language of the sixteenth-century Reformations) because Scripture is a record of Tradition. What the heretics claimed as Scripture was only the record of their own novel opinions (On the Prescriptions of Heretics 38.6).
On this point, Tertullian often failed to follow his own principle. His treatises against heretics are full of debate about the meaning of scriptural passages. Without this, Tertullian would have been reduced to silence in his engagement with the Marcionites, the Valentinians, Praxeas and Hermogenes.
The second thing to say about Tertullian’s stated hermeneutic was his belief in the simplicity of Scripture. It could interpret itself, he claimed at one point, and had a method of its own, such that all apparent inconsistency could be explained (Against Praxeas 18.2). Indeed, the principle he put forward was that one text of Scripture must always be interpreted in the light of a greater number of texts (Against Praxeas 20.2), and that later texts must agree with earlier ones (Against Praxeas 20.3), principles with which he did not always conform.
How then are we to understand this variety of interpretative methods in Tertullian’s treatment of Scripture? Waszink (1979:17) sees this as a problem needing to be explained. I would see it as a deliberate rhetorical technique employed to win a variety of different arguments, each technique being used depending upon what an opponent had first put forward. Thus, at times Tertullian could argue for an allegorical or typological or spiritual interpretation of a scriptural passage (Against Marcion 3.5.3; 3.14.5, 7; 3.24.2; 4.17.12; 5.4.8; 5.7.11; Against the Jews 9.20; On the Soul 35.2; On Modesty 8.11; On the Resurrection of the Flesh 37.4), whereas at others he would support a more literal or obvious interpretation (On the Resurrection of the Dead 19–20; 26.1; Against the Valentinians 1.3; Against Praxeas 13–4; Antidote for the Scorpion’s Sting 13.4). Parables, for example, obviously had a spiritual meaning, even though that meaning could be sometimes very obvious (which did not stop heretics from misinterpreting it), yet one should not go looking for allegory everywhere (Antidote for the Scorpion’s Sting 11.4) (see O’Malley 1967:145–58). Against the Jews is littered with examples of Tertullian’s typological reading, from the opening interpretation of God’s promise to Rebekah in Gen 25:23 (1.3–4) to the closing interpretation of the two goats in Lev 16:5– 29 (14.9).
Just as anyone with an oratorical education would know how to argue in support of a strict interpretation of a law or a document or a less strict one, more in accord with the spirit or intention of the law (Quintilian, Oratorical Instruction 7.6.1–12), so too Tertullian knew how to argue for or against allegory, depending upon what his opponent had already advocated. A good debater will find a way to contradict and undermine what the person from the other side has said. Tertullian would support whatever method of using the Scriptures would win his argument for him.
Scripture was an important source of evidence for Tertullian. I shall return to this in the section of this introduction that deals with Tertullian and philosophy, for logical argument makes up another block of material that he used as evidence. To take but one example, a threefold pattern of blocks of evidence forms the basic structure to On the Veiling of Virgins. The arguments are from Scripture, from reason or nature and from ecclesiastical teaching. As I stated at the beginning of this section, there is barely a chapter in Tertullian that is not a discussion about the proper interpretation of a binding scriptural passage, even though he did not write exegetical commentary as such.