Introduction – The Didache – Saint Clement of Rome – Saint Ignatius of Antioch – Saint Polycarp of Smyrna – The Epistle of Barnabas – Fragments of Papias – The Shepherd of Hermas – The Epistle to Diognetus – Saint Justin Martyr – Saint Irenaeus of Lyon – Tertullian – Saint Cyprian of Carthage

Tertullian

Page from the Codex Balliolensis (13th century)

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born in Carthage around the year 155. A lawyer by profession, he converted to Christianity around the year 197 and became the first great ecclesiastical writer in the Latin language. His literary output is vast: it encompasses apologetics, anti-heretical polemics, Christian morality, and dogmatic treatises. Toward the end of his life he adhered to Montanism, a rigorist sect, which diminished his standing as a Father of the Church in the strict sense; nevertheless, his writings from the Catholic period are of incalculable value. To him is owed, among other things, the trinitarian formula “one substance, three persons,” which remains to this day the official formula of Christian theology on the Trinity. His importance for the debate with Protestantism lies especially in his argumentation on the relationship between Scripture and Tradition.

Scripture Belongs to the Church, Not to Heretics

In his work De Praescriptione Haereticorum (On the Prescription of Heretics), Tertullian applies to doctrinal debate a Roman legal technique called “prescription”: before debating the content of a dispute, it is established whether the opposing party has any right to claim what it claims. Applied to the debate with heretics: before discussing the meaning of the Scriptures with them, one must ask whether heretics have any right over the Scriptures that would allow them to invoke these as an argument. Tertullian’s answer is unequivocal:

“Let them show the origin of their churches, let them unfold the roll of their bishops running down in due succession from the beginning in such a manner that their first bishop shall be able to show for his ordainer and predecessor some one of the apostles, or of apostolic men… This is the way in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers. But what if they disagree with the apostolic churches? Then this very fact shows them to be aliens and adversaries of the apostles. If these things are so, then likewise among us the rule of faith is one, alone immovable and irreformable… Heretics ought not even to enter an appeal to the Scriptures since we can demur that their appeal to them is unlawful. For if they were heretics they cannot be Christians, in not receiving from Christ that which, in pursuing their own choice of doctrine, they follow after as if it were Christianity. So, not being Christians, they have acquired no right to Christian literature; and it may be very fairly said to them: Who are you? When and whence did you come? As you are none of mine, what have you to do with that which is mine?” (Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum 37)

The argument of Tertullian has a validity that transcends its original anti-Gnostic context and applies directly to Protestantism. The reformers of the sixteenth century claimed to interpret the Scriptures independently of the Church that had produced, preserved, and transmitted them for fifteen centuries. For Tertullian, this is juridically inadmissible: the Scriptures belong to the apostolic Church, and she alone has the right and the capacity to interpret them authentically. Whoever invokes the Scriptures without possessing the apostolic succession that would qualify him to do so is using them without legitimate title.

Unwritten Traditions

Tertullian also provides an invaluable testimony on the existence of unwritten traditions in the primitive Church that nonetheless carry full normative authority for the faithful. This directly contradicts the Protestant doctrine that everything the Christian must believe and practice is found in Scripture. In his treatise De Corona, while defending the custom of soldiers not wearing the laurel crown, he enumerates various practices of the Church that have no written basis in the Scriptures but are obligatory by tradition:

“If, for these and other such rules, you insist upon having positive Scripture injunction, you will find none. Tradition will be held forth to you as the originator of them, custom as their strengthener, and faith as their observer. That reason will support tradition, and custom, and faith, you will either yourself perceive, or learn from some one who has. Meanwhile you will believe that there is some reason to which submission is due… Let us take note of the usages of the Church, prior to any tampering with them, to see what has been observed of old, in order to show us what is right and proper. The Lord says in the Gospel: When the Spirit of truth is come, He will lead you into all truth. And the Spirit of truth came when Christ ascended.” (Tertullian, De Corona 3–4)

This text of Tertullian is fundamental. The African Father affirms with complete clarity that there are practices and doctrines in the Church that have no written foundation in Scripture but are valid because they are guaranteed by the apostolic tradition. The absence of a written text does not invalidate a Christian practice: what validates it is its belonging to the living tradition of the Church. This is exactly the position that Protestantism rejects with Sola Scriptura, and that the Fathers of the second and third centuries affirm unanimously.

Prayer for the Dead and the Intermediate State

There is a doctrine that Protestantism rejects with particular vehemence and that nonetheless has its roots in the earliest testimonies of Christianity: prayer for the dead and the existence of an intermediate state of purification — what the Church calls Purgatory — between death and the full enjoyment of the beatific vision. Far from being a medieval invention, this doctrine is documented in the second century with a regularity that admits no explanation unless it was already a universally established practice in the primitive Church. Tertullian, once again, is the first to attest it explicitly. In his treatise De Corona, in the same list of unwritten traditions of apostolic origin already cited, he mentions offerings for the dead as something that everyone practices:

“We make offerings for the dead on the anniversary days of their birth.” (Tertullian, De Corona 3)

The importance of this phrase lies precisely in its brevity and tone. Tertullian does not present offerings for the dead as a novelty or as a controversial practice requiring justification: he mentions them in passing, alongside the sign of the cross and the renunciation of the devil at baptism, as apostolic customs that everyone knows and no one disputes. This attitude presupposes that the practice is already universally accepted and of long standing. In his treatise De Monogamia, addressed to a Christian widow, he adds further:

“A faithful wife prays for the soul of her husband, and begs for him in the interval refreshment, and fellowship in the first resurrection; and she offers on the anniversaries of his falling asleep.” (Tertullian, De Monogamia 10)

The term “refreshment” (refrigerium in Latin) is the very same one inscribed on hundreds of inscriptions in the Roman catacombs of the second century, where the first Christians prayed for their dead: “Deus tibi refrigeret” — May God refresh you. This convergence between written texts and archaeology is revealing: the practice of praying for the dead, asking on their behalf for a state of relief or purification, was so universal in the second-century Church that it was expressed both in the writings of theologians and in the carved stone of sepulchers. If prayer for the dead were futile — as Protestantism maintains, for whom the eternal destiny is sealed at the moment of death with no possibility of intercession — the first Christians would have engaged from the very beginning in a vain and superstitious practice. But if the writings of the Fathers and the inscriptions of the catacombs say anything clearly, it is that none of them understood it that way.

The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity, written in North Africa around the year 203, offers perhaps the most moving testimony. Perpetua, a catechumen on the eve of her martyrdom, has a vision of her brother Dinocrates, who had died in childhood from a disease: she sees him in a dark place, thirsty, unable to reach the water before him. Perpetua prays for him insistently, and in a second vision sees him transfigured, in a bright place, drinking freely of the water. The account leaves no doubt about what its author intends to express: the prayer of the living can assist the dead who find themselves in an intermediate state. This testimony, more than a century before Nicaea, forms part of a patristic consensus that includes Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, and later Augustine and John Chrysostom. Protestantism, in suppressing prayer for the dead in the sixteenth century, did not restore primitive Christianity: it separated itself from it.