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INTRODUCTION II~ U",NG THE LAST YEARS of the .eign of Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211), and under his immediate successors , the Church enjoyed relative tranquility. She made considerable progress in expansion and was able to consolidate her organization. However, the attitude of high imperial officials toward Christianity continued to be hostile. About A. D. 215, for instance, the outstanding and influential Roman jurist Domitius Ulpianus made a collection of the imperial rescripts which had been issued against the Christians . The collection itself has not come down to us, but is referred to by Lactantius in his Divine Institutions (5.11.19) : 'In the seventh book of his work, The Office of the Proconsul , Domitius has collected the vicious rescripts of the emperors in order to show what punishments ought to be inflicted on those who professed to be worshippers of God.' Since the general prohibition of the Christian religion was not revoked, the legal situation remained the same, and the application of the persecuting edicts rested with the individual provincial governors. This is the background of the small apologetic writing which Tertullian addressed in the form of an open letter to Scapula, governor of proconsular Africa between 211 and 213. Scapula had taken action and started a bitter persecution . Tertullian begins by stating that, in appealing to the governor , he is not motivated by fear, but by the Christian precept of loving one's enemies. He continues by laying down and defending the fundamental principle of liberty of conscience: that each individual has the natural right to worship what he 147 148 TERTULLIAN thinks good and that religion should be embraced of one's own free will and not through force. Moreover, any doubt regarding the loyalty of the Christians toward the emperor is unfounded, since they know that his authority comes from God. Hence, they love and honor him, desiring and praying for his well-being and the welfare of the Empire. The author's main argument, however, consists in enumerating the terrible punishments meted out by divine disposition to all those who had persecuted the faithful. Moreover, a certain number of recent events--devastating rainfalls, fires which hung over the walls of Carthage, the eclipse of the sun, the governor's own illness-are warning signs from Heaven. Tertullian appeals to the governor 'not to fight against God,' but to act humanely, as many of his colleagues had done before. He concludes by raising the question as to what the governor would do with the great number of Christians if they all gave themselves up to the authorities. With his main argument, Tertullian anticipated by a hundred years a work of Lactantius , On the Deaths of the Persecutors (De mortibus persecutorum ), written in the same strain, though on a larger scale. The work must have been written shortly after August 14, 212, since Tertullian refers to the eclipse of the sun, which took place on that date, as a recent event. The text followed in the present translation is that of F. Oehler (Leipzig 1853); the edition by T. H. Bindley (Oxford 1893) was consulted throughout. TO SCAPULA 149 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Texts: F. Oehler, Quinti Septimii Florentis Tertulliani Quae Supersunt Omnia I (Leipzig 1853) 539ff. T. H. Bindley, Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani De praescriptione haereticorum, Ad Martyras, Ad Scapulam, with introduction and notes (Oxford 1893) 127ff. Translations: S. Thelwall, The Ante·Nicene Fathers (American reprint of the Edinburgh edition) III (New York 1903) 105ff. K. A. H. Kellner and G. Esser, Tertullians ausgewiihlte Schriften II (Bib!. d. Kirchenvater 24, Kempten and Munich 1915) 264ff. Other Sources: J. Schmidt, 'Ein Beitrag zur Chronologie def Schriften Tertullians und def Prokonsuln von Afrika,' Rhein. Museum 46 (1891) 77·98. ...

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