Tertullian and His 21st Century Chronicler

Martin Luther railed about many issues while instigating the Protestant Reformation, among them the Catholics’ overdependence on papal decrees, tradition, the saints and the fathers. Those, he insisted, should take a back seat to holy scripture. Early church fathers—some of whom were later named saints—include Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, Papias of Hierapolis, Justin Martyr of Nablus and Tertullian of Carthage. My focus is on the latter, whose full name was Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus and whose life spanned c. 155 to c. 222 AD.

He may be best remembered for the following quote in his 200 AD essay Prescription Against Heresies: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” It was a rhetorical question, meant more to make a point than to elicit an answer. If I may paraphrase Tertullian, the answer is “little, if anything.” To him, Athens represented pagan wisdom and secular philosophy, whereas Jerusalem stood for divine revelation and Christian faith. The latter was much too important, Tertullian claimed, to risk being corrupted by the former. In spite of all this, he was by no means cut off from the classical world, being trained and well read in Roman and Latin culture.

An intellectual who used sophisticated legal modes or arguments in his writings, Tertullian abjured the Roman imperial rites and converted to Christianity shortly before composing what is his most famous work, Apologeticum, in 197 AD. Its target audience was Roman authorities who held the power of life and death over Christians. He took a risk by addressing them sarcastically as “excellent judges.” Lots of believers had already been “sent to the beasts” and subjected to other forms of persecution. It had begun with Nero in 64 AD and peaked with Diocletian in the first decade of the fourth century. But all throughout Tertullian’s life in Carthage, precarity was a constant. For example, he was at the Carthage arena in 203 AD when Perpetua, Felicitas (who had given birth less than a week earlier) and three of their companions were put to death. The crowd jeered and shouted as they were stripped, whipped and draped in nets before being torn to shreds by a leopard, a bear and a bull. To the modern mind, events like this are shocking, horrifying and almost beyond belief. Though it happened almost two millennia ago, surely some witnesses felt the same revulsion.

By the time Tertullian came along, the majority of Christians were Gentiles, since what began as a Jewish sect (remembering, of course, that Jesus, Joseph, Mary and all 12 of the disciples were Jewish—as were Mary Magdalene and Paul) had undergone a fundamental demographic shift. The Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, the decision that Gentile converts did not have to follow the Mosaic law and the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 130s AD weakened relations between the two communities. For well over a century, the broader Greco-Roman population had been attending Christian churches and taking leadership roles. I think it is only fair to acknowledge that some Jews enthusiastically joined in persecuting Christians in the early centuries of the faith. They considered these followers of the man from Galilee as part of a dangerous and devious sect.

Tertullian’s thoughts evolved. He came to believe in the subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to God the Father—that is, Montanism, a movement known especially for prophecy and rigorous Christian discipline; the Catholic Church later rejected this in favor of consubstantiation. Tertullian is generally credited with coining the Latin term trinitas and played a major role in shaping early Latin Trinitarian theology, so he is obviously a foundational character in Christianity. Operating outside of the mainstream church, he may have been lucky to avoid excommunication. It is probably the reason for his never gaining admission to the pantheon of Catholic saints. (The first formal, papal-canonized saint was St. Ulrich of Augsburg, so named in the early 10th century.)

He advocated supersessionism, also known as replacement theology or fulfillment theology. Here, Tertullian asserted that the new covenant through Jesus had superseded (gone above and beyond, if you will) the Mosiac covenant—and thus Christians are the people of God, not Jews; some later insisted that this view originated with Paul. Tertullian, who still wanted to convert the Jews, wrote that the Gospel carries the torch of divine revelation and thus really does supersede the older tradition. Only at the Second Vatican Council, which convened in 1965, 20 years after the Holocaust, did the Catholics revise the covenantal status of their Jewish brothers and sisters. They made it what some critics called a softer form of supersessionism, but in doing so raised questions as to whether Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection had been rendered somehow unnecessary.

The reason for me writing about a man who died more than 1,800 years ago is as follows: Lee Jung-chan, son of the pastor (Lee Wang-jae) of Seonglim Church, which I often attend, recently earned a master’s degree in religious studies from Seoul National University. His thesis is entitled Tertullian’s Reconstruction of the Other’s Perception in Apologeticum. Jung-chan was kind enough to give me a signed, bound copy of his thesis. Perhaps I should now write an apologeticum to him since his thesis demonstrates that my understanding of the present topic is, as the old saying goes, an inch deep and a mile wide. I have read the English abstract and scanned an AI-derived English version of the document itself, and I am greatly impressed with the young man’s intelligence and his scholastic skills. It is clear that Jung-chan performed all the due diligence required of a grad student. No Jason Arday he!

Pastor Lee and his wife Kim Ye-jin (with some help from her father Kim Poong-myeong) have raised not one, but two, good-looking, smart and emotionally balanced children; Jung-chan’s younger sister Lee Chan-mi is a recent graduate of Yonsei University and a superb singer, quite possibly my favorite mezzo-soprano. I will always applaud fine parenting. To use a baseball analogy, Pastor Lee and Ms. Kim came to bat twice and hit two home runs.

Jung-chan is not the first Korean to write about Tertullian—Nam Seong-hyeon, Jo Byeong-hwa, Yang Seung-hwan, Kim In-su, Jang Jae-myeong and possibly others having preceded him—but I do not doubt that Jang-chun (whose final paragraph included a version of the usual academic statement that “further study is needed”) has made a significant contribution to his field. I asked him on a recent Sunday, What’s next? He smiled rather shyly and replied that he hopes to pursue another master’s, this time from a prominent American university that he asks me not to name. A doctorate may follow.

A manuscript page of Apologeticum, done in the 1440s…

Scenes from modern-day Carthage…

Lee Jung-chan on the day he got a master’s degree from SNU…

With Jung-chan after church in late August 2026…

Lee Jung-chan’s master’s thesis…