An alternative theory of the history of Christianity
Tertullian and the Eusebian fiction postulate
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Tertullian Bishop of Carthage

Arnaldo Momigliano - "Was Tertullian a living figure"?

Arnaldo Momigliano back-handedly questions whether Tertullian was a living figure.
(See Journal of Roman Studies 66 (1976), pp.273-276; Review of T.D.Barnes' Tertullian by Arnaldo Momigliano)

Chronology Mistake in Ad Nationes

If Tertullian is writing Ad Nationes before he "dies" c.220 CE how could he have possibly written, in confirmation of the succession of the "nation" or "tribe" or "association" of "christians" that ...

As we have remarked already, three hundred years
have not yet passed in our existence.

Why does Tertullian not write that two hundred years have not yet passed in our existence?
Tertullian is simply one of the legions of pseudomous names invented by Eusebius.

			Tertullian, (ca.160 – ca.220 AD)

			AD NATIONES.
			TRANSLATED BY DR. HOLMES

			Chapter 9 - THE CHRISTIANS ARE NOT THE CAUSE
						OF PUBLIC CALAMITIES: THERE WERE
						SUCH TROUBLES BEFORE CHRISTIANITY

			But why should I be astonished at your vain imputations?
			Under the same natural form, malice and folly have always
			been associated in one body and growth, and have ever
			opposed us under the One instigator of error.

			Indeed, I feel no astonishment; and therefore, as it is
			necessary for my subject, I will enumerate some instances,
			that you may feel the astonishment by the enumeration
			of the folly into which you fall, when you insist on
			our being the causes of every public calamity or injury.

			If the Tiber has overflowed its banks, if the Nile has
			remained in its bed, if the sky has been still, or the earth
			been in commotion, if death has made its devastations,
			or famine its afflictions, your cry immediately is,

			"This is the fault of the Christians!"

			As if they who fear the true God could have to fear a light thing,
			or at least anything else (than an earthquake or famine, or such
			visitations). I suppose it is as despisers of your gods
			that we call down on us these strokes of theirs.


			As we have remarked already,
			three hundred years have not yet
			passed in our existence;


			but what vast scourges before that time fell on all the world,
			on its various cities and provinces! what terrible wars,
			both foreign and domestic! what pestilences, famines,
			conflagrations, yawnings, and quakings of the earth has
			history recorded! Where were the Christians, then, when
			the Roman state furnished so many chronicles of its disasters?

Whelas on Tertullian

TERTULLIAN: Bishop of Carthage, in Africa; ex-Pagan born
about 160, died 220. He was "the first of the Latin theological
writers; ... and the first witness to the existence of a Latin
Bible ... Tertullian's canon of the O.T. included the deutero-
canonical books -- [i.e. the forged apocrypha]. ... He also cites
the Book of Henoch [Enoch] as inspired, ... also recognizes IV
Esdras and the Sibyl." (CE. xiv, 525.)

     He was the most violent distribist of them all in promoting
the Christian religion, but renounced Christianity after 200 and
became equally violent in propagating the extravagant heresy of
Montanus. In this recantation of faith he gave evidence that he was
in error in his former complete acceptance of Christianity as the
last word and irrevocable posture in revealed truth, -- and
revealed his own errant credulity. In attacking the heretics --
before he became one, of the most preposterous sect, -- he thus
formulates the assurance of the finality of Christian Faith: "One
has succeeded in finding definite truth, when he belie lies. ...
After we have believed, search should cease." (Against Heresies,
ch. xi; ANF. iii, 248.) Tertullian is noted for several
declamations regarding the assurance of faith which have become
famous, as they are fatuous: "Credo quia incredibilis est -- I
believe because it is unbelievable"; and, like Paul's "I am become
a fool in glorying," he vaunts thus his own folly: "Other matters
for shame I find none which can prove me to be shameless in a good
sense, and foolish in a happy one, by my own contempt for shame.
The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed [to believe it]
because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died;
it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was
buried and rose again; the fact is certain because it is
impossible." (De Carne Christi, ch. v; ANF. iii, 525.) Reasoning
thus, -- or quite without reason -- Christians yet believe these
confessed absurdities and impossibilities.

     Tertullian denounces the sin of theater-going, and in this
awful illustration he invokes his God to witness of one of his lies
to God's glory: "We have the case of the woman -- the Lord Himself
is witness -- who went to the theater, and came back possessed. In
the outcasting (exorcism), accordingly, when the unclean creature
was upbraided with having dared to attack a believer, he firmly
replied: 'And in truth I did most righteously, for I found her in
my domain.'" (De Spectaculis, ch. xxvi; ANF. iii, 90.) In one of
his sumptuary diatribes on woman's dress -- yet a favorite theme of
the Vicars of God, though nowadays the complaint is of nether
brevity -- he warns and assures: "to us the Lord has, even by
revelations, measured the space for the veil to extend over. For a
certain sister of ours was thus addressed by an angel, beating her
neck," and telling her that she had as well be "bare down to your
loins" as any elsewhere below the neck. (On the Veiling of Virgins,
ch. xvii; ANF. iv, 37.) And he expresses the clerical concept of
women, saying that "females, subjected as they are throughout to
men, bear in their front an honorable mark of their virginity."
(Ib. ch. x, p. 33.) The celibate Fathers all glorified the
suppression of sex: "Marriage replenishes the earth, virginity
fills Paradise," says St. Jerome. (Adv. Jovianum, I, 17; N&PNF. vi,
360.) The Fathers regarded Woman as did St. Chrysostom: "a
necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a
domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill!" Good
Father Tertullian, in his Exhortation to Chastity, has chapters
captioned: "Second Marriage a Species of Adultery," and "Marriage
Itself Impugned as akin to Adultery." (On Chastity, chs. ix, x;
ANF. iv, 55.)

     Strongly, and upon what seems good physiological reason, he
"denies the virginity of Mary, the mother of Christ, in part,
though he affirms it [oddly] ante partum." (CE. xiv, 523.) Father
Tertullian was strong in advocacy of virginity not alone feminine,
but of the men, exclaiming, "So many men-virgins, so many voluntary




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eunuchs" (Ib.). He commends with marked approval the fanatical
incitation of the Christ to self-mutilation "for the kingdom of
heaven's sake" (Mt. xix, 11), and avers that to this same cause was
due Paul's much-complained-of "thorn in the flesh," saying: "The
Lord Himself opens the kingdoms of heaven to eunuchs, as being
Himself a virgin; to whom looking, the apostle [Paul] also -- for
this reason -- gives the preference to continence (I Cor. vii, 1,
7, 37, 40). ... 'Good,' he says, 'it is for a man not to have
contact with her, for nothing is contrary to good except evil."'
(On Monogamy, ch. iii; ANF. iv, 60.) For like reason it was, he
assures, that Noah was ordered to take two of each animal into the
ark, "for fear that even beasts should be born of adultery. ...
Even unclean birds were not allowed to enter with two females
each." (Ib. ch. iv; p. 62.) Father Tertullian shares the fantastic
notions of natural history stated by Bishop St. Barnabas; in proof
of the eternal renovation of all things, Tertullian says: "The
serpent crawls into a cave and out of his skin, and uncoils himself
in a new youth; with his scales, his years, too, are repudiated.
The hyena, if you observe, is of annual sex, alternately masculine
and feminine. ... The stag, feeding on the serpent, languishes --
from the effects of the poison -- into youth." (On the Pallium, ch.
iii; ANF. iv, 7.) Magic admirably supplements nature and medical
remedies as cure for the scorpion's sting, assures Father
Tertullian: "Among cures certain substances supplied by nature have
very great efficacy; magic also puts on some bandages." (Scorpiace,
ch. i; ANF. iii, 633.)

     Like all the credulous ex-Pagan Fathers of Christianity,
Tertullian is a confirmed Sibyllist, and believes the forged Pagan
oracles as inspired truth of God. Citing several of her
"prophecies," he assures with confidence: "And the Sibyl is thus
proved no liar." (Pallium, ch. ii; ANF. iv, 6.)

     Tertullian admits, in a tu quoque argument, that the
Christians are sun-worshippers: "You [Pagans] say we worship the
sun; so do you." (CE. xiv, 525; Ad. Nationes, xiii; ANF. iii, 123.)
He is in common with the Fathers in the belief in magic and
astrology, which since Christ, however, are turned into holier
channels in token of His divinity: "But Magi and astrologers came
from the East (Matt. ii). We know the mutual reliance of magic and
astrology. The interpreters of the stars, then, were the first to
announce Christ's birth, the first to present gifts. ... Astrology
now-a-days, forsooth, treats of Christ -- is the science of the
stars of Christ; not of Saturn, or of Mars. But, however, that
science has been allowed until the Gospel, in order that after
Christ's birth no one should thenceforward interpret anyone's
nativity by the heaven." (On Idolatry, ch. ix; ANF. iii, 65.)

     In common with all the Fathers, Tertullian appeals to the
Phoenix as proof supreme of the resurrection of the body. It will
be noticed, that the modern false translators of our Bibles have
slipped in another bit of falsification by suppressing the word
"phoenix" in the passage quoted by Tertullian, and have substituted
the word "palm-tree" to express the flourishing state of the
righteous, as there depicted:






                              129



          "Then take a most complete and unassailable symbol of our
     hope [of resurrection], subject alike to life and death. I
     refer to the bird which is peculiar to the East, famous for
     its singularity, marvelous from its posthumous life, which
     renews its life in a voluntary death; its dying day is its
     birthday, for on it it departs and returns: once more a
     phoenix where just now there was none; once more himself, but
     just now out of existence; another, yet the same. What can be
     more express and more significant for our subject; or to what
     other thing can such a phenomenon bear witness? God even in
     His own Scripture says: 'The righteous shall flourish like the
     phoenix' [Greek Septuagint: Dikaios os phoenix anthesei; Ps.
     xcii, 12]. Must men die once for all, while birds in Arabia
     are sure of a resurrection?" (Tert., On the Resurrection of
     the Flesh, ch. xiii; ANF. iii, 554.)

     Father Tertullian vouches, too, with the other Fathers, for
the bogus official Report of Pilate to Caesar, and for Pilate's
conversion to Christianity, saying: "All these things Pilate did to
Christ; and now in fact a Christian in his own convictions, he sent
word of Him to the reigning Caesar, who was at the time Tiberius.
Yes, and even the Caesars would have believed on Christ, if either
the Caesars had not been necessary for the world, or if Christians
could have been Caesars." (Apol. ch. xxi; ANF. iii,. 35.) Father
Tertullian gives fall credence to the fable of the Septuagint, and
assures the Emperors: "To this day, at the temple of Serapis, the
librariis of Ptolemy are to be seen, with the identical Hebrew
originals in them." (Apology, to the Rulers of the Roman Empire, I,
xviii; ANF. iii, 32.) And, as all the other Fathers, he gives full
faith and credit to the Pagan gods, as "effective witnesses for
Christ"; -- "Yes, and we shall prove that your own gods are
effective witnesses for Christ ... "Yes, and we shall prove that
your own gods are effective witnesses for Christ. ... Against the
Greeks we urge that Orpheus, at Piera, Musaeus at Athens, (etc.)
imposed religious rites. ... Numa Pompilius laid on the Romans a
heavy load of costly superstitions. Surely Christ, then, had a
right to reveal Deity." (Apol. ch. xxi; ANF. iii, 36.) Like the
other Fathers, Tertullian is also in the ranks of patristic forgers
of holy fables, being either the author or the publisher of "The
Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas," the fabulous
Martyrdom of two of the Church's most celebrated bogus Saints,
annexed to his accredited works. (ANF. iii, 699-706.)

-- extracted from Joseph Wheless,
"FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY", 1930

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