WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM TERTULLIANUS?

Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus (155-240CE) from Carth'Age (now Tunisia, North coast of Africa) was a scholar with an excellent education. As an important early Christian theologian, polemicist, and moralist who, as initiator of ecclesiastical Latin, was instrumental in shaping the vocabulary and thought of Western Christianity.
Carth'Age was founded bt Phoenicians of Tyre in 814BC; its Phoenician name means "New Town."The Greeks called the city Karch'Edon. The Aeneid, a Virgil's epic poem, written from about 30 to 19BC, tells the story of Dido, queen of Carth'Age falling in love with Aeneas, who has taken refuge in Carth'Age after the fall of Troy. He refuses to marry her and sails away, the despairing queen kills herself. Carth'Age's inhabitants were known to Romans as "Poeni,"a derivation from the word "Phoenicians,"from the adjective "Punic"is derived. Nothing earlier than the last quarter of the 8thBC has been discovered. The Phoenicians selected the locations of their maritime colonies with great care, focusing on the quality of harbors and their proximity to trade routes. The interests of the inhabitants were turned toward commerce and Carth'Age controlled much of the Western trade in the luxurious dye from the murex shell. The marine snail feeds by drilling a hole through the shell of bivalves or other shelled animals and inserts its long proboscis to ingest the prey. The purple color appears when its natural yellow fluid is exposed to sunlight. Carth"age fell to the expansion of Roman control in 146BC.
In 122 CE the Roman Senate entrusted Gaius Gracchus and Marcus Fulvius Flaccus with the foundation of a colony on the site of Carth'Age.Thereafter it became known as Colonia Julia Carth'Ago and it soon grew prosperous enough to be ranked with Alexandria and Antioch. Carth'Age became a favorite city of the emperors, but in the mid-3rd CE, the city began to decline again.
From the end of the 2nd CE, Cath'Age had its own Christian bishop and among its luminaries were the Church Fathers, Tertullianus, and St. Cyprian.
When Tertullianus was born in 155CE, Carth'Age was 2nd only to Rome as a cultural and educational centre in the West. He received an exceptional education in grammar, rethoric, literature, philosophy and law. His parents were unbelievers, and his father was a non commissioned officer in an African-based legion assigned to the governor of the province. After completing his education Tertullianus went to Rome to study further and it was there that he became interested in the Christian movement, but not until he returned to Carth'Age toward the end of the 2nd CE he was converted to the Christian faith. He left no account of his conversion experience but he indicated in his early works that he was impressed by the courage and determination of martyrs, the moral rigor-ism and the uncompromising belief in one God.  By the end of the 2nd CE the church in Carth'Age had become large, firmly established and well organized and was rapidly becoming a powerful force in North Africa. By the year 225CE there were approximately 70 Bishops in Numidia and Pro-Consularis, the two provinces of Roman Africa.
Tertullianus emerged as a leading member of the African church, using his talents as a teacher in instructing the unbaptized seekers and the faithful and as a literary defender of Christian beliefs and practices.
During the next 20 to 25 years, from his early 40 to mid-60s, Tertullianus devoted himself almost entirely to literary pursuits. Developing an original Latin style, his fiery and tempestuous personality became a lively and pungent propagandist though not the most profound writer in Christian antiquity.
Tertullianus' works abound with arresting and memorable phrases, ingenious aphorisms, bold and ironic puns, wit, sarcasm, countless words of his own coinage, and a constant stream of invective against his opponents.
Sometime before 210CE Tertullianus left the orthodox church to join a new prophetic sectarian movement known as Mountanism (founded by 2nd CE Phrygian prophet Montanus), which has spread from Asia Minor to Africa. It held similar views about the basic tenets of Christian doctrine but it was labelled a heresy for its believe in new prophetic revelations. Montanus proclaimed the towns of Pepuza and Tymion in West-Central Phrygia as the site of the New Jerusalem, making the larger, Pepuza, his headquarters. Phrygia as a source for this movement was not arbitrary. Hellenization never fully took root in Phrygia, unlike many of the surrounding Eastern regions of the Roman Empire. This sense of difference, while simultaneously having easy access to the rest of the Mediterranean Christian world, encouraged the foundation of this separate sect of Christianity. Montanus has 2 female colleagues, Prisca (Priscilla) and Maximilla, who likewise claimed the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The female popularity even exceeded Montanus' own. "The Three" spoke in ecstatic visions and urged their followers to fast and to pray, so that they might share these revelations.  Their followers claimed they received the prophetic gift from the prophets Quadratus and Ammia of Philadelphia, figures believed to have been part of a line of prophetic succession stretching all the way back to Agabus, 1st CE and to the daughters of Philip the Evangelist. In time, the New Prophecy spread from Phrygia across the Christian world, to Africa and to Gaul. The response to the new movement split the Christian communities, and the proto-orthodox clergy mostly fought to suppress it. They made the people belief that evil spirits were in possession of the Phrygian prophets, and both Maximilla and Priscilla were the targets of failed exorcisms. There was real doubt at Rome, and its Bishop even wrote letters in support of Montanism. In 193, an anonymus writer found the church at Ancyra in Galatia torn in two, and opposed the movement there. The clash of basic beliefs between the movement's proponents and the greater Westernization of the Christian World was enough ingredients for such conflict to occur. The dramatic public displays by its adherents brought unwanted attention to the still fledging religion. There was never a uniform excommunication of the New Prophecy adherents and in many places they maintained their standing within the orthodox community. Montanists may have been guilty of extravagant reverence for the teachings of their prophetic leaders, treasured them, and even appearing to exalt them above the Scripture themselves. The Montanist certainly made excessive use of the writings of John to such a extreme that some extreme Christian believers began to doubt their authenticity.
As the Catholic Christian Church grew in numbers and prosperity the spiritual fire that had driven it on began to burn low. Tertullianus' own dissatisfaction with the increasing moral laxity and formalism of the orthodox Christian community was congenial with the Montanist message of the imminent end of the world combined with a stringent and demanding moralism. He eventually broke with them to found his own sect, a group that existed until the 5th CE in Africa.
The Seven Books Against the Church in Defense Of Montanism that Tertullianus wrote have, sadly, been lost, leaving us with incidental references gleaned from his other works.