TRANSLATIONS OF CHRISTIAN

LITERATURE. SERIES II

LATIN TEXTS

TERTULLIAN

AGAINST

PRAXEAS

By A. SOUTER, d.litt.

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING

CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. London

The Macmillan Company. New York

1920

in

loving memory

of

my daughter

BETH

suddenly

called to higher service

in her sixteenth year

december 15, 1918

PREFACE

By common consent the Against Praxeas of Tertullian is one of its author’s most important works. Like many other writings which have sprung out of controversy, it possesses a positive and historic significance also, as the earliest surviving formal statement of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is true that the argument, at least so far as it is based on passages from the Greek version of the Old Testament, or on a Latin translation of that Greek, is not so convincing to the modern student of Scripture as it must have been in Tertullian’s own day. Yet the knowledge of the Bible shown is amazing, and such as to shame most modern readers. At the same time the sheer brain power which the work exhibits would render it notable in any age.

The difficulty of interpreting Tertullian is an old story. There is no Latin writer for whose study an exhaustive concordance or special lexicon is so necessary, and yet there are few for whose Latinity so little of a comprehensive nature has been done. With the exception of the complete vocabulary of the works edited in the two volumes of the Vienna edition, preserved in Munich for the sake of the great Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, and Henen’s published index to the Apologeticus, no complete record of the vocabulary of a single work of Tertullian is known to me. The translator has therefore to depend on the incomplete indexes of words in the various editions and the useful, if necessarily partial, treatment of the vocabulary in Hoppe’s Syntax und Stil des Tertullian. It is fortunate, however, for the translator of the Adversus Praxean that his difficulty arises more from individual terms of theological import like substantia, than from the build of clauses or sentences.

Here, too, as in the case of Tertullian’s works generally, we are faced with a scanty manuscript tradition of somewhat questionable value. Gratitude is due to Dr. Emil Kroymann for the fresh record of manuscript variants in his two editions (Vienna, 1906; Tübingen, 1907). I have not been able to adhere, however, either to his or to any other single text. In particular I would deprecate the theory underlying Kroymann’s frequent additions to, and excisions from, the text of the manuscripts. Words do get lost and added in the course of transmission, but if I may venture to say so, hardly in the way Kroymann postulates. I have consulted in addition to Kroymann, the complete editions of De la Barre (Paris, 1580), Rigault (Paris, 1634), and Oehler (Leipzig, 1854). I have also profited by the notes on the text of chapters 1–17, contributed by Dr. C. H. Turner to the Journal of Theological Studies, vol. xiv. (1912–1913) pp. 556–564. The monograph of d’Alès, ...