Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire: The Witness of Tertullian

Among the voices that come across the centuries from early Christianity, few speak with sharper accents, or in more highly colored tones, than that of Tertullian. First in the Latin-speaking West to leave a major corpus of writings, Tertullian is also the first in the West to address in both treatise and tract the issues confronted by Christians in their encounter with the surrounding pagan world.
Tertullian belonged to an era when Roman imperial power was at its height and paganism could pro…