Apologeticus

Addressed formally to Roman provincial governors, this defense of Christianity, written in Carthage by a trained rhetorician and one of the first major Christian authors to write in Latin rather than Greek, argues systematically that Christians are punished merely for bearing the name 'Christian' rather than for any proven crime, a legal irregularity Tertullian attacks using the conventions of Roman forensic rhetoric. The work catalogs and rebuts standard pagan accusations against Christians while turning the charge of religious novelty back against traditional Roman religion's own inconsistencies, and closes with the famous claim that persecution is self-defeating, since 'the blood of Christians is seed,' each execution producing more converts. Tertullian's aggressive, quotable Latin style and his role in effectively creating a Latin Christian theological vocabulary, coining or fixing terms like trinitas, made him foundational to Western Christian Latin literature.