Prescription against Heretics

De praescriptione haereticorum borrows a term from Roman law: a praescriptio was an objection that stopped a case before it was argued. Tertullian’s objection is that those who teach differently from the churches the apostles founded cannot be allowed to argue from the Scriptures at all. Truth, he says, is whatever the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ and Christ from God (21); let the heretics show the list of their bishops going back to an apostle, as Smyrna does with Polycarp and Rome with Clement (32).

The work gives a summary of the “rule of faith” (13), calls philosophy the parent of heresy (7), and praises the church of Rome, “on which apostles poured forth all their doctrine along with their blood” (36). It also has a few statements about the lives of Marcion and Valentinus (30). These were written half a century after the men taught, by an opponent, and one of them, that they belonged to the Roman church under bishop Eleutherus, does not fit the dates given by Irenaeus. The work carries no date; it is usually placed about 200, before Tertullian’s writings in defence of the New Prophecy.