The last exhaustive treatment of Tertullian’s citations of the New
Testament was Hermann Rönsch’s in 1871. Since his work was published,
many developments have taken place in the text critical analysis of
patristic citations and in themselves justify a new study. Another field
of research primarily undertaken in Nijmegen had established that early
Christian Latin including Tertullian’s was most akin to vulgar Latin
and in some ways was a language unto itself, thus referred to as a Sondersprache.
Recent work in the Old Latin Gospels and in Tertullian has nuanced and
in some places overturned the Nijmegen view by demonstrating that their
Latin did at times employ a higher register and that where their Latin
was distinctive it was so because of the biblical idiom. These and other
developments in the understanding of Roman African Christianity and
translation in early Christianity provide the helpful background
material to understand the socio-theological setting in which Tertullian
did his work. Most recently it has been suggested that Tertullian was
translating from a Greek New Testament on the fly when inserting
biblical quotations rather than copying these from a Latin New
Testament. This hypothesis will be tested for Tertullian’s use of
Galatians in order to lay the foundation for an exhaustive new study.
Critical editions of Tertullian will be used throughout, and recent work
on Old Latin manuscripts and commentaries of Galatians will serve as
comparative data.
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