Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting
For For readers working on martyrdom and its theology under persecution; scriptural throughout, not an introduction.
Length About 14,000 words, about an hour.
Tertullian wrote Scorpiace, "Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting," around 213, during the period of his life when he had aligned himself with the New Prophecy. The occasion was concrete and urgent: certain Gnostic teachers, chiefly of Valentinian persuasion, were counseling Christians that confession before persecutors was unnecessary, that the truly enlightened could dissemble outwardly while preserving inward faith, or that God could not possibly demand the bloody death of his own. Tertullian treats this teaching as venom injected by a scorpion into the body of the church, and casts his own treatise as the remedy.
The argument proceeds by direct confrontation with Scripture on both sides of the dispute. Tertullian marshals the texts his opponents use to excuse apostasy and reads them against their own grain, insisting that Christ's commands to confess him before men, and the apostles' own deaths, leave no room for a doctrine of safe denial. He defends the goodness of a God who permits persecution, arguing that trial is not cruelty but the means by which genuine faith is distinguished from counterfeit profession, and that the martyr's death is not gratuitous suffering but obedience modeled on Christ's own passion. Running through the work is Tertullian's characteristic charge that heresy survives by manipulating the text of Scripture itself, so that correcting doctrine on martyrdom requires correcting method of reading as well.
The treatise has mattered to historians of doctrine chiefly as a witness to how seriously the early church fought over the terms of fidelity under Roman persecution, and to how thoroughly questions of martyrdom were bound up with disputes over Gnostic exegesis and the authority of Scripture. It also stands as one of the clearer statements of Tertullian's mature theology of suffering, written with the polemical intensity that marks his Montanist-period work.
Who should read this: students of patristic theology and the early church's encounter with persecution, and readers already acquainted with Tertullian's style who want his argument on martyrdom in its sharpest form. It is not an introductory text, nor a devotional one; its combative, scripturally dense argumentation assumes familiarity with the Gnostic positions it is attacking.
Editions
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- OTHER Scorpiace (CCEL) PDTrans. S. Thelwall · 1885Scorpiace in the same Ante-Nicene Fathers translation (volume 3, 1885) by S. Thelwall, hosted by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library with chapter-by-chapter navigation and downloadable as EPUB or PDF. Choose this over the single-page copies if you want to move around the text or take it offline.
- OTHER Scorpiace (New Advent) PDTrans. S. Thelwall · 1885Scorpiace in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation (volume 3, 1885), translated by S. Thelwall, on New Advent as a single continuous page with the chapter divisions kept and the editors' notes gathered at the foot. No introduction and no apparatus — the plainest way to read it straight through. A manageable single sitting for most readers.
- OTHER Scorpiace (The Latin Library (Latin)) LatinScorpiace in Tertullian's Latin, unaccompanied: no translation, no introduction and no notes — just the text, section-numbered, on one page at The Latin Library. For readers working with the original, or checking an English rendering against it.Much harder than the work: Original Latin, no translation — read alongside an English edition unless you have the language.