51�Թ�

This is the common paraphrase of an argument by Tertullian, an early church father.

The church father Tertullian insisted that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Roman Catholic Church.

At least one scholar has suggested that martyrdom stories fueled a “myth of persecution” that Christians like Tertullian, they would say, and many ever since, love to exaggerate.

“Do you not believe that you are each an Eve?” the early Christian theologian Tertullian preached to women.

Cecilia’s enthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescension perhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister wanted each bound story catalogued and placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath Tagore and Quintus Tertullian.