Written by Tertullian and preserved in his Codex Agobardinus.
I think I wanted to read it because it's where the Church got its idea that Jeremiah was stoned to death in Egypt, and I was reading Jeremiah at the time. But I don't remember. I was also interested in Valentinians at one point, so maybe that was it.
Summary: Scorpiace in Plain English
The scorpion poisons Christians with heretical ideas such as the belief martyrdom conflicts with God's will to protect the lives of His people.
Response
I'm having a lot of trouble finding the cultural context for this stuff with a surface-level search. Also the language is very nearly unreadable to me. Is this because I am very weak on African literature? I could read all his Roman cohorts just fine in high school. ChatGPT 3.5 could not even begin to parse Tertullian, but 4 (paid version lol) has a night-and-day difference in its power of interpretation.
The protective draught against scorpions that is drained by sexual intercourse is crazy to me. Sexual intercourse was a source of ritual impurity for the Jews (Leviticus 15:18 - "If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe themselves in water and be unclean until the evening."), so maybe it's an influence of Judaism/Christianity or some similar Canaanite religion. Or maybe Greeks, Romans, or Carthaginians shared this cultural peculiarity. But what? Were they using preventative medication, real magic potions, or can a placebo effect actually protect you against deadly scorpions?
Some people say the Church in the West isn't very serious about the faith because we are not facing significant martyrdom. Is Tertullian saying that, even in the midst of the early church martyrdom, there were many flippant Christians? I didn't think lukewarm Christianity could be possible where any confession of faith or refusal to kneel before other gods was punishable by torture or death. It's not even like converting to Gnosticism or some other heretical offshoot of Christianity would protect you from religious persecution by the state, I think. Of course, the New Testament and even Jesus himself spoke against lukewarm Christians while being persecuted, so I guess it's been an issue since the beginning.
Vocabulary
- adjure - to command solemnly under or as if under oath or penalty of a curse
- besmear - smear or cover with a greasy or sticky substance
- egress - the action of going out of or leaving a place; go out of or leave (a place).
- glut - an excessively abundant supply of something; supply or fill to excess.
- scourge - a person or thing that causes great trouble or suffering; cause great suffering to; a whip used for punishment; to whip as punishment
- suppuration - the formation of, conversion into, or process of discharging pus. An abscess is a localized area of suppuration.
Works Mentioned
(https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0318.htm, https://www.tertullian.org/manuscripts/agobardinus.htm)