Tertullian's earliest surviving defense of Christianity, addressed directly "to the nations" of the Roman Empire, arguing that persecution punishes a mere name rather than any proven crime.
Ad Nationes 1 is Tertullian's first extant apologetic work, written around 197 CE in Carthage and later reworked into the more polished Apology. Across twenty short chapters he confronts the Roman public and its magistrates with a single core grievance: Christians are condemned simply for admitting the name "Christian," while every other class of the accused is tortured to force a confession rather than a denial. He walks through the standard slanders circulating in the streets and law courts of his day — that Christians worship a donkey-headed god, that they practice ritual infanticide and incest at their gatherings, that they form a shapeless "third race" outside the recognized categories of Roman and Jew — and answers each in turn with logic, mockery, and pointed reversal.
The treatise unfolds as a sustained cross-examination rather than a systematic creed. Tertullian opens by diagnosing the psychology of prejudice: people hate Christians out of ignorance and keep hating rather than risk being proven wrong. From there he moves methodically through the legal absurdity of the anti-Christian process, the fabricated origin-myths behind the "ass-worship" charge (he traces one version to Tacitus's Histories), the tired slur of a "third race," and a long central section in which he turns Rome's own accusations back on Rome — cataloguing real Roman infanticide, incest, and superstition to show the empire is prosecuting Christians for practices it tolerates or commits itself. He closes with the two things pagans found genuinely laughable in Christians: their willingness to die, and their hope in bodily resurrection, which he insists is no stranger than doctrines already circulating among Greek philosophers and poets.
Historically, Ad Nationes 1 is a rare on-the-ground record of what ordinary provincial Romans actually said about Christians before Christianity had any official standing — the rumors, epithets, and courtroom habits of the late second century, preserved because Tertullian, a trained rhetorician and former lawyer, took them seriously enough to refute point by point. It sits at the head of the whole Latin apologetic tradition and shows Tertullian testing the arguments and structure he would sharpen a year or so later in the Apology.
“It is now plain that the whole charge against us is directed not at any crime, but at a name.”
— Ad Nationes 1 – Chapter 3
“In this you judge even against the very form of judging the wicked. For when the guilty are brought in, if they deny the charge, you press them with tortures to a confession; but when Christians confess of their own accord, you constrain them with tortures to denial.”
— Ad Nationes 1 – Chapter 2
“Plainly, we are called the "third race." Are some people Dog-headed Feather-folk, or Shade-footed men, or some subterranean Antipodeans?”
— Ad Nationes 1 – Chapter 8
“we presume the resurrection of the dead. Hope of resurrection is contempt for death.”
— Ad Nationes 1 – Chapter 19
“those who stop being ignorant stop hating — indeed, they themselves become the very thing they hated, and begin to hate what they themselves once were.”
— Ad Nationes 1 – Chapter 1
It is Tertullian's earliest surviving defense of Christianity, written to the pagan population of the Roman Empire around 197 CE. Its central claim is that Christians are punished for the bare name "Christian" rather than for any demonstrated crime, and it works through the common slanders of the day one by one.
Ad Nationes 1 is generally considered the rougher, earlier draft of arguments Tertullian later refined into the Apology, addressed to the Roman populace generally rather than to magistrates specifically. It preserves more raw invective and some material, such as the extended attack on Roman religion in its second half, that the Apology treats more briefly.
Pagans circulated a rumor that Christians secretly worshiped a god with a donkey's head. Tertullian traces one version of this slander to the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus, who in his Histories reported that the Jews, fleeing through the desert, were guided by wild asses to water and were suspected of worshiping the animal afterward.
Romans classified peoples largely as Roman/Greek or barbarian, with Jews as a distinct recognized nation; Christians, drawn from all of these, fit none of the categories and were mockingly called a "third race." Tertullian answers with satire, asking his accusers to first produce the supposed first and second races before the insult can even make sense.
Yes, in its closing chapters. Tertullian argues that Christian hope in bodily resurrection, which pagans found laughable, is no stranger than Greek and Roman ideas already in circulation, including the transmigration of souls and judgment after death assigned to figures like Minos and Rhadamanthus.
Roman legal practice normally used torture to extract confessions from suspects who denied guilt. Tertullian points out that with Christians the process is reversed: they confess freely to being Christian, and it is the confession itself, not any further proven crime, that magistrates punish, while torture is used to try to make them deny it.
He addresses "the nations" broadly — the pagan Roman public and provincial magistrates of Carthage and the wider empire — rather than a single named opponent, responding to the general climate of rumor, courtroom practice, and popular hostility toward Christians in the late second century.
It is one of the few surviving texts that records, in some detail, what ordinary pagans in the Roman world actually said about Christians before Christianity had any legal standing — specific slanders, courtroom habits, and even named sources like Tacitus — making it valuable evidence for how a new religious minority was perceived and prosecuted.
Ad Martyras · Ad Nationes 2 · Adversus Marcionem 1 · Adversus Marcionem 2 · Adversus Marcionem 3 · Adversus Marcionem 4 · Adversus Marcionem 5 · Adversus Praxean · Apologeticum · De Anima · De Baptismo · De Carne Christi