A letter to a Christian named Fabius arguing, against the majority practice of his own church, that fleeing persecution and bribing off arrest are both forms of denial.
De Fuga in Persecutione ("On Flight in Persecution") is a short treatise cast as an answer to a question from a fellow believer, Fabius, who had asked Tertullian whether a Christian may flee when persecution breaks out. Tertullian's answer is uncompromising: persecution comes about by God's will, even though the devil supplies its instruments, and what comes from God as a testing of faith cannot rightly be dodged. He works through the logic in stages: persecution is a proving and disproving of the faithful, like Job's trial or the sifting of Peter; because it is willed by God it is by nature good, whatever it feels like to the one suffering it; and therefore fleeing it amounts to either accusing God of evil or claiming to be stronger than him.
Having established that flight is wrong in principle, Tertullian turns to the standard scriptural objections. Did Christ himself not tell the apostles, "When they persecute you in one city, flee to another"? Tertullian answers that this command was tied to the apostles' specific mission to Israel before the gospel passed to the nations, and points out that Paul, at the end of his own ministry, refused every plea to avoid Jerusalem and went to suffer there instead. He marshals a long chain of New Testament sayings on confession, endurance, and shame, and turns finally to the harder practical question Fabius has not even asked: if persecution should not be fled, may it at least be bought off with money paid to informers or soldiers? Tertullian says no - a bribed release is only flight in another form, and it cheapens a ransom that Christ paid with his own blood. He closes by conceding that this is a hard teaching, but insists that the Paraclete equips the church to bear it.
The treatise matters historically because it is a rare inside view of a real pastoral controversy in the pre-Constantinian church: whole congregations, Tertullian says, were paying tribute to informers to avoid exposure, and clergy themselves were fleeing their posts. Written from within Tertullian's later, Montanist-influenced rigorism, it shows the movement's radical intolerance for any accommodation with the state fully worked out into practical church discipline, and it captures, in real time, the argument that would recur every time Christians faced state persecution for the next three centuries.
“This is that winnowing-fan which even now cleanses the Lord's threshing-floor — that is, the church — tossing the confused heap of the faithful and separating the wheat of the martyrs from the chaff of the deniers”
— De Fuga in Persecutione – Chapter 1
“we believe that persecution comes about, if you like, through the devil, but not from the devil”
— De Fuga in Persecutione – Chapter 2
“Rutilius, that most holy martyr, after fleeing the persecution from place to place so many times, and even buying off the danger, as he thought, with money, was seized quite by surprise”
— De Fuga in Persecutione – Chapter 5
“a soldier lost in battle is a finer sight than one saved by flight”
— De Fuga in Persecutione – Chapter 10
“just as flight is a free-of-charge redemption, so a cash redemption is a form of flight”
— De Fuga in Persecutione – Chapter 12
It is Tertullian's answer to a fellow Christian, Fabius, who had asked whether it is permissible to flee a city when persecution breaks out. Tertullian argues that it is not: persecution is willed by God as a test of faith, so fleeing it is tantamount to denying him. He extends the argument to a harder case - paying bribes to informers or soldiers to avoid arrest - and rejects that too.
Yes, that is his stated position in this treatise. He argues that because persecution comes from God's will as a trial of faith, it cannot rightly be evaded, and that fleeing it amounts to either accusing God of doing evil or claiming to be stronger than God. He does allow that Christians can meet quietly at night or in small groups rather than large public gatherings, but not in order to escape confrontation with the authorities.
He argues that the command in Matthew was addressed specifically to the twelve apostles for the period when their mission was confined to Israel, and that it lapsed once the gospel passed to the nations. He points to Paul, who in his final years refused every warning to avoid Jerusalem and went there to be arrested and eventually die, as proof that even the apostles did not treat the command as permanent.
He treats a bribe paid to an informer or soldier as functionally identical to flight, just paid for in coin rather than in distance covered. He argues it cheapens the ransom Christ already paid in his own blood, and he criticizes whole congregations that had apparently pooled money to pay off informers rather than risk exposure.
Fabius is addressed as "brother" and appears to be a Christian who had put the question to Tertullian informally before asking for a fuller written answer. The treatise gives a rare glimpse of pastoral controversy inside a real congregation under threat, including clergy who fled first and churches that taxed themselves to bribe informers - practical details not preserved in most surviving sources on early persecution.
It comes from Tertullian's later period, after his association with the New Prophecy movement, and closes by invoking the Paraclete as "guide into all truths" who equips believers to endure what more moderate teaching would excuse. Its uncompromising rigor on flight and ransom is consistent with the harder disciplinary line Tertullian took in his Montanist-influenced writings.
He draws on Job's trial by Satan under God's permission, Christ's warning to Peter that Satan had asked to sift him, Jonah's failed flight to Tarshish, the parable of the good and bad shepherd, and Paul's refusal to avoid Jerusalem despite his disciples' pleading, alongside numerous sayings of Jesus on confession, shame, and endurance to the end.
Rutilius is presented as a cautionary example: a Christian who fled from city to city and bought off danger with money multiple times, only to be seized by surprise, handed over, tortured, and finally burned - which Tertullian reads as proof that flight and bribery ultimately profit nothing if God does not will them to succeed.
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