Tertullian is the first known major Christian theologian who thought and wrote in Latin. He came from the important North African city of Carthage, which in the third and second centuries BCE had nearly succeeded in ending the steady rise of the Roman Republic. Its conquest, destruction and refoundation as a Roman colony had been so thoroughgoing that it was now a centre of Latin culture, with its own flourishing schools of advanced education; it is likely that a Latin-speaking Christian Church emerged first here rather than in Rome. The city’s links with Rome were close,
