African Christianity produced the first Latin-speaking churches in the world. This means they tended to be of the upper class. Not surprisingly problems of race and language arose in this area, for the Punic language, brought by the early Phoenician settlers, and the Berber language, spoken by the village and desert dwellers, could also be found in and around Carthage. In the great persecutions of the third century these cultural differences spelled trouble for the churches.
