Tertullian's Exegetical Practice in Context: Preserving the "Instrumenta Doctrinae"

This article seeks to examine the role of Tertullian in relation to the literary practices implemented between the second and third centuries in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis, especially in Carthage. The reading of some passages from his works, in comparison with others from Apuleius' writings, allows us to focus on the analysis of the various ways in which texts were shared and disseminated within the broader question of the evolution of the dynamic between orality and writing in this period. For Tertullian, the conception of the Scriptures as "instrumenta doctrinae" implies the protection of their integrity in the oral debate and in the written dimension. Claiming his own legitimacy as a faithful hermeneut of the Scriptures, Tertullian attributed to his opponents a "corruptor" and "adulterus stilus", with which they manipulated the biblical text and derived false and misleading interpretations from it.