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 exegesis (de Pud. c. ix.; cf. de Res. Carn. c. xxi.) is found side by side with such signal examples of perverse interpretation as those which disfigure the de Jejunio and de Pudicitia, or such fanciful expositions as his view of the cross (adv. Marc. iii. c. xviii.; cf. adv. Jud. cc. x. xiii.), St. Peter and the sword (de Idol. c. xix.), God's Voice to Adam (adv. Marc. ii. c. xxv.), and the phoenix (de Res. Carn. c. xiii.). Such paradoxes, contrasts, and contradictions are characteristic indications not so much of a want of comprehensiveness as of a determination to occupy himself with but one idea or one aspect of a great truth, and subjugate to that the wider bearings of the question. His great acuteness, power, eloquence, and causticity are concentrated for the time being upon a single principle; and whatever will illustrate it, prove it, and drive it home, is drawn into its service, often regardless of its fitness (see this drawn out in Pusey's pref. to Libr. of the Fath. vol. x.) Tertullian's style is strongly marked by the early training of his life: it is juridical in thought, language, and exposition—a fact which explains so much of its difficulty. The advocate is always present. His conduct of the contest between Christianity and heathenism is that of a law-court contest, God v. the devil; his conception of the contest between Montanist and Churchman is that of one who asserted and developed Christianity v. one who surrendered it or left it defective. Tertullian was often wrong, and the church has, with sorrow, so adjudged him; but the character of the man explains everything.

What that character was he has himself told: "Miserrimus ego, semper aeger caloribus impatientiae" (de Pat. c. i.). The sentence, caught up by Jerome, explained to him the man ("homo acris et vehementis ingenii"), as it explains his secession to Montanism and his intellectual and moral defects. Perverse in the sense of wrongheaded he often was in his narrow estimates, but he was never wrong-hearted. His life and work, full of the shades and contrasts of one who loved well and hated well, were after all a life and a work from which more has been gained than lost. If Hilary can regret that his "later error took away from the authority of what he had written," Vincentius can remind us that those writings were "thunderbolts"; they were hurled forth in defence of faith and practice. It will be to his earlier life or less polemical treatises that the reader will turn with Cyprian by preference, and in the perverse impatience of his later life see at once "the fire which kindles and the beacon which warns" (Pusey).

V. .—Oehler's ed. of Tertullian is on the whole the best extant. A new and scientific ed. was commenced by Rufferscheid and Wissowa in the Vienna ''Corpus Scr. Eccl. Lat.'' xx. See a full list of recent litt. in Bardenhewer's Patrology (Freiburg im Br. 1908). Kaye is most serviceable in elucidating many points as to his life, era, teaching, and style. Translations into Eng. of some of his apologetic and practical treatises are in ''Lib. of the Fathers, vol. x., and of almost all his works in Ante-Nicene Lib.'' vols. ii. vii. xi. xviii.; but the translations are very unequal. Recent edd. are ''de Praescrip. Haer., ad Martyres, and ad Scapulam'' in one vol. with intro. and notes, and adv. Gentes, both ed. by T. H. Bindley (Oxf. Univ. Press); de Baptismo, ed. with intro. and notes by J. M. Lupton (Camb. Univ. Press); de Poen. and de Pud. with French notes and intro. by Prof. de Labriolle (1906); and a reprint of the bp. of Bristol's illustrations of Ecclesiastical History from Tertullian's writings in the ''A. and M. Theol. Libr.'' (Griffith).

[J.M.F.]

Thaddaeus. Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. i. 13) gives a story, which he says he found in the archives of Edessa, that after the ascension of our Lord, the apostle Judas Thomas sent Thaddaeus, one of the seventy disciples, to Edessa, to king Abgarus the Black, and that he cured the king of a serious illness, converted him with all his people to Christianity, and died at Edessa after many years of successful labours. The name of this apostle of the Edessenes is given by the Syrians as Addaeus (Doctrina Addai, ed. Phillips, p. 5, Eng. trans. 1876), and it is possible that Eusebius misread the name as Thaddaeus. Thaddaeus was at a later date confused with the apostle Judas Thaddaeus. The documents given by Eusebius contain a correspondence between Abgar and our Lord, which of course is spurious. Cf. R. A. Lipsius, Die Edessenische Abgarsage kritisch untersucht (Braunschweig, 1880), and in D. C. B. vol. iv.; also, by the same, Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten, vol. ii. 2, 178–201, and Suppl. p. 105; also Texeront, Les Origines de l’Eglise d’Edesse et la légende d’Abgar (Paris, 1888).

[H.W..]

Thaïs, St., a penitent courtesan of Egypt, converted c. 344 by Paphnutius of Sidon. Her story illustrates her age. Her fame reached to Paphnutius's monastery, whereupon he determined to make a great effort to convert her, though she was evidently a nominal Christian. He assumed a secular dress and put a single coin in his pocket, which he offered to Thaïs on arriving at her house. Recognizing his true character, she cast herself at his feet, destroyed all her precious dresses, and entered a female monastery, where Paphnutius shut her up in a cell, sealing the door, and leaving only a small window, through which to receive food. After 3 years she received absolution, and died 15 days after (Vit. PP. in Migne's Patr. Lat. lxxiii. 661).

[G.T.S.]

Thecla (1), the heroine of a romantic story which from a very early date has had a strong hold on the imagination of the church, and which, though under the form in which it is now extant it can only be received as a fiction, has enough appearance of a foundation in fact to warrant us in treating of her as a real person. She was, as we read in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, a contemporary of St. Paul, a Virgin of Iconium, daughter of a woman of rank (apparently a widow) named Theocleia, and affianced to Thamyris, a youth who was first among the nobles of that city. At the time when the narrative opens St. Paul is represented as being on his way to Iconium, after having been driven from Antioch of Pisidia; but whether his flight from Antioch, related in Acts xiii. 15, is meant, and consequently whether the ensuing events are to be taken as belonging to his first visit to Iconium, is not clear. One Onesiphorus of