Newness is more than a matter of timing. It is not enough, says Tertullian, to arrive early and stand at the head of a queue, as people did each day outside the baths in Carthage. An originator has to be original. The new miracles of Christ were followed by a long line of imitators; but the novelty of Christ was his uniqueness rather than his priority in time. In a humbler way, Tertullian himself is not merely first in an occidental queue. He is ‘astonishingly original and personal’ and is able to do theology, that laminated fusion of argument and scripture, in a way which breaks new ground. Strikingly, he wrote his own kind of Latin. He liberated Christian thought from its Greek beginnings by analysing and developing biblical concepts.

Thinkers are ‘divided according to traditions, each member of which partially adopts and partially modifies the vocabulary of the writers whom he has read’. Traditions begin from ‘the people with poetic gifts, all the original minds with a talent for redescription’. Tertullian was an innovator, and, in length of influence, he has outstripped the modern creators, like Darwin and Freud, by nearly two millennia. It is therefore useful to elucidate his final vocabulary, the words and meanings which continually recur in his arguments. Most of his words were not new, but the way he arranged them was. He purified a dialect, by framing a vocabulary which enabled him to challenge the opponents of his kind of Christianity.