Apology
Tertullian, Apology (Apologeticum)
Tertullian of Carthage
A defense lawyer’s brief, addressed to the men who could have him killed. He spends half of it explaining what Christians actually do, and the other half asking who the real cannibals are.
- Catch rate
- 95 / 255
- Base research
- 110
- Stat total
- 262
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
The Apology is complete, substantial, and has never dropped out of use in eighteen hundred years. A deep pool of argument to draw on.
This is the great Latin defense of the faith — addressed to the governors of the empire by a trained rhetorician who does not dither. It argues with real force.
The Apology survives in more manuscripts than anything else Tertullian wrote — thirty-nine copies of its standard text alone — and the ancient world thought so well of it that somebody translated it into GREEK, which almost no Latin book got. A text that well secured defends like a wall.
Most people who have never read a word of Tertullian can still quote him about the blood of the Christians. Quick to the debate floor.
Cited for this book
“The object of our worship is the one God, who, out of nothing, simply for the glory of his majesty, fashioned this enormous universe.” — Apology 17.1, in Arbesmann, Daly & Quain (Fathers of the Church, 1950), 52. Written c. A.D. 197 to the governors of the empire. Thirty-nine codices carry its standard text, far more than any other work of Tertullian’s; a Greek translation once existed and only fragments survive — Eusebius quoted from it.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Turn the Charge | Ethics | Argument | 60 | 100% | 15 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 8 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 15 |
| 11 | Heard Before Condemned | Rationality | Argument | 60 | 100% | 15 |
| 13 | The Blood Is Seed | Ethics | Argument | 65 | 100% | 10 |
| 16 | We Pray for Caesar | Rationality | Argument | 55 | 100% | 20 |
| 19 | Sarcasm | Rationality | Argument | 60 | 95% | 15 |