other · 197 · Carthage
Tertullian was a trained rhetorician and the Apology is a lawyer's brief, addressed to the governors of provinces and arguing on their own ground. Its sharpest passage is about procedure: torture is used everywhere else to extract a confession and here alone to extract a denial, which means the authorities know the charge will not stand up. If the name itself is the crime, he asks, why is investigating the name forbidden? He goes through the standing accusations — infanticide, incest, treason, refusing to sacrifice for the emperor — and answers each of them, and near the end comes the line that outlived the argument: the more you mow us down, the more we grow; the blood of the Christians is seed. He is also where a great deal of the Latin language for these things starts, including trinitas and persona and substantia used of God. The date is the work's own: it names Saturninus as the first proconsul to have drawn the sword against Christians in Africa, and refers to events of 197.
To make the Roman legal procedure against Christians look, to Roman officials, like bad law.
The vocabulary of Latin theology, and the sentence everyone can quote without knowing whose it is.