Two Latin apologies from the same generation share whole passages, and nobody can settle which one borrowed. Tertullian's Apologeticum dates itself to 197. The Octavius of Minucius Felix dates itself not at all, and everything anyone claims about when its author lived is fitted around the answer to this question. The ancients are no help because they disagree. Lactantius, in the Divine Institutes, names Minucius first and Tertullian after him, which reads like chronological order. Jerome, listing the writers of the church, puts Tertullian at chapter 53 and Minucius at chapter 58, which reads like the opposite — and Jerome elsewhere calls him simply a distinguished advocate of Rome who wrote a dialogue between a Christian and a Gentile. Modern opinion has swung both ways more than once. The stakes are not small: if Minucius is first he wrote the earliest Christian work in Latin, and if he is second he is a stylish imitator. This dataset shows his dates as a second-century birth and a death about 260, and the reader should know that this is a range fitted around a book and not a record of a life. He is given no event for the same reason: an event carries a year, and there is no year to carry.
Patrology · on Minucius Felix and the priority question