A while back I posted a quotation that I said was from Tertullian: “You can’t serve God and the Emperor.” The more I’ve read of Tertullian the more suspicious I became about the authenticity of the quotation. I checked with David Ivan Rankin, author of a book on Tertullian and the church and of another ( From Clement to Origen ) on the “social and historical context of the church fathers.” Rankin is the kind of meticulous scholar who gets his kicks doing prosopography.

He didn’t recognize the quotation, and said that it didn’t represent an accurate summary of what Tertullian believed about the emperor. Perhaps now someone can help me remember where I picked up that (bogus?) quotation.