The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Marcus Minucius Felix
died c. 250Early Church
The Roman lawyer whose seaside conversation answered every ugly rumor the empire told about Christians.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer — Jean-Léon Gérôme (1863–83), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 250.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
Marcus Minucius Felix was a lawyer practicing at Rome, almost certainly of North African origin, who had been a pagan and became a Christian. Jerome lists him among Christian authors and calls him a distinguished advocate. Beyond that the record of his life is empty.
He left one book, and it is unlike anything else from the early church. It is called the Octavius, and it is not a treatise or a sermon. It is a conversation between friends on a holiday.
The scene is Ostia, the port of Rome, on a day off from the courts. Three men walk down to the beach in the early morning. Minucius is one of them; the others are Octavius Januarius, a Christian and an old friend, and Caecilius Natalis, a pagan. As they pass a statue of Serapis, Caecilius lifts his hand to his lips and kisses it, and Octavius says something. They sit down on a breakwater, and Minucius is asked to judge between them.
Caecilius speaks first, and he speaks well. Minucius gives the pagan case its full strength: nothing can be known for certain, so a wise man keeps the customs of his fathers; Rome's greatness is the proof of Rome's gods; the Christians are an illiterate rabble of the lowest classes who meet in the dark, worship the head of an ass, adore their crucified criminal, initiate their converts by making them stab an infant hidden in flour, and hold incestuous feasts. He asks why, if their God is so powerful, they are poor, hunted, and burned.
Then Octavius answers, point by point, in the same civil tone. There is one God, whose existence the philosophers half-saw and the world's order declares. The crimes charged to Christians are the crimes pagans themselves commit, he names the exposure of infants and the abortions. Christian poverty is not a punishment but a training; suffering is where a man is proved, as the arena crowds themselves believe when they cheer a gladiator who will not yield.
Caecilius concedes, and the three walk home glad, and that is the end.
When it was written is genuinely disputed. Minucius and Tertullian share so much material that one plainly used the other, and scholars have argued both directions for two centuries; the date is placed anywhere from about 197 to the middle of the third century.
What is not in dispute is that it is the most humane apology the ancient church produced, an argument conducted between friends who go on being friends.
Sources: Minucius Felix, Octavius (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4); Jerome, On Illustrious Men 58; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · AD 100–313
- 177The martyrs of Lyons and VienneMob violence in Gaul turned into arrests, torture, and days in the amphitheater. The churches there wrote an account that Eusebius preserved (*Church History* 5.1). Two names stayed: Pothinus, the bishop, over ninety years old, who died in prison, and Blandina, a slave woman whose owners feared she would break first and who outlasted them all.
- c. 203Perpetua and Felicity die in the arenaVibia Perpetua, a young mother of good family in Carthage, and Felicity, a pregnant slave woman, were arrested with several companions. Perpetua kept a prison diary that survives inside *The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity*, one of the earliest firsthand writings we have from a Christian woman. Felicity gave birth in prison days before they were sent out to the beasts.
- 250Decius orders the whole empire to sacrificeFor the first time the persecution was universal by decree: every inhabitant had to sacrifice before a commission and receive a signed certificate proving it. About forty-odd of those certificates have been dug up in Egypt on papyrus, ordinary paperwork of a very hard year. Fabian, bishop of Rome, was killed in January 250; thousands of others simply signed and lived, and the church spent the next decade arguing about what to do with them.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Marcus Minucius Felix at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Wrote a calm seaside conversation that answered every ugly rumor Rome told about Christians.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.