Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth Century/Scapula, proconsul of Africa
Scapula, a proconsul of Africa, with whom Tertullian remonstrated for
his persecution of the Christians; not because the Christians feared martyrdom,
but solely because their love for their enemies made them desire to save them from
the guilt of shedding innocent blood. Tertullian recounts the temporal calamities
which had overtaken former persecutors of the Christians, and denounces the injustice
of punishing men pure in life and loyal, and whose innocence the magistrates fully
acknowledge by their evident unwillingness to proceed to extremities and by their
exertions to induce the accused to withdraw their confession. If, as had been done
in another province, the Christians of Carthage were to present themselves in a
body before the proconsul's tribunal, the magistrate, he says, would find before
him thousands of every age, sex, and rank, including many leading persons, and probably
relations and intimates of his own friends, and might well shrink from severities
which would decimate the city. The tract is later than the emperor Severus, of whom
it speaks in the past tense.
The Scapula addressed was probably Scapula Tertullus, one of the ordinary consuls in 195. The usual interval between consulship and proconsulship was 15 to 20 years; this also would place the proconsulship not very long after Severus died on Feb. 9, 211.
[G.S.]