ABSTRACT
Like most of the scholars considering Tertullian's contribution to Christian thought on abortion, the bioethicist David Albert Jones deals with him in passing. This is due to the wide scope of his work, which examines Christian views of ensoulment and abortion from antiquity to the present. Jones makes a valuable contribution in that he places Tertullian's views on the human embryo in the context of previous and contemporary Christian literature. The second-century Christian authors' metaphysical conceptualisation of prenatal offspring was intimately linked to traditions found in the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures provided the strongest authority on which the Christians based their opposition to abortion. It is important to recognise that the early Christian writers of the second century continually interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures through the lens of Christian theology. The pseudepigraphic Apocalypsis Petri also censured both the practice and practitioners of abortion quite severely.
