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Traditor, pl. traditores (Lat), is a term meaning the one(s) who had handed over and defined by Merriam-Webster as "one of the Christians giving up to the officers of the law the Scriptures, the sacred vessels, or the names of their brethren during the Roman persecutions".[1] This refers to bishops and other Christians who turned over sacred scriptures or betrayed their fellow Christians to the Roman authorities under threat of persecution. During the Diocletianic Persecution between AD 303–5, many church leaders had gone as far as turning in Christians to the authorities and "handed over"[2] sacred religious texts to authorities to be burned. Later, some traditors would be returned to positions of authority under Constantine, sparking a split with the Donatist movement.
While many church members would eventually come to forgive the traditors, the Donatists were less forgiving. They proclaimed that any sacraments celebrated by these priests and bishops were invalid.[3]
The sect had particularly developed and grown in North Africa. Constantine, as emperor, began to get involved in the dispute, and, in AD 314, he called a council at Arles in Gaul, modern France; the issue was debated and the decision went against the Donatists.[4] The Donatists refused to accept the decision of the council. Their "distaste for bishops who had collaborated"[5] with Rome came out of their broader view of the Roman empire.
Held out as a counter-example to the Traditors was the venerated Saint Vincent of Saragossa who at this time preferred to suffer martyrdom rather than agree to consign Scripture to the fire, and who is depicted in religious paintings holding the book whose preservation he preferred to his own life.
The word traditor comes from the Latin transditio from trans (across) + dare (to hand, to give), and is the source of the modern words traitor and treason. The same derivation, though with different context of what is handed to whom, gives us the word tradition.
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Byzantine Empire, Roman Republic, Crisis of the Third Century, Pompeii, Tacitus
University of York, Kingston upon Hull, River Ouse, Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, Leeds
Carthage, Early Christianity, Bishop, Holy Bible, Traditors
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