Traditors

Sculpture of Constantine I in York, England.

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 persecution of Diocletian 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

See also

• Agonistici, or Circumcellions
• Donatism
• Novatianism

References