Passion of Perpetua and Felicity

The authorship of this document is largely debated:

There is a legal problem. Perpetua leaves her small child in the care of her family. Roman child custody laws favored the father, though, and if she was really respectably married, then her child would automatically have been turned over to her husband’s family. There are two potential explanations for this legal problem. First, perhaps the editor is mistakenly or deliberately elevating Perpetua’s social status. There is also another problem with respect to her child. When Perpetua is imprisoned, her young son stays with her, so that she can continue to breastfeed him. Shortly before her death her child is miraculously weaned, and she is able to hand him over to her family free from concerns for his well-being. In the ancient world, however, this would have seemed very peculiar. Most Roman citizens used wet nurses to care for their infants, so Perpetua’s insistence on breast-feeding her own child would have struck ancient audiences as idiosyncratic. Even if Perpetua had been breast-feeding her child prior to her imprisonment, surely her family could have secured a suitable wet nurse in anticipation of her execution

There are other incongruities as well. If Perpetua comes from such a good family, then why does Hilarianus have her father publicly beaten in court? This would be quite the affront to a man of high social status in the Roman Empire. Similarly, if Perpetua is wellborn, then why is she executed in the arena with slaves and common criminals? She should have been beheaded quietly and out of sight, without suffering the indignity and shame of exposure in the arena. It is difficult, although not impossible, to believe that these are historical events. There are a number of discrepancies between Tertullian’s report and the Passion. Not only do they attribute the vision to different characters; they place it on different days. Tertullian places the vision on the day of Perpetua’s martyrdom, yet in the chronology of the Passion the vision takes place several days beforehand. We might assume that Tertullian made a mistake, but it’s not clear that Tertullian knows the version of the Passion that we have in our possession. The editor of the Passion used an earlier collection. Who is to say that Tertullian did not also utilize that collection? And, if he did, who is to say that he is not preserving the earlier tradition? There’s simply no way to know. Whatever form Perpetua’s diary and visions originally took, all that we know about her and her companions is shaped for us by an anonymous and shadowy editor.