The reception of the Watchers in Tertullian with regard to 1 Cor. 11.2-16

[Extract] One of the ways that early Christians used to define themselves as a community was through texts. They wrote epistles and treatises to shape the practice of the communities they formed, whether it was Paul for the churches he planted or Tertullian for the communities he increasingly found himself alienated from. As with any text, the community-forming documents they produced were read and understood in light of the other texts and traditions they received. A particularly contested area of social formation lies at the intersection of gender, sex, marriage and dress.1 How are Christian men and women to behave in their new communities, and how much of their behaviour is to differ from or align with the practices of the larger communities they find themselves in? In particular, are they to marry, and if they reject marriage in favour of celibacy, what does that say about their social status and how they dress? To answer these questions, Christians turned to the textual resources they had at hand, including Paul’s directives in 1 Corinthians, as well as the Jewish scriptures they inherited. Through this process, it is evident that intertextuality affects interpretation, and this case study investigates a specific example of this: Tertullian’s reading of Paul in 1 Cor. 11.2–16 in light of his reception of the pre-Christian, Jewish ‘Watchers’ tradition in 1 Enoch. In particular, this study explores how Tertullian’s reception of texts with distinct social imaginations for a community of God’s people facilitated still another social imagination of his own, for his Christian community in the early third century.