Donatism

thumb|alt=Painting of Augustine of Hippo arguing with a man before an audience|Charles-André van Loo's 18th-century Augustine arguing with Donatists Donatism was a schism from the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Carthage from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid. Donatism had its roots in the long-established Christian community of the Roman province Africa Proconsularis (present-day Tunisia, the northeast of Algeria, and the western coast of Libya) and M

The Circumcellions, or Agonistici (as called by Donatists), were bands of Roman Christian radicals in North Africa in the early to mid-4th century. They were initially concerned with remedying social grievances. They condemned poverty and slavery and advocated canceling debt and freeing slaves. The term "Circumcellions" may have been coined by critics who referred to them as "circum cellas euntes" (they go around larders) because "they roved about among the peasants, living on those they sought to indoctrinate."

Novatianism or Novationism was an early Christian sect devoted to the theologian Novatian () that held a strict view that refused readmission to communion of lapsi (those baptized Christians who had denied their faith or performed the formalities of a ritual sacrifice to the pagan gods under the pressures of the persecution sanctioned by Emperor Decius in AD 250). The Church of Rome declared the Novatianists heretical following the letters of Saint Cyprian of Carthage and Ambrose wrote against them. Novatianism survived until the 8th century.

thumb|right|Sculpture of Constantine I (emperor)|Constantine I in York, England. Traditor, plural: traditores (Latin), 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". The word traditor comes from the Latin transditio from trans (across) + dare (to hand, to give), and is the source of the modern English words traitor and treason. The same root word, with a different context of what is handed to whom, g