A primordial evil lay at the base of the conflict: an act of betrayal. And no one doubts that deep perfidy generates irreconcilable hatred. Betrayal moves and it paralyzes. It was not for any trivial offense that Dante placed Brutus and Cassius, along with Judas Iscariot, in the ninth circle of Hell, freezing on eternal ice, being ripped apart by the maws of Satan himself. It was for the sin of betrayal. And the betrayal at the heart of the sectarian conflict in Africa was not a personal betrayal of the usual kind. The betrayal was permanently branded by the handing over or traditio of the Holy Scriptures, the Words of God Himself, to secular authorities by Christian collaborators during the Great Persecution of 303–05. The history of this betrayal was incessantly asserted and denied, extended and elaborated by both dissidents and Catholics. It called out for explanatory storytelling, and a lot of it. The traitors, the traditores, were at the heart of their mutual hatreds and fears. The universal conviction was that certain detestable men had betrayed God Himself. In handing over His holy words to earthly officials to be destroyed, they deserved their notorious status as agents of the Devil and of the Antichrist. But real ambiguities about who precisely had done what meant that no one could let the question fade or slip from knowledge or from endless debate.

The act of faithlessness was meditated upon and condemned by the dissident Christians. They felt that their enemies were not just personal sectarian foes: they were the betrayers of God's words, traitors to his divine laws. The acts of betrayal were a common currency. They became a creative seedbed, causing a new community to come into existence whose members identified themselves as “not them,” not the traitors. In the eyes of dissident Christians in the age of Augustine, their Catholic enemies were genetically descended from the original collaborators. They had inherited the primal sin. And no one, not even the sometimes innovative Augustine, doubted the African conviction that primal sin was inherited – passed down from one generation of sinners to the next. He himself was made to face his inheritance. At the great conference at Carthage in 411, the dissident bishop Petilian from Constantina verbally challenged him: “Who are you? Are you a son [sc. of that traitor] Caecilian or aren't you?” “Was Caecilian your daddy, or your mommy?” Petilian then goaded, to which Augustine replied “He's my brother.” Which only provoked the acidic counter from Petilian: “The person who procreates children is not a brother.” The answer, to Petilian, was manifest. All the talk about kinship was because the great sin was inherited, and to show who had acquired it. On these grounds, the Catholics were not just any congregation of bad Christians. They were a segregated and polluted church of traitors. This much was stated frankly in the programmatic statement about “who we are” enunciated before the conference of Carthage by the belligerent dissident bishop of Arusuliana who bore the wonderful name Habetdeum (“He-Hath-God”). Habetdeum read aloud a statement on behalf of “the bishops of Catholic Truth: the church which is suffering persecution – not the one that is conducting it.” In it, the collected dissident bishops stated bluntly: “Our adversaries are traitors and they are our persecutors.” Habetdeum's statement advanced to link the Catholics closely with the arch-traitor Judas, going so far as to say that Judas was their patron, the one whose example they were following.