Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 32

If anyone dares to wedge themselves into the apostolic era just so they can claim the Apostles handed them down—on the grounds that they ‘lived under the Apostles’—we can answer bluntly: let them cough up the origins of their churches. Let them lay out the full line of their bishops, an unbroken succession from the very start, so that their first bishop can name an Apostle—or at least an apostolic man who stuck with the Apostles—as his author and predecessor. That is exactly how the apostolic churches present their credentials: the church of Smyrna records that John installed Polycarp; the Romans produce Clement, ordained by Peter. In the same way, every other church displays the men the Apostles themselves appointed to the episcopate, the living carriers of apostolic seed. Let the heretics try to fabricate a list like that. After blasphemy, what is left that they would not dare? Yet even if they concoct one, it will get them nowhere. Their own teaching, set beside the apostolic teaching, will shout from its very contradictions that they have no apostolic author and are not apostolic. The Apostles never disagreed among themselves, so apostolic men never taught anything contrary to the Apostles—unless those who learned from the Apostles turned around and preached something else. Therefore, churches that cannot name an Apostle or apostolic man as their founder, churches that came much later and are still being planted every day, are nevertheless judged apostolic because they conspire in the same faith; the kinship of doctrine makes them family. So every heresy, challenged by our churches on both counts, let them prove themselves apostolic if they think they can. But they are not, they cannot prove what they are not, and they are not welcomed into peace or communion by any church that is in any way apostolic—precisely because their sacrament differs in a way that is anything but apostolic.