Aristo of Pella; the Christian Dialogue.

        The dialogue was a Greek literary device for making philosophy easy, and about A.D. 140 Aristo, a man of Pella, in Palestine, laid hold of it for Christian purposes. Pella was the city in Perea in which the Christians of Jerusalem were warned to take refuge when the Roman armies gathered about Jerusalem to besiege it in A.D. 66-70 (Eusebius Church History iii. 5. 3). It was one of the ten cities that formed the league known as the Decapolis. Aristo may have been a descendant of those Jerusalem refugees. At any rate, his writings, probably this very dialogue of his, supplied some material to Eusebius on the subject of the Bar-Cochba rebellion against Rome (A.D. 132-35), and Eusebius mentions Aristo as the source of some of his information about it (Church History iv. 6. 3).

        The dialogue was represented as taking place between a Christian named Jason and a Jew named Papiscus and became the model for a whole series of such Jewish-Christian dialogues. The first mention of it is in the famous True Discourses which Celsus, about A.D. 178, directed against Christianity. This work has long since disappeared, but Origen in his answer to it (Against Celsus, A.D. 248) quoted from it so extensively that we can recover a good deal of it.

        Celsus says he knows a Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus and that it deserves not so much to be laughed at as to be pitied and hated. Origen finds nothing hateful about the book but defends it as showing how the Jewish prophecies of the Christ apply to Jesus (Against Celsus iv. 52).

        A few years after Celsus and before Origen, Clement of Alexandria mentioned the book in the sixth book of his Outlines. The Outlines are now lost, but Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century reports Clement's mention of the Dialogue.

        Jerome in his Commentary on Galatians (3:13) remembers that he has read in the Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus that he who is hanged is a reproach of God. This was Aquila's translation of a sentence in Deut. 21:23, which is familiar from Paul's quotation of it in Gal. 3:13. Aquila flourished, according to Epiphanius, in A.D. 128-29, so that his translation of the Hebrew scriptures cannot be much earlier than A.D. 130-35. Taken with Aristo's report of the Bar-Cochba War, which ended in A.D. 135, this suggests that Aristo cannot have written before A.D. 140. Jerome also says that the Dialogue said: “In the Son God made the heavens and the earth.”

        Toward the end of the fifth century another man named Celsus made a Latin translation of the Dialogue. This has disappeared, but the preface he wrote for it has survived and informs us that Jason was a Jewish Christian and Papiscus an Alexandrian Jew who was finally converted by Jason's arguments.

        Maximus the Confessor, a Greek writer of the seventh century already mentioned, is the first reader of the Dialogue to tell us that it was the work of Aristo of Pella. He reports that it spoke of seven heavens, and, as we have seen, we owe to him our knowledge that Clement of Alexandria mentioned it in the sixth book of his Outlines.

        In the sixth century another Greek dialogue between a Jew and a Christian-the Dialogue of Papiscus and Philo-appeared, and, since it uses the name of one of Aristo's debaters, it is natural to suppose that it made use of Aristo's book; but we cannot be sure of this. Certainly Aristo's idea of using the Greek dialogue as a medium for arguing out the rival claims of Christianity and Judaism was acted upon by a whole series of Christian apologists,[38] beginning almost immediately with Justin's Dialogue with Trypho. This exhausts our present knowledge of Aristo's dialogue, a complete text of which, in either Greek or Latin, would help much toward the recovery of early Christian apologetic.