The Age of Justin.

Justin Martyr.

        Both the early forms of apologetic, the dialogue and apology, were employed by Justin, about the middle of the second century, in defense of Christianity. Justin was a native of Flavia Neapolis, in Palestine, the ancient Shechem, the modern Nablous. He was not a Jew but traveled into the Greek world to complete his education. He visited various philosophical schools-Stoic, Pythagorean, Peripatetic, and Platonist-but found no complete satisfaction until at Ephesus he met a Christian who introduced him to the Jewish prophecies and showed him how they were ful filled in Christ. This was probably about A.D. 135. A few years later he became a Christian teacher, and by 150 found himself in Rome, where he wrote the only books of his that have survived, his Apology, written about i 5o, an appendix to it, and the Dialogue with Trypho, written between 155 and 160. He suffered martyrdom in Rome between A.D. 163 and 167.

        Eusebius (Church History iv. 18) lists eight works of Justintwo Apologies, Against the Greeks, the Refutation, On the Sovereignty of God, Psaltes (perhaps a hymnbook), On the Soul, and a Dialogue against the Jews. Eusebms also mentions a work of Justin, Against Marcion (iv. 11. 8), but, when he proceeds to quote from it, he quotes from what we know as the Apology. But Justin's contemporary Irenaeus also mentions Against Marcion and quotes from it a sentence that is not found in the Apology: “Justin well says in his work against Marcion that he would not have believed the Lord himself if he had preached another God besides the Creator” etc. (Against Heresies iv. 6. 2; Eusebius Church History iv. 18. 9). Eusebius also mentions elsewhere (Church History iv. 11. 10), in Justin's own words, a work Against All Heresies, which he had probably never seen. This work is now lost.

        Another list of Justin's writings is given by Photius, about A.D. 890, in his Bihliotheca (cod. 125), but for the most part it is taken from Eusebius and adds nothing of value. He does not seem to have seen any of the genuine works of Justin. In general, almost everything said about Justin after the time of Eusebius seems to have been drawn mostly from what he had said in the Church History about him.

        Of all the works with which Justin has been credited, only two have reached our day: the Apology and the Dialogue. They are preserved in two manuscripts dated in 1364 and 1541, the latter being a copy of the former. There is also a fifteenth-century fragment, containing Apology chapters 65-67.[39] The manuscripts, it is true, offer two apologies, perhaps under the influence of Eusebius, but what they count as the first may have been an appendix to the other one. It is doubtful if there ever was really a second.

        The Apology is addressed to the emperor Antoninus and his colleagues and asks the emperor to examine the charges made against the Christians and to satisfy himself that they are really a decent, law-abiding body who should not be condemned simply for the name they bear. They are not atheists, even though they are not idolators. Christ taught a higher morality, and his life and work were foretold by the Hebrew prophets. Persecution and error are the work of the demons. The religious practices of the Christians are pure, pious, and simple. In closing, Justin quotes a letter of Hadrian to Minucius Fundanus, which he thinks favorable to the Christians.

        Justin was the most voluminous Christian writer up to his time, and his Dialogue was probably the longest Christian book thus far written. It describes the discussion, begun on one day and continued on the next, between Justin, speaking in the first person, and a Jew named Trypho, a name perhaps suggested by a well-known Jewish rabbi named Tarphon. Justin makes a great deal of the argument from prophecy. His contention that the Jewish prophecies are fulfilled in Christ is so contrary to the position taken by Marcion in his Antitheses, or Contradictions, that the Dialogue may be regarded as a counterblast against Marcion's book. Justin naturally allegorizes the Jewish scriptures in the manner of interpretation customary with Jews, Greeks, and Christians in antiquity. In the end, while Trypho is not converted, they part, with courtesy and good feeling. This irenic note is characteristic of Justin, whether he deals with Jewish prophecy or Greek philosophy.

        In the Apology (xxvi. 8) Justin speaks of his treatise Against All Heresies, which may have been the work Against Marcion which Irenaeus mentions and quotes and which Eusebius had confused with the Apology. Justin is frequently mentioned by later Christian writers, beginning with his own pupil Tatian, who speaks of him as the “most admirable Justin” and refers to his martyrdom as brought about by the Cynic Crescens, who may have reported him to the authorities.[40] His Apology manifestly influenced later apologists like Athenagoras, Theophilus, Tertullian, and probably Minucius Felix. Hippolytus (Refutation viii. 9 [Gr. 16]), and other Roman writers knew his work, although Clement and Origen do not mention him. How far he may have influenced subsequent writers on the heresies we cannot certainly say, but, beginning with his contemporary Hegesippus, they probably owed much to his lost work Against All Heresies. Eusebius quotes a dozen passages from his Apology, and Methodius, about A.D. 300, in his book On the Resurrection, describes him as a man “neither in time nor virtue far removed from the apostles.”

        Justin flourished in what Harnack called the blooming time of the sects, the middle of the second century, and it was natural that he should be the first to undertake a literary counterattack upon them which led to such notable works as those of Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius. He also laid hold of both apology and dialogue in the service of Christian truth. Not only the bulk but the breadth of his literary work gives him importance. In seeking to bring Greek philosophy to the aid of his Christian faith, he is a forerunner of the Alexandrian theology.

        We are most grateful to Justin for his account (Apology 65-67) of early Christian worship as practiced in the church at Rome in the middle of the second century, when the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets (67:3) were read to the congregation as long as time permitted. Even after his conversion, he continued to wear the philosopher's cloak, which drew Trypho's attention to him, in the opening scene of the Dialogue, and, like Aristides, he was called a “Christian philosopher,” which seems to have been a sort of primitive Christian honorary degree.

        But, notwithstanding all his influence and fame, Justin's works have for the most part disappeared, and even those we have rest on the slenderest manuscript tradition-a single fourteenth-century manuscript and a copy made from it in the sixteenth century. Even this is, for the Dialogue at least, somewhat dilapidated, for there is a manifest break at 74:4, where one leaf or more was missing from the text from which our oldest manuscript was copied. What follows seems to belong to the second day of the debate, 78:6, and so forth. So for Justin, too, we should welcome new manuscripts of his works, whether extant or lost.[41]

        In addition to the works of Justin himself, we are fortunate enough to possess an account of his martyrdom that seems to be based on an actual report of his trial, along with that of several other Christians, before the Roman prefect Junius Rusticus (prefect between 163 and 167). This account, preserved in four Greek manuscripts of which the earliest comes from the tenth century, constitutes the oldest of the Greek martyr-acts-with the possible but improbable exception of the Martyrdom of Polycarp.

        Out of a number of works preserved in Greek manuscripts under the name of Justin, but quite certainly not written by him, three may be mentioned here. The Exhortation (Cohortatio) to the Greeks appeals to the Greeks to turn from Homer and the poets to Moses and the prophets and to accept the truth of Christianity. It shows the use of the Chronography of Julius Africanus (A.D. 221) and was probably written in the latter part of the third century, somewhere about the Aegean.

        In the Address (Oratio) to the Greeks, a Greek who has become a Christian offers a justification of his course, exposes the immoralities of Greek mythology and of pagan festivals, and urges the Greeks to follow him into the Christian faith. It is probably a work of the early years of the third century.

        On Sovereignty makes use of quotations from the Greek poets to show the truth of monotheism. Justin is said to have written a work on the Sovereignty of God, but his method of proof was rather different, as he sought to establish it from the scriptures as well as from the books of the Greeks-so Eusebius tells us (Church History iv. 18. 4). The present work gives little evidence of its date, but it may be as early as the closing years of the second century. Six other works have come down to us under the name of Justin, but all except possibly the Letter to Diognetus are as late as the fifth century.

        It may be that the fragments of a treatise On the Resurrection ascribed to Justin in the eighth-century Sacra Parallela are actually his.[42] P. Prigent has argued that one can recover Justin's earlier Syntagma from his Dialogue and Apology and that the work On the Resurrection, also based on the Syntagma, was written by Justin himself.[43] The differences, however, in vocabulary, style, and thought between this treatise and the demonstrably genuine works remain striking.