Justin Martyr

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Justin Martyr (c. 100 – c. 165) was a Greek-speaking Christian philosopher and apologist, the most substantial Christian writer to survive from the middle of the second century, and the first to argue at length that the new faith was the fulfillment of philosophy rather than its rival. He was born at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria, the Roman colony planted on the site of biblical Shechem, to a pagan family of Greek and Roman culture — he names his father Priscus and his grandfather Bacchius, and writes as a man for whom the Hebrew scriptures were at first a foreign book. By his own account he searched through the schools — Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean, and finally Platonist — before an old man met by the sea turned him toward the Hebrew prophets and the figure they pointed to. He kept the philosopher’s cloak after his conversion and taught in Rome, where, in the early 160s, he and several companions were denounced, tried before the city prefect Junius Rusticus, and beheaded for refusing to sacrifice — the death that gave him the only name by which the tradition remembers him.

The search through the schools

The most vivid self-portrait in early Christian literature opens the Dialogue with Trypho, where Justin retraces the road that carried him to the Church as a sequence of disappointments inside the philosophical curriculum of his age. He first attached himself to a Stoic, who taught him nothing of God and judged the question unnecessary. He went next to a Peripatetic, brisk and capable, who spoiled the relation by pressing too soon for his fee — a small, telling detail, the philosopher as tradesman. A Pythagorean turned him away for arriving without music, astronomy, and geometry, the preliminary studies Pythagorean discipline required before the soul could be led to the contemplation of the incorporeal. Only with a Platonist did the ascent seem to open: the perception of the immaterial, the contemplation of forms, the wingéd hope of seeing God directly, which Justin says was the goal Plato’s philosophy held out to him. The sequence is not merely autobiographical. It is a map of the schools as they stood in the second-century revival of the classical curriculum — the milieu of the Second Sophistic — graded by their nearness to the contemplation of the divine, with Platonism set at the summit because it alone promised the vision of what is beyond the senses.

That promise broke, in the telling, on the shore. Walking in a field near the sea to be alone, Justin fell into conversation with an old man of grave and gentle bearing — the setting is traditionally placed at Ephesus — who took apart the Platonist confidence that the soul is by nature kin to God and able to see him unaided. The old man argued that the soul does not possess life in itself but receives it, that it has not always existed, and that no discipline of the mind reaches God without a witness sent from God. He pointed Justin past the philosophers to men older than all of them: the Hebrew prophets, who had spoken by the divine Spirit and foretold the one in whom their words came true. The encounter did not make Justin abandon philosophy. It made him relocate it. He concluded that this was the only sure and profitable philosophy, and that he had become a philosopher in the act of becoming a Christian — and he never took off the cloak.

The philosopher’s cloak in Rome

Justin came to Rome under Antoninus Pius (the predecessor and adoptive father of Marcus Aurelius), and there he did the thing the schools did: he opened a house of instruction. The Acts of his trial preserve the address — he lodged, in his second Roman residence, above the baths of a man named Myrtinus — and they record that students came to him to be taught the true doctrines. He taught in the philosopher’s mantle, the pallium that marked a man as a professional lover of wisdom, and he meant the costume to be an argument: Christianity was not a barbarian superstition to be hidden but a philosophy to be professed in the open, in the city’s intellectual marketplace, in competition with the Stoa and the Academy. Among his pupils was Tatian, who would write his own defense of the faith and the gospel-harmony called the Diatessaron before drifting toward the ascetic rigorism that the wider Church came to suspect. Justin’s running antagonist was the Cynic Crescens, whom he charged with attacking Christians out of ignorance or malice; Justin predicted, in the Second Apology, that this rivalry might cost him his life, and the later tradition took Crescens for the man behind his denunciation.

The three works

Three of his works are extant, and they are the bedrock of any account of what second-century Christianity thought and did. Two are Apologies. The longer, the First Apology, is addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius and his sons and was composed around the middle of the 150s; the Second Apology, shorter and probably a supplement rather than a separate book, answers a fresh case of Christians executed at Rome. Together they defend believers against the twin charges that drew Roman suspicion: atheism, because Christians refused the civic gods, and sedition, because they confessed a kingdom not of this world. Justin’s reply turns both charges back. Christians are the truest of citizens because they will not lie even to save their lives; they are not atheists but worshippers of the one God whom the best of the philosophers had also sought. Folded into the argument is the earliest detailed description from a Christian hand of what believers actually did when they gathered — the washing that initiates, the meal of bread and wine mixed with water over which thanks is given, and, on the day named for the sun, the weekly assembly at which the records of the apostles and the writings of the prophets are read aloud, the presider expounds them, prayers are offered, and a collection is taken for orphans, widows, the sick, and prisoners. It is the first window into the shape of Christian worship, drawn by a witness defending it before a hostile state.

The third work, the Dialogue with Trypho, is the longest sustained Jewish-Christian disputation to survive from the period and the earliest of its kind from a Christian. Trypho, presented as a learned Jew who had fled the catastrophe of the Bar Kokhba war, debates Justin over two days on the single question that divided the two communities: whether Jesus is the Messiah the Hebrew scriptures promise. Justin argues from those scriptures throughout — the suffering servant, the virgin of Isaiah read in its Greek form, the second figure beside God in the theophanies of the patriarchs, whom he identifies with the pre-existent Word. The Dialogue is at once courteous and uncompromising, and it stands as the foundation document of a genre that would grow heavy and bitter in later hands; in Justin it still has the texture of an argument between two men who take each other seriously. The whole surviving Justinian corpus reaches the modern world through a single slender thread: a Greek manuscript copied in 1364, Parisinus graecus 450, which preserves the Apologies and the Dialogue together and on which every critical edition ultimately depends.

The seminal Word

The idea that carries his name is the logos spermatikos, the “seminal Word.” Justin taught that the divine Logos — the Word that was with God and through whom all things were made, fully present and incarnate in Christ — had been at work in the world from the beginning, sowing fragments of itself in every mind that reached for truth. The image is agricultural and exact: a seed of the Word is implanted in human reason as such, so that whatever any person has thought rightly belongs to Christians, because it was the Word’s own gift. On this reading Socrates and Heraclitus, who had lived “with the Word” without knowing its name, were Christians before Christ; what they grasped truly was already Christian in substance, and what they missed they missed because the seed is one thing and the whole plant another — they had a portion, where the believer has the source. Justin even read Socrates’ death as a foreshadowing: the philosopher condemned by Athens for refusing its gods, accused of introducing new divinities, killed by the same Word-resisting power that would later kill Christians, was a martyr of the Word who had not yet been named.

It was a generous claim and a polemical one. It let him honor the philosophers he had studied while subordinating the whole of their achievement to the revelation he now served — and it gave him a second, sharper move, the charge that the philosophers and poets had borrowed their best insights from Moses and the prophets, who were older. The conception drew on the Logos already developed in Hellenistic Judaism, above all by Philo of Alexandria, who had joined the Greek philosophical logos to the God of scripture and described it as the mediating instrument through which the unapproachable deity shapes and addresses the world; Justin bent that inheritance toward an explicitly Christian end by identifying the Logos with the crucified and risen man of Galilee. From Stoicism he took the very term — the logos spermatikos was a Stoic phrase for the generative reason-principle scattered through the cosmos — and emptied it of its materialism, making the seed of reason a gift of a personal and transcendent God rather than a fire pervading matter. From Plato he took the architecture of a world ordered toward an intelligible source, while denying that the soul could climb to that source on its own.

A hinge for what followed

Scholarship treats Justin as a hinge — the moment Christian thought began to furnish itself from the philosophical schools it had grown up among, a move that would shape everything from the later apologists to the trinitarian controversies. His doctrine of a second divine principle, the Logos numerically distinct from the Father yet not separate from him, begotten before all creatures and the agent of creation, is one of the first attempts to think through the relation that the fourth-century councils would labor to fix; his language of the Word as a fire kindled from a fire, undiminished in its source, became a standard image for that relation. The trajectory runs forward through Clement of Alexandria, who systematized the claim that philosophy was a covenant given to the Greeks as the Law was given to the Jews, and through Origen, the first Christian to build a full philosophical theology, to the Cappadocian Fathers, who would settle the vocabulary of the Trinity that Justin had only begun to grope toward. Apologetics as a Christian genre — the reasoned defense of belief in terms an outsider might weigh — has its first great practitioner in him.

His readiness to find truth scattered outside the Church has made him a recurring reference for anyone arguing that the wisdom of the nations and the wisdom of revelation are continuous rather than opposed; it is also the move his sterner successors most distrusted. Tatian, his own pupil, turned against Greek learning with a convert’s contempt. Centuries later Jerome, cataloguing the Christian authors in his De viris illustribus, lists Justin first among the apologists and credits him with the philosopher’s habit of arguing the faith on the ground of reason — a notice that helped fix Justin’s place in the Latin West even as most of the works Jerome attributed to him were lost or were never his.

The texts and the scholarship

The standard public-domain English Justin is the Roberts–Donaldson translation in volume I of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (1885), which carries the First and Second Apologies, the Dialogue with Trypho, and the Acts of his martyrdom; it is freely available through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and, for the Apologies, through the New Advent Fathers archive. The critical Greek text of the Apologies is now Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies (Oxford, 2009), which argues that the two Apologies were originally one work; the Dialogue is edited by Miroslav Marcovich (de Gruyter, 1997) and translated with commentary by Thomas Falls and Thomas Halton (Catholic University of America Press, 2003). The foundational modern monograph is Leslie W. Barnard, Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought (Cambridge, 1967); the relation of the seminal-Word doctrine to its Stoic and Middle-Platonist background was set out early by Erwin R. Goodenough, The Theology of Justin Martyr (Jena, 1923), a public-domain study cataloged and digitized and still cited for its account of the logos spermatikos. For Justin’s place in the wider apologetic movement the indispensable survey is Robert M. Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (1988); for the social setting of his Roman school, the church-historical narrative in Henry Chadwick’s Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition remains the most lucid short account of how a philosopher’s classroom became a seedbed of Christian theology.

He wrote as a convert who refused to disown what had first drawn him, and the work keeps the shape of that refusal — a Christianity reasoned for in the vocabulary of the men it was trying to persuade.

→ In the library: Plato — Apology (Jowett, 1892)

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