Justin

Justin, known to later generations as Justin Martyr, was a Christian philosopher and apologist of the second century. He identifies himself in the opening of his First Apology as the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, a Roman colony on the site of ancient Shechem in Samaria. No contemporary source records an exact year of birth. He was raised in a pagan household and received a Greek education. In the autobiographical preface to the Dialogue with Trypho he describes successive attachments to Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean, and Platonist teachers, a typical path for a provincial seeking wisdom in the intellectual world of the high Roman Empire.

He presents his conversion as the result of a conversation with an unnamed old man, encountered while walking near the sea, who challenged the sufficiency of Platonism and pointed him to the prophets of Israel and to Christ. Justin also writes that the courage of Christians under persecution helped persuade him that they were not guilty of the crimes alleged against them. After becoming a Christian he continued to wear the pallium of a philosopher and to argue that the faith was the true philosophy, in which the seeds of the Logos scattered among the Greeks found their fulfillment. Surviving evidence does not record a marriage, children, or membership in a monastic community, which did not yet exist in the later sense.

Justin taught in Rome, apparently conducting a school open to inquirers, in the manner of other philosophical instructors of the city. His authentic surviving works are the First Apology, addressed to Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Verus; the Second Apology, connected with urban unrest and the condemnation of a Christian named Ptolemaeus; and the Dialogue with Trypho, set in Ephesus and directed toward a Jewish audience. These writings defend Christians against charges of atheism, incest, and cannibalism, outline baptismal and eucharistic practice in the mid-second century, and develop a theology of the Logos that identifies Christ with the Reason through which God created and in which philosophers had partially shared. Eusebius and others mention further works, including a lost syntagma against heresies; some later texts circulated under Justin's name are now judged inauthentic.

The Acts of Justin and his Companions, preserved in Greek recensions and generally accepted as based on official records, describe his arrest with six companions—Chariton, Charito, Euelpistus, Hierax, Paeon, and Liberianus—and their interrogation by the urban prefect Quintus Junius Rusticus. When they refused to sacrifice to the gods they were sentenced to beheading. Rusticus held office in the 160s, and the martyrdom is traditionally placed in Rome about the year 165, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The precise burial place of the relics is not established with certainty in the earliest sources.

Justin has been venerated as a saint and martyr from antiquity, without a later papal canonization of the medieval type. His feast is observed on 1 June in the Roman Catholic Church (to which it was moved in the twentieth century from 14 April) and in the Eastern Orthodox Church. He is invoked as a patron of philosophers, apologists, lecturers, and speakers. His apologies remain primary evidence for the public self-understanding of the Roman church in the mid-second century and for the encounter between Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy.