Justin

Saint Justin, commonly called Justin Martyr or Justin the Philosopher, is the second-century Christian apologist whose name is usually intended when a hagiographical subject is given simply as Justin. He was born to a pagan family at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria, a Flavian foundation on the site of ancient Shechem (modern Nablus). No contemporary source records an exact year of birth or death; historians place his life in the second century, with birth near the beginning of that century and martyrdom in Rome in the 160s. He received a Greek philosophical education, moving among Stoic, Peripatetic, and Pythagorean teachers before a period of Platonism, which he later said had awakened in him a desire for the vision of God.

In the autobiographical opening of his Dialogue with Trypho he describes his conversion as the result of a conversation with an elderly Christian who directed him from the Greek schools to the Hebrew prophets as the sure path to knowledge of God. Thereafter he treated Christianity as the true philosophy and continued to wear the philosopher’s pallium. He taught for a time in Rome and there composed the works on which his historical importance rests: the First Apology, addressed to Antoninus Pius and his sons; the Second Apology; and the Dialogue with Trypho. These writings defend Christians against charges of atheism and immorality, develop a theology of the Logos already present in all who live according to reason, and preserve some of the earliest detailed descriptions of baptism and of the Sunday Eucharist, including the reading of the memoirs of the apostles and the offering of bread and wine mixed with water.

Justin’s public teaching in Rome brought him into controversy with the Cynic Crescens and finally before the urban prefect Junius Rusticus. The Acts of Justin, a trial narrative that scholars generally regard as substantially historical, record that he and several companions refused to sacrifice to the gods and were condemned to death. He was beheaded in Rome, most probably during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He held no episcopal, patriarchal, or papal office and belonged to no later religious order. No reliable source documents a spouse or children.

Veneration of Justin as a martyr is ancient and does not rest on a modern process of beatification or canonization. In the Roman Catholic Church his feast is kept on 1 June (formerly 14 April); many Eastern Orthodox calendars likewise commemorate him on 1 June. He is invoked in later Catholic devotion as a patron of philosophers. His apologies remain primary evidence for second-century Christian worship, for the Church’s argument with both pagan philosophy and Judaism, and for the conditions of Christian life in the capital of the empire.