Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr, also called Saint Justin, was a second-century Christian philosopher and apologist. He was born at Flavia Neapolis (ancient Shechem, modern Nablus) in Samaria to a pagan family of Greco-Roman background. In the opening of his First Apology he names himself the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of that city. He received a full Greek education and attached himself in turn to Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean, and Platonic teachers. Platonism attracted him most, especially its teaching on the immaterial and the possibility of seeing God, yet it did not satisfy him. No ancient source records an exact year of birth; modern estimates place it in the early second century.

His conversion is described in the Dialogue with Trypho. While walking near the sea—an episode usually associated with his time in Asia Minor, perhaps near Ephesus—he met an elderly Christian who turned him from purely speculative philosophy to the Hebrew prophets as witnesses to the truth. Justin thereafter regarded Christianity as the only sure and profitable philosophy. He continued to wear the philosopher’s cloak and to teach, presenting the faith as the fulfillment of what pagan thinkers had glimpsed through the seminal Word (logos spermatikos). He taught in Asia Minor and later opened a school in Rome, where, according to the Acts of his martyrdom, he lodged above the house of a man named Martinus and instructed pupils while debating pagan intellectuals.

Justin’s surviving works are among the principal witnesses to mid-second-century Christianity. The First Apology, addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius and his adopted sons, defends Christians against charges of atheism and immorality, describes baptism and the Sunday Eucharist in unusual liturgical detail, and argues that Christian worship is reasonable. The shorter Second Apology, written after the execution in Rome of a Christian named Ptolemy, appeals to the Senate against punishment merely for the name of Christian. The Dialogue with Trypho, cast as a conversation with a learned Jew, expounds the Old Testament as prophetic of Christ and treats circumcision, the Law, and the identity of the true Israel. Justin taught that the divine Logos had sown seeds of truth among the Greeks, so that figures such as Socrates and Heraclitus could be called Christians before Christ in an extended sense. Other works, including a treatise against all heresies and a writing against Marcion, are lost but were known to Irenaeus and Eusebius. Several writings later circulated under his name are now judged spurious or doubtful.

Public teaching in Rome brought him into conflict with the Cynic philosopher Crescens, whom he accused of ignorance and whom later tradition blamed for denouncing him. During the reign of Marcus Aurelius he was arraigned before the urban prefect Junius Rusticus together with companions including Chariton, Charito, Euelpistus, Hierax, Paeon, and Liberianus. The Acts of their martyrdom, generally regarded as substantially historical, record that they refused to sacrifice to the gods and were condemned to death by beheading. The execution is conventionally dated to about 165, within Rusticus’s prefecture (c. 162–168). Justin was thereafter remembered as both philosopher and martyr. He was not the object of a later papal canonization; veneration as a martyr of the early Church is ancient. His feast is kept on 1 June in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and several other calendars. His writings remain a central source for early Christian self-understanding, the encounter of the Gospel with Greek philosophy, and the shape of worship in the second century.