Justin

Saint Justin, known to later generations as Justin Martyr, was a Christian philosopher and apologist of the second century. He was born at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria, a Roman colonial city in the province he himself named Syria Palaestina. In the opening of his First Apology he identifies his father as Priscus and his grandfather as Bacchius. He was not of Jewish origin; his family belonged to the pagan population of the region. As a young man he sampled the principal Greek philosophical schools in succession. He found the Stoics unable to speak of God with knowledge, a Peripatetic teacher too concerned with fees, a Pythagorean who demanded preparatory studies Justin would not undertake, and finally Platonists, whose teaching on immaterial reality and the vision of God attracted him strongly. His conversion, recounted in the Dialogue with Trypho, came through a conversation with an old Christian, probably near the sea in the region of Ephesus, who directed him from Plato to the prophets and to Christ. Thereafter he regarded Christianity as the only sure and profitable philosophy.

Justin continued to wear the philosopher’s cloak and to teach. He spent time in Asia Minor and then settled in Rome, where he conducted a school; Tatian was among those associated with him. His principal surviving works are the First Apology, addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius, the emperor’s sons, and the Roman Senate; the Second Apology, occasioned by the execution of Christians in Rome; and the Dialogue with Trypho, a debate with a learned Jew that sets out Justin’s reading of the Hebrew scriptures as fulfilled in Christ. In the apologies he refutes charges of atheism, immorality, and disloyalty, gives some of the earliest detailed descriptions of baptism and the Sunday Eucharist, and develops the doctrine of the Logos, arguing that the seminal Word had enlightened pagan thinkers such as Socrates and Heraclitus even before the Incarnation. He also wrote works now lost, including a treatise against all heresies and a work against Marcion, known to Irenaeus and to Eusebius of Caesarea.

Justin’s public teaching brought him into conflict with pagan philosophers in Rome, notably the Cynic Crescens, whom Tatian and later Eusebius accuse of having intrigued against him. Under Marcus Aurelius he was arrested with several companions and brought before the urban prefect Quintus Junius Rusticus. The Acts of Justin, a relatively early document generally judged to preserve an authentic core, record a brief interrogation in which Justin confessed the Christian faith, refused to sacrifice to the gods, and was condemned to death by beheading. The martyrdom took place in Rome in the mid-second century, customarily placed about the year 165. From an early date the Church honored him as a martyr; Eusebius already treats him as such in the fourth century. No contemporary source records a wife or children, nor membership in any later religious order; he appears as a lay teacher and, in the judgment of most historians, was not ordained.

In the General Roman Calendar his feast is kept on 1 June. He is invoked as a patron of philosophers, of those who defend the faith by argument, and of lecturers. The original place of his burial is not known with certainty, though later Roman tradition has associated relics with more than one church. His writings remain among the most important witnesses to the theology, liturgy, and self-understanding of the Church in the generations immediately after the apostles, and later Christian tradition in East and West has consistently ranked him among the foremost apologists of the ante-Nicene period.