Justinus

Justinus, known to later generations as Justin Martyr, was a second-century Christian philosopher and apologist. He was born at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria, a city established by the emperor Vespasian in the later first century near the ancient site of Shechem. In the opening of his Dialogue with Trypho he identifies his father as Priscus and his grandfather as Bacchius, names that indicate a Greco-Roman rather than a Jewish family. He received a pagan education and, by his own account, sampled the principal philosophical schools of his age. Stoic teachers disappointed him because they could not speak of God; a Peripatetic demanded a fee and so lost his respect; a Pythagorean required prior training in music, astronomy, and geometry; Platonism, with its doctrine of immaterial reality, seemed for a time to offer a path toward the vision of God. No exact year of birth is attested; later tradition places it around the turn of the second century.

Justin’s conversion to Christianity is narrated in the same Dialogue. While walking in a solitary place, traditionally located near the sea in Asia Minor, he met an elderly Christian who exposed the limits of Platonic speculation and pointed him to the Hebrew prophets as witnesses to Christ. Justin presents this encounter as the turning point after which he found in Christianity the only sure and profitable philosophy. The date of the conversion cannot be fixed with precision, but it belongs to the first half of the second century. Thereafter he continued to wear the pallium, the cloak of the professional philosopher, and to present the Christian faith in philosophical terms rather than abandoning the public role of a teacher.

He spent a substantial part of his later career in Rome, where he taught students and composed works of apology and controversy. The writings that survive under his name and are generally accepted as authentic are the First Apology, addressed to Antoninus Pius and his adoptive sons; the shorter Second Apology, occasioned by the execution of Christians in Rome; and the Dialogue with Trypho, a lengthy argument with a Jewish interlocutor, set after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Other works listed by Eusebius of Caesarea, including a treatise against heresies and a work against Marcion, have not survived or survive only in fragments and disputed attributions. In the Apologies Justin describes contemporary Christian worship, including baptismal practice and the Sunday Eucharist, and he defends Christians against popular accusations of atheism, incest, and cannibalism. He argues that the divine Logos, fully revealed in Jesus Christ, had already been present in fragmentary form among both Greek philosophers and Hebrew prophets.

Justin’s theology is marked by the identification of Christ with the Logos, by a strong interest in Old Testament prophecy and typology, and by a relatively positive, if still polemical, engagement with Greek philosophy, especially Platonism. He is an important early witness to the four Gospels, to the Pauline letters, and to the developing rule of faith. His account of the Eucharist speaks of the food over which thanksgiving has been said as the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus. He also records that Christians prayed for the emperor and lived as loyal subjects even while refusing to sacrifice to the gods. These features have made him a central source for the history of second-century Christianity, even where later readers have noted tensions or developments in his thought.

According to the Acts of Justin, a document that scholars generally regard as substantially historical, Justin was denounced, possibly at the instigation of the Cynic Crescens with whom he had disputed, and brought with several companions before the urban prefect Junius Rusticus. Named with him are Chariton, Charito, Euelpistus, Hierax, Paeon, and Liberianus. The prefecture of Rusticus falls in the 160s, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius; later tradition often assigns the martyrdom to about 165, but no contemporary source records an exact year. When ordered to sacrifice to the gods, Justin and his companions refused; they were condemned and beheaded. The Roman Martyrology and the present general calendars of the Catholic, Orthodox, and several other churches commemorate him on 1 June (an older Latin feast on 14 April is also attested). He has long been venerated as a martyr and is invoked as a patron of philosophers. No securely documented tomb or original burial place can be identified from contemporary evidence; later Roman churches have claimed relics, but the chain of transmission is not historically verified.