A lot has been written, and said, of Justin Martyr during the eighteen-plus centuries after he met his great reward. He’s remembered by Christians as a staunch, even fierce, advocate for the faith he converted to and traveled all the way to Rome to promote. What doesn’t get much attention, was how he chose to go about doing so.
Justin was born in what was then the new city of Flavia Neapolis (“New City of [Emperor] Flavius”) just before, or at, the turn of the 2nd century CE, to a Greek (or so it’s thought) family. He was educated, that much is certain, according to the Hellenic tradition of the time. But, as he related later in life, in works that have survived, he found it all very unimpressive.
To hear Justin tell it (and he describes his academic career in more than one surviving work), that Hellenic education was a steaming load of bovine excrement. Between the fact that it did nothing to explain God to him, it was populated by charlatans, grifters, idiots, and money-grubbers. He only felt he’d gotten somewhere when he learned Platonism, and he’d been excited about that, but even then, it didn’t prove compelling enough for him.
A more likely explanation for his ambling education and inability to find a stable academic setting for himself, is that he simply wasn’t a very good student. If he’d lived today, he’d be the kid who managed to get into Yale but couldn’t keep up, then went to his local public university and washed out there, ending up in some junior college someplace, barely passing his classes and maybe not even earning a degree.
After being initially awed by Platonism, as Justin relates, he chanced to meet an elderly Christian who engaged him in a discussion about learning and epistemology. It was from this elderly Christian that Justin realized that it was prophets — not philosophers — who really understood the cosmos. Philosophers, you see, studied the world and found out more about it by close examination, induction, deduction, and so on. Prophets, on the other hand, were simply told about the cosmos by the Almighty. They didn’t have to go through all the grunge work of actually figuring things out the hard way. They simply had God tell them whatever they needed to know.
In Justin’s mind, then, actual “philosophers” weren’t really “philosophers.” They were, instead, prophets who propounded divine revelations.
Justin had literally traveled around a lot as he’d gone from teacher to teacher, looking for one who’d live up to his magnified expectations and/or overlook his own academic deficiencies. His conversion at the hands of the elderly Christian reportedly happened at Ephesus in western Anatolia. But that didn’t end his travels; Justin ended up in no less a city than imperial Rome, sometime during the reign of Emperor Antoninus Pius (so, from 138 to 161 CE).
It’s at Rome that Justin made his mark as an apologist for Christianity, and — in his own mind at least — as a Christian “philosopher.” He appears to have operated a school and had at least one student we know of: Tatian, a Syriac who’d also ambled his way to Rome, and who later wrote the Diatessaron, a single-volume paraphrase or “harmony” of the gospels written in Aramaic which was widely used by Syriac Christians.
Justin being Justin — believing himself to be more of a philosopher than actual, working philosophers — took on some of the philosophers in Rome. One of them was Crescens, a Cynic. To hear Justin tell it, he destroyed Crescens in some kind of debate or dialogue. Later legend has it that Crescens denounced Justin to Roman authorities as an “atheist,” although there’s no evidence this was the case.
Whether it was Crescens, or someone else, Justin was denounced and brought in for questioning along with some other Roman Christians. Given a chance to “make good” and renounce his Christianity, Justin and his companions refused, and they were executed.
Justin Martyr left more behind than just his arrogant, “know it all” attitude. He’s counted as one of the first Christian “apologists,” i.e. believers in Jesus the Christ who argued the veracity and superiority of their faith over all others. He left behind two Apologies in which he argues, in his uniquely pseudo-academic way, that Christianity is the one religion for all humanity and that all others are outright lies.
Justin being Justin, these are written in the form of correspondence; one to none other than Emperor Antoninus Pius, and another to the Senate of Rome. Yes, the man was so arrogant that he thought he could write letters to people at the apex of the Roman regime and expected they’d read them.
Much of what Justin penned in his twin Apologies became common Christian talking points through the following centuries. You’ll even hear some of it now, in the 21st century, among devout Christians trying to convince others of their beliefs.
Among those talking points: Christianity was founded by Jesus of Nazareth, not a legendary or metaphorical figure from an unknown age, but a living breathing man who walked the Earth himself just a few generations before; his birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection had been predicted by prophecy; during his ministry he made predictions that have since come true; he also worked miracles that no other pagan “magician” could match; Christianity must be true, because no rational person would brave the wrath of the Roman regime over notions that aren’t true; and more.
Part of Justin’s apologetics was intended to respond to common pagan criticisms of Christianity. He defended Christians’ chastity and frequent asceticism (which, honestly, would not have been hard since there were already Greco-Roman traditions along those lines, for example among Pythagoreans). He defended Christians’ monotheism by asserting the many pagan deities were merely poor reflections of aspects of the one true God.
Justin further asserted that Plato had learned from Moses himself. Thus, pagan philosophy actually had come from the Christians’ own God!
He came up with a clever defense against pagan critics’ observation that many Christians’ legends about Jesus resemble mythological tales that had long been told of pagan deities and demigods. His answer to that was to assert that demons — having formerly served God, then left his service and turned on him — had been aware of what Jesus the Christ was supposed to do, and seeded cultures with similar stories, in order to throw everyone off by the time he actually arrived on Earth and did what he’d planned to do.
This is known as the principle of “diabolical mimicry” or “diabolical anticipation.” Modern Christian apologists know how silly it is, and often argue that Justin made no such assertion. But he did, very clearly. It’s especially clear in chapter 54 of Justin’s First Apology.
Despite his pretense of providing a rational, well-reasoned explanation for how and why Christianity is true and why the Roman regime should embrace it, Justin’s apologies are little more than a massive barrage of raw assertions. Unfortunately, he not only impressed himself with them, he also impressed his fellow Christians. As noted, even to this day, they often repeat many of his talking points.
In addition to addressing pagan criticisms of Christianity, Justin faced down another class of people whom he believed stood in the way of Christian supremacy: Jews. Christianity’s relationship with the nation and faith it had originally emerged from had always been fraught. But Justin took the bull by the horns, and — just as he’d done in the face of pagans’ criticisms of his faith — he went to town against Jews’ insolent refusal to believe in Jesus the Christ.
This effort by Justin is seen in his Dialogue with Trypho. It’s his account of a likely-imagined “debate” he held with a Jew named Trypho (which is neither a Hebrew or Aramaic name, making it an odd choice for Justin unless he didn’t know any better, which may have been the case).
In his twin Apologies (to the Emperor, and the Roman Senate), Justin at least attempted the veneer of a reasoned argument for his faith. His Dialogue with Trypho, on the other hand, is no such thing.
It is, instead, a colossal blast against Trypho (who represents, as Justin sees it, all Jews). It’s not much of a “dialogue” or debate, either; Trypho says something (a sentence or two), and Justin responds with a paragraph. His complaints against Jews and Judaism are downright blistering.
Although Justin had been born in the Levant, the district he was raised in was primarily Samaritan, and the Samaritans had little love for Jews. This may have been the impetus for at least some of his hatred for Jews. But he also held grudges against them, as a Christian: He claimed Jews had killed Jesus the Christ; and he was outraged over Jews’ rejection of Jesus as the Messiah.
As noted, Justin laid the foundation for what would become Christianity’s arguments in favor of its veracity and sanctity, argument points that are still made today, well over 18 centuries after him. His takedown of Jews and Judaism was also taken seriously and later contributed to the machinery of anti-Semitism that would build up, over the succeeding centuries, within Christendom.
Justin’s surviving works (the two Apologies and the Dialogue) both had been written with anti-Christians in mind. That is, they were his way of explaining Christianity not just to outsiders, but to its critics. Ironically, however, they had no known effect on that audience. But, those works were embraced and loved by Christians, who admired him for taking on opponents of the faith.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Christianity depended greatly on the written word. As such, anyone who was literate inherently held at least some importance within the faith. Christians like Justin, who were not only literate but who’d had some education, were held in even higher esteem by other Christians.
Once he’d converted to Christianity, Justin had found not only a “home” of sorts, but finally received the recognition, if not adulation, he long felt he’d deserved but hadn’t gotten from prevailing Greco-Roman academia. This was enough to make this wannabe philosopher turn on the very vocation he’d wanted to participate in.
In a way, Justin presaged another scholar who would turn on scholarship: Ibn al-Ghazali, the 11th century Persian philosopher who emerged from a spiritual crisis by deciding that “philosophy” was inherently profane, contradicted Islam, and condemned it.
Despite his dismissal of “philosophy” and traditional Hellenic learning methods as inferior to simply swallowing the often-incoherent ramblings of prophets, Justin wasn’t above presenting himself as a “Christian ‘philosopher’” who understood “philosophy” better than actual philosophers. He was beloved by other Christians because of that — and because the vast majority of them weren’t educated themselves, so they didn’t know any better.
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