The pagan philosophy student who shopped around schools before choosing Christianity
Justin Martyr tried a Stoic, a Peripatetic who wanted his fee too eagerly and a Pythagorean who insisted he learn geometry first. He settled on Plato, until an old man by the sea convinced him the prophets beat the philosophers. He then taught Christianity as the true philosophy.
Justin was born around AD 90 to 100 into a Greek family at Flavia Neapolis, today's Nablus, in Samaria. He knew little Hebrew, considered himself a Gentile, and came to faith through philosophy rather than through Judaism. His own account of the search, told at the start of his Dialogue with Trypho, reads almost like a comedy of mismatched teachers before the fateful conversation on the shore. His conversion is usually placed at Ephesus, though it may have happened anywhere along the road to Rome.
Still wearing a philosopher's cloak, he travelled and taught, and under the emperor Antoninus Pius he opened a school in Rome, where Tatian was among his students. His best-known work, the First Apology, written between 147 and 161, defends Christian morality and urges the emperor to stop persecuting the Church. It also argues that the divine Logos was active before Christ, so that thinkers such as Socrates and Plato were Christians without knowing it. The Dialogue with Trypho, by contrast, claims the Hebrew scriptures for Christians alone and is widely read as polemic against Judaism, though it also preserves rare glimpses of second-century tensions between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus.
His end came under Marcus Aurelius. After an argument with the Cynic philosopher Crescens, Justin was denounced, tried with six companions before the prefect Junius Rusticus, and executed around 165 after refusing to sacrifice to the gods. He is honoured as a saint across Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican traditions.
For centuries his genuine writings barely circulated, and many works bearing his name turned out to be by others. Then, around 1540 in Venice, Guillaume Pellicier bought a single codex holding his complete works, finished on 11 September 1364 somewhere in the Byzantine Empire. It sits in the Bibliothèque nationale de France as Parisinus graecus 450, and Robert Estienne printed the first edition from this tradition in 1551.
Source: Justin Martyr
