Justin Martyr

Who Was Justin Martyr?

Justin Martyr was the first significant Christian apologist — a philosopher who converted to Christianity and spent the rest of his life demonstrating, in public writing addressed to emperors and to the general educated public, that Christianity was not a superstition but a philosophy: the true philosophy, the fulfillment of everything that Greek thought had been reaching toward. Born in Flavia Neapolis (modern Nablus) in Samaria, he was educated in the philosophical schools of his day — Stoic, Pythagorean, Peripatetic, Platonist — before encountering an old man by the sea who directed him to the Hebrew prophets and their fulfillment in Christ.

He wrote two Apologies addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius and to the Roman Senate, defending Christianity against the charges of atheism, immorality, and sedition that were regularly leveled against it, and a Dialogue with Trypho, a Jewish interlocutor, in which he argued for Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. He founded a school in Rome and was denounced by a rival philosopher, tried before the prefect Rusticus, and executed around 165 — earning the title Martyr that the church has given him ever since.

Justin is significant for TLA as the founder of the apologetic tradition: the first person to make the case, in the public arena and in the intellectual language of his culture, that the gospel was not a retreat from reason but its fulfillment.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• First Apology — c. AD 155
• Second Apology — c. AD 155–157
• Dialogue with Trypho — c. AD 155–160