Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who kept his cloak after he became a Christian, and argued the faith to a Roman emperor on the emperor’s own philosophical ground. + Around the middle of the second century a man in a rough woolen cloak, the working uniform of a professional philosopher, rented rooms above a bathhouse in Rome and taught anyone who would come. He had tried four schools of philosophy before he found what he was looking for, and when he found it he did not change his clothes. He kept teaching, in the same cloak, in the same manner, with one difference: he now thought the answer had a name. That is Justin, and he matters because of what he did next. Christians before him had written to each other. Justin wrote to the people who were killing them. He addressed a formal petition to the emperor Antoninus Pius, laid out what Christians actually believed and actually did at their meetings, answered the rumors of cannibalism and incest point by point, and asked for nothing except that the charges be investigated before the sentences were passed. He was not quite the first to try it, and it would be unfair to him and to them to say he was. A Christian named Quadratus had addressed the emperor Hadrian a generation earlier, though only a fragment of that survives, and a short defense by another Christian, Aristides, comes from about the same years and is the oldest one a reader can still follow from beginning to end. What sets Justin apart is what happened afterwards. Aristides was effectively lost until the nineteenth century, while Justin was read and mined by everyone who came after him, and he worked the case out at a length, and in a detail, that nobody before him had attempted. The trade of arguing the Christian faith to outsiders, on ground the outsiders accept, takes its shape from him. Everything of Justin’s that survives, all of it, comes down through a single Greek manuscript: Codex Parisinus graecus 450, copied out by one scribe in the fourteenth century, close to twelve hundred years after Justin died. Three works, all three in that one volume, and nothing else to check the copy against. Nothing, that is, except a scrap of fourth-century parchment from a codex (a book with pages, of the kind we still use, rather than a rolled scroll) dug out of the rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. The scrap carries seventy-seven letters of the First Apology, and even in that little space it already differs from the medieval copy at three points. Had the Paris volume been lost the way a sister collection was lost (the manuscript carrying the Epistle to Diognetus burned at Strasbourg in 1870), we would know the man who set the pattern for Christian apologetics only from other men’s quotations of him.

(●) c. 100 AD: He was born a Greek-speaking pagan in Samaria, in a town Rome had built on Israel’s oldest ground. + Justin opens his petition to the emperor by naming himself with a precision that reads like a census return: Justin, son of Priscus, son of Bacchius, of Flavia Neapolis in Syria Palestina. That last phrase is the Roman province, the administrative name the empire attached to Judea and its neighbors, and the three names in front of it tell their own story. Three generations, all of them Greek or Latin, and not one of them Jewish. The family were settlers. Flavia Neapolis, the "new city of the Flavians," had been founded by the emperor Vespasian around AD 72, in the aftermath of the Jewish revolt that ended with the temple in Jerusalem burned. It stood in the valley beneath Mount Gerizim, on ground with a longer memory than Rome had: Shechem was there, where Abraham built an altar, and Jacob’s well is a short walk away, the well where John’s Gospel has Jesus talking with a Samaritan woman. The town is still there too, under a worn-down version of its Greek name: Nablus. Justin was raised within sight of all that history and, so far as anything he wrote shows, learned nothing from it. He calls the Samaritans his own people in so many words, telling Trypho that he had spared no thought for "any of my people, that is, the Samaritans" when he warned the emperor that they were wrong to trust the magician Simon; yet he was uncircumcised, and he came to the God of Israel as a complete outsider, by way of Athens rather than Jerusalem. The birth date is a convention rather than a record. No ancient source gives one, so historians work backwards instead: the man who wrote to Antoninus Pius in the mid-150s was a mature and established philosopher, settled enough in the trade to lecture an emperor about it, which puts his birth somewhere around the year 100, give or take a decade. Nearly every date in his life before the trial is reckoned that same way, which is why each of them carries a "c."

(●) c. 130 AD: He went shopping for a philosophy, and four schools disappointed him in four different ways. + Justin tells the story himself, at the opening of the Dialogue with Trypho, and it is one of the few pieces of autobiography anyone wrote in that century. He wanted to know God, and in the ancient world you did not look for that in a temple. You looked for it in a school. He went first to a Stoic, one of the school that taught that an impersonal reason runs through everything that happens and that wisdom means living in step with it, and found that the man neither knew anything about God nor thought the subject necessary. He moved on to a Peripatetic, one of Aristotle’s people, who after a few days’ teaching raised the matter of his fee; Justin decided that a man who leads with a price is no philosopher, and walked out. He tried a Pythagorean of some reputation next, from the school that traced itself back to Pythagoras (the man the theorem is named for) and held that number and harmony are the key to what things really are. That teacher asked whether he had studied music, astronomy and geometry, and on hearing that he had not, sent him away to get the prerequisites, since a soul untrained in those could not see the beautiful. Then he found a Platonist, a follower of Plato, and this one worked. Plato had taught that behind the changing things a person can see and handle there stand unchanging realities that only the mind can reach, and that the highest of them is the Good itself. That is what stands behind Justin’s own description of the experience. The contemplation of ideas, he says, gave wings to his mind; he was making progress daily, and he expected quite soon to look upon God, which he calls the whole point of Plato’s philosophy. Three cautions belong with the story. No source dates the search, so c. 130 is nothing more than the room left between a birth around 100 and a conversion that has to fall before the meeting with Trypho. Then there is the shape of the telling. Ancient writers had a settled genre for the tour of the schools, a form a reader of the day would recognize on sight the way we recognize a testimony given from a stage, and Justin shapes his account to fit it, so how literally to take each stage is debated. And the account is not neutral, because he is telling it in order to explain why Plato was not enough, and a man explaining why he left will hand you the reasons that point toward the door. What is not in doubt is where he ended up before his conversion. The man who wrote all this was still, in every visible way, a Platonist when the next chapter of his life began.

(●) c. 130s AD: An old man on the shore asked him a question about the soul that he could not answer, and Justin became a Christian. + Justin had gone out to a quiet place near the sea to think, and an elderly stranger fell into step behind him. What followed reads like Socrates being given a taste of his own method, which was to ask a confident man one plain question after another until he discovers he cannot say what he thought he knew. The old man asked what a philosopher thinks God is, and then began pressing on the answers. If the soul is immortal by its own nature and has looked upon God, why does it need a body at all? Why does it not remember what it saw? And if souls live forever without being made, why not simply say the world is unmade too, and drop God from the account? Justin, who had expected to see God any day now, discovered he could not defend the ground he was standing on. Then the old man changed direction, and this is the turn on which the rest of Justin’s life hangs. There were men, he said, older than any of the philosophers, who did not reason their way to God but were told, and who wrote down things that afterwards happened. They are called the prophets. Read them, and pray that the gates of light be opened to you, since nobody understands them who has not been given understanding. The old man walked away and Justin never saw him again. "Straightway a flame was kindled in my soul; and a love of the prophets, and of those men who are friends of Christ, possessed me." He does not say the argument alone did it. In the Second Apology he supplies the other half, and it is oddly modern: he had been a happy Platonist hearing Christians slandered, and he had also watched Christians go to their deaths without flinching, and he concluded that people who behave like that are not living for pleasure and vice. The reasoning and the funerals worked on him together. As with the schools, the date here is inference from the shape of his life rather than a record of any particular year.

(●) c. 135 AD: He spent two days at Ephesus arguing with a Jew named Trypho, and neither man gave way. + Trypho recognized him in a colonnade by the cloak, which was how you spotted a philosopher, and opened with the courtesy of one educated man to another. He had recently fled a war, and the war matters a great deal to what follows. The revolt of Bar Kokhba (AD 132 to 135), the last great Jewish rising against Rome, led by a man his supporters hailed as the promised deliverer, had ended with Judea devastated, Jerusalem a pagan colony, and Jews forbidden to enter it. So Trypho was talking to a Christian about the identity of the Messiah in the very year the roof fell in on his people, and having just watched what following the wrong claimant costs. What follows in Justin’s written account runs for two days and a hundred and forty-two chapters, and it is the longest surviving conversation between a Christian and a Jew from the ancient world. Justin argues that the law of Moses was given for a season and for a purpose, that the prophets pointed past it to a Messiah who would suffer, and that this Messiah has come. Trypho does not roll over. He objects that the Christians have misread Isaiah 7:14, which speaks of a young woman and not a virgin; he objects that the law itself pronounces a curse on anyone hanged on a tree (Deuteronomy 21:23), which is a hard thing to say about your Messiah; he objects that Christians do not keep the commandments God gave. Justin answers each of them, and each time Trypho comes back at him. What is striking is the ending. Nobody converts. They part with real warmth, Justin about to sail, Trypho saying they have found more than they expected and asking to be remembered as a friend. Eusebius, writing much later, places the meeting at Ephesus, and the book itself was written years afterwards, since it refers back to the petition Justin had already sent the emperor. Whether Trypho was a real man Justin met, or a composite standing in for the arguments Justin had actually heard, is a question scholars still discuss; the objections in his mouth are certainly real ones.

(●) c. 150 AD: He opened a school in Rome above a bathhouse and taught Christianity as a philosophy. + We know where he lived because he told a judge. Asked at his trial where the Christians assembled, Justin answered that he lodged above the baths of a man named Martinus, and that he knew of no other meeting place than his own rooms. He also mentions, in the same breath, that this was his second stay in Rome. A rented upper floor over a public bath, with the noise and steam of the city coming up through the boards. Justin was not the only Christian keeping a school in Rome in those years. Valentinus, who taught that a secret higher knowledge was available to an inner circle of the spiritually equipped, and Marcion, who cut the Old Testament out of the Christian books and denied that the God who gave it was the Father of Jesus, had both gathered students in the city before him. Justin’s, though, is the school whose address anyone can give. Eusebius says he preached the divine word in the garb of a philosopher, and the garb was the point. A Roman who saw a man in that cloak knew what he was looking at, the way we know a doctor’s coat, and Justin used the recognition. Christianity, he was saying with his clothes before he said it with his mouth, is not a foreign superstition; it is the true philosophy, and here is its teacher, taking students. He took at least one who mattered: Tatian, who later assembled the four Gospels into a single continuous narrative, the Diatessaron, which the Syrian churches read for centuries. Teaching in public in Rome meant fighting in public in Rome. Justin says he put questions to a Cynic philosopher named Crescens, one of the school that made a public show of despising money, comfort and reputation, and found "most convincingly that he, in truth, knows nothing," and he offered to hold the examination over again in the emperor’s presence if anyone wanted to watch. He also said flatly in writing that he expected to be plotted against and fixed to the stake, perhaps by Crescens himself, "that lover of bravado and boasting," a man he judged not worthy of the name of philosopher. Tatian and Eusebius both report that Crescens did in fact plot against him. Justin knew the risk and stayed at his post.

(●) c. 155 AD: He addressed his First Apology to rulers who liked to be called philosophers, and asked for nothing but a fair hearing. + The First Apology is addressed to Antoninus Pius, to his adopted sons (one of them the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, whom Justin names by his boyhood name, Verissimus, and titles "the philosopher"), to the sacred Senate and to the whole Roman people. The word "apology" in the title has nothing to do with saying sorry. It translates the Greek apologia, the speech a defendant makes in court, and that is exactly the form of the thing: a legal brief filed on behalf of people who were not allowed to speak. Justin opens by holding his readers to their own advertising. Since you are called pious and philosophers, he says, guardians of justice and lovers of learning, give good heed and hearken to my address. Justin’s central complaint is procedural, and it is devastating precisely because it is so dry. Rome was executing people for a name. A magistrate did not ask a Christian what he had done; he asked whether he was a Christian, and the confession was the crime. Justin asks the emperor to notice that no other charge in Roman law works that way, and to do the ordinary thing: investigate the conduct, and if Christians are found guilty of a real offense, punish them for the offense. If they are not, stop. Along the way he answers the standing rumors, which were ugly and specific, that Christians were atheists, that they ate human flesh at their meetings, that they put out the lights and slept with each other’s wives. His answer to the rumors is to publish the meetings (T4). A shorter second petition followed, addressed to the Senate, and it was written hot. A woman had converted; her husband, who had not, denounced her to the authorities out of spite. When the case reached the urban prefect Urbicus (the prefect of the city was the senior magistrate in Rome, the man who kept order and heard the capital cases), a teacher named Ptolemaeus was condemned simply for admitting he was a Christian. A bystander named Lucius objected out loud that the man had been convicted of no crime, was asked whether he too was a Christian, said yes, and was led off to die with him; and a third man after him. Justin sets the sequence down in flat prose and lets it indict itself. The First Apology can be dated to roughly 155 from its own contents, since Justin says Christ was born a hundred and fifty years ago and speaks of Marcion as still alive and teaching.

(●) c. 165 AD: Tried before the prefect Rusticus with six others, he refused to sacrifice and was beheaded. + The record of the trial survives, in three versions of differing length. The shortest is usually judged the earliest, though some scholars argue that the middle one stands nearer the court’s own minutes, and either way we may be reading something not far from a Roman transcript. The judge was Quintus Junius Rusticus, prefect of the city of Rome. He was also, and this is the irony of the whole scene, the Stoic philosopher who had taught Marcus Aurelius, and whom Marcus thanks by name in the opening pages of the Meditations, the private notebook that emperor kept for himself, for teaching him to want a straightened character. The most famous philosopher-emperor’s own tutor sentenced the man who had written to that emperor asking for philosophy’s fair hearing. Six others stood with Justin: Chariton, a woman named Charito, Euelpistus (a slave of the emperor’s household), Hierax, Paeon and Liberianus. Rusticus went down the line, asked each one, and got seven confessions. Then he turned back to Justin with the question a Roman judge would think crushing. In the acts as the Ante-Nicene Fathers print them, Rusticus asks whether Justin supposes he will ascend into heaven to receive some recompense, and Justin answers: "I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it." Rusticus ordered them to sacrifice to the gods; they refused; and the sentence was that those who had refused to sacrifice and to obey the emperor be scourged, and led away to suffer the punishment of decapitation, according to the laws. The year is a convention, as the birth date was at the other end of his life. Rusticus held the prefecture somewhere in the range of 162 to 168, so the execution falls inside that window, and 165 is the traditional figure rather than a recorded one. The church has called him Justin Martyr ever since, which is a rare thing: a man’s manner of death becoming his surname.

What He Taught

(T1) Whatever anyone has said truly belongs to Christians, because the Word who became flesh had already sown seed of himself in every mind. + Think about what happens when a Christian and an atheist agree that torturing children is wrong. Something is going on there, and the Christian has to account for it. Either the agreement is a coincidence, or the atheist has borrowed without noticing, or there is some real light available to a person who has never opened a Bible. Justin took the third option, and he took it further than almost anyone since. His key word is Logos, Greek for both "word" and "reason," the term John’s Gospel uses for the Son of God: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Justin’s move is to take that title with full seriousness in both of its senses. If the Son is the Reason of God, then wherever there is genuine reasoning there is some contact with him, whoever is doing the reasoning and whatever they call it. Justin describes this as the logos spermatikos, the seed-bearing Word: a farmer scattering seed across a whole countryside, including fields whose owners have never met him. Every human mind gets a seed of the Word. What that seed produces, in the best pagan minds, is real truth, actually true, genuinely theirs to have found. So Socrates, who was executed by Athens on a charge of atheism for telling his city that its gods were not gods, was on Justin’s account living by the Word without knowing his name, and Justin will say the startling thing outright: "those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them." He is careful to keep a distinction, and the distinction is the whole hinge of the idea. A seed is not a harvest. The philosophers had fragments and contradicted each other on the largest questions; in Christ the whole Word appeared in person. Later Christians have argued ever since about whether Justin gave the seed too much (†3), but nobody after him could pretend the question had not been asked.

(Q) "Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians." + Source: Justin, Second Apology 13 (Roberts and Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Justin has just conceded that Christian teaching seems in places to overlap with Plato’s and with the Stoics’. Rather than deny the overlap he claims it, and the sentence is his explanation of the claim rather than a boast about it.

(T2) The prophets are older than the philosophers, and what they wrote down afterwards happened. + The argument that converted Justin is the argument he spends most of his ink on, which is a rare and rather touching consistency in a writer. It has two halves, and modern readers usually notice only the second. The first half is about age, and it landed harder in the second century than it does now. A Greek or a Roman assumed that older meant truer, and that novelty was the mark of a fad. Christianity looked embarrassingly new, barely more than a century old, which is roughly how a religion founded in 1900 would look to us. Justin’s reply is that Christianity is not new at all: its books are the Hebrew prophets, and Moses is older than Plato, older than Homer, older than any Greek writer whose name anyone knows. When Plato says something true about God, Justin argues, the reasonable guess is that Plato had read Moses, since Moses came first. Not every modern scholar follows him there, though the bare claim underneath it, that Moses wrote before the Greeks did, was common ground in his century and was argued by Jewish and Christian writers alike. The second half is the one still in use. These old books, Justin says, are not merely old; they are checkable, because they say in advance what later happened. He works through the specifics at length for the emperor: a ruler’s scepter not departing from Judah, a virgin conceiving, a birth at Bethlehem, hands and feet pierced and garments divided by lot, a servant led silently to slaughter and buried with the rich. And then he does something a confidence man would not do. He tells the emperor where to check. The Hebrew books, he says, were translated into Greek for a king of Egypt long before Christ was born, and copies are in Jewish hands throughout the empire; anyone may look. Whether every one of Justin’s particular readings holds up is another matter, and some do not (†3), but the method is the one Christian apologetics has used ever since: point to the texts, and invite the audit.

(Q) "There existed, long before this time, certain men more ancient than all those who are esteemed philosophers, both righteous and beloved by God, who spoke by the Divine Spirit, and foretold events which would take place, and which are now taking place." + Source: Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 7 (Roberts and Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The words are not Justin’s own but the old man’s by the sea, quoted by Justin decades later as the sentence that undid his Platonism. Justin had just asked him whom a man should take for a teacher, or where he could be helped from, if the truth was not in the philosophers after all. The next line of the answer names them: "They are called prophets."

(T3) The Word was begotten from the Father before all creatures, and is God in his own right without being a rival God. + Here is the problem Justin inherited and could not put down. Christians worshipped Jesus. Christians also insisted, against every neighbor they had, that there is exactly one God. Nobody had yet worked out the vocabulary that holds those two together, and Justin is one of the first men on record trying to build it. His term is begotten, and he means it in a technical sense worth pausing on: not made, not created out of nothing, and not a second god assembled alongside the first, but brought forth from the Father as something that genuinely came from him and genuinely is what he is. Justin reaches for two homely pictures to keep the idea from collapsing. When you speak a word, the word goes out of you and yet nothing has been cut off you; you are not less for having spoken. And when you light one fire from another, the first fire is not diminished, while the new one burns in its own right. That is his account of how the Word can come forth from the Father without the Father being divided or diminished, and without the Word being a mere effect of God rather than God. Two things follow that Justin holds firmly. The Word existed before anything was made, so he is not part of creation. And it was the Word, not the invisible Father, who appeared in the Old Testament: the one who spoke to Moses from the burning bush, who visited Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, who wrestled Jacob. Those episodes have a name in theology, theophanies, from the Greek for a showing of God, meaning the scenes where God makes himself visible to somebody instead of merely speaking. Justin’s reading of them, that every one is an appearance of the Son, became standard for centuries. But Justin is writing about a hundred and sixty years before the Council of Nicaea, and his own phrasing sometimes gives the Son a rank rather than an equality; he can speak of him as holding second place, and he can tell Trypho outright that there is "another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things." What the church later decided about that language belongs with the honest reckoning (†3).

(Q) "God begat before all creatures a Beginning, [who was] a certain rational power [proceeding] from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos." + Source: Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 61 (Roberts and Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The square brackets are the translators’, marking words supplied to make the Greek read in English. Justin is showing Trypho from the Jewish Scriptures themselves that God has a Word who is distinct from him and is called by divine names. A few lines later comes the picture he is best remembered for: "just as we see also happening in the case of a fire, which is not lessened when it has kindled [another], but remains the same."

(T4) Christian worship is a washing and a shared meal, and the way to answer the rumors was to publish it. + Consider the position. Christians met before dawn, behind closed doors, in private houses. They called each other brother and sister and then kissed. They spoke of eating a body and drinking blood. They refused to sacrifice to the gods who kept the harvest coming and the empire standing. Rome concluded, not unreasonably given the evidence available to it, that these people were atheists who held cannibal feasts and slept with their own relatives. The obvious defense was to deny the charges. Justin did something better: he described the meeting, in an open letter to the emperor, in the plain administrative detail of a man with nothing to hide. New members, he explains, are first taught, and fast, and pray; then they are washed in water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and this washing is called illumination because the mind of the one learning is enlightened. Afterwards they are brought to the assembly for the first time. Prayers are said. The members greet each other with a kiss. Bread is brought, and a cup of wine mixed with water. The one presiding, whom Justin calls simply "the president," meaning nothing grander than the man who stands at the head of the meeting, gives thanks over them at some length, and the whole congregation answers "Amen," which Justin helpfully glosses for his Greek-reading emperor as a Hebrew word meaning "so be it." Deacons carry a portion to those who could not come. Those with means leave money, and the president holds it and spends it on orphans and widows, the sick, prisoners, and strangers staying in the city. Two details in this description have paid dividends nobody in the second century could have predicted. Justin says the assembly reads "the memoirs of the apostles," and a chapter earlier he had told his pagan reader that those memoirs "are called Gospels," which is the earliest surviving use of that plural title for a set of books. And he says plainly that the day of the assembly is Sunday, and why: it is the day light was created, and the day Jesus rose from the dead.

(Q) "And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits." + Source: Justin, First Apology 67 (Roberts and Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The sentence continues into the reading, the sermon, the standing prayers, the bread and the cup, and the collection for the poor. It is the oldest surviving full description of an ordinary Christian Sunday service, written roughly one hundred and twenty years after the crucifixion, and a reader who has been to church this year will recognize most of the order.

(Q) "For as for us, we reckon that no evil can be done us, unless we be convicted as evil-doers or be proved to be wicked men; and you, you can kill, but not hurt us." + Source: Justin, First Apology 2 (Roberts and Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Written to an emperor who held the power in question, about ten years before Justin was scourged and beheaded on the order of that emperor’s successor. He was not, as it turned out, bluffing.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He set the pattern for a trade that is still open: arguing the faith to outsiders on ground the outsiders already stand on. + Peter had told Christians to be "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15), and the word behind "defense" there is the same apologia that gives Justin’s books their title. Peter gave the command. Justin worked out what obeying it looks like when the person asking is a magistrate who can have you killed. The method he set is still the method, and it is a good deal easier to describe than to practice. He addressed the audience actually in front of him rather than a convenient version of it. He used the vocabulary his readers already owned, which in his case meant Greek philosophy and in a modern writer’s case might mean history, or law, or physics. He granted everything true the other side had said, and granted it warmly rather than as a tactic, which is why the seed of the Word (T1) reads as a compliment and not as a trap. Then, having granted all of that, he asked for examination rather than agreement, because a man confident of his case can afford to ask only for a hearing. Within two generations the shelf was full: Tatian his own student, Athenagoras petitioning Marcus Aurelius, Theophilus of Antioch writing to a pagan friend, Tertullian in Latin doing to Roman law what Justin had done to Greek philosophy. His own reputation held. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing about twenty years after Justin’s death, quotes him by name and reaches for his lost book against Marcion. Eusebius the historian, in the fourth century, gave him several chapters and copied out the list of his writings, which is how we know what has been lost. Jerome gave him an entry in his catalog of Christian authors. And the title stuck to him in the plainest possible way: the church did not remember him as Justin the Apologist or Justin of Neapolis, but as Justin Martyr.

(†) His pages are the earliest full description of Christian worship, and evidence of what the second century was already reading as Scripture. + Justin was not trying to leave evidence for anybody. He was trying to keep his friends from being executed, and the historical value of his work is a side effect of that effort, which is exactly what makes it good evidence. A man writing propaganda for the future does not stop to explain what the word "Amen" means. What falls out of his description, from around the middle of the second century, is a church that already looks recognizable: baptism in the threefold name, a weekly gathering on Sunday, Scripture read aloud, a sermon, standing prayer, bread and a mixed cup with thanksgiving, and a collection taken for the poor and kept by the presiding minister. Set that beside the New Testament and the gap between the apostles and the settled church shrinks considerably. The literary evidence matters just as much. Justin quotes and paraphrases material found in Matthew, Mark and Luke constantly, shows knowledge of John, calls these writings the memoirs of the apostles, says outright that they are called Gospels, and describes them as composed by the apostles and by those who followed them, a description that matches the traditional authorship of Mark, the follower of Peter, and Luke, the companion of Paul. He is also the reason we know how seriously the church took the alternatives: he wrote a book against all heresies, and another against Marcion, and though both are lost, Irenaeus was still quoting the one against Marcion a generation later.

(†) Where later Christians could not follow him: the rank he gave the Son, the philosophers he came close to baptizing, the Jews he argued past, and the thousand years he expected. + Justin is a pioneer, and pioneers leave behind roads that later travelers straighten. Four places where the church, or a good part of it, has had to say that he went wrong. - The rank of the Son. Justin can write that the Son holds the second place and the prophetic Spirit the third, and he can call the Word another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things. He means at the least that the Son is someone other than the Father, and he insists in the same breath that the Word is worshipped and existed before all creatures. But the ordering sits there in his own sentences, the language is loose, and a century and a half later Arius used something very like it to argue that the Son is a creature, however exalted. The Council of Nicaea in 325 answered with the word homoousios, "of one substance with the Father," precisely to close that door. Some of Justin’s sentences would not pass the creed his own questions made necessary, and he cannot fairly be blamed for failing a test written after he died. - Socrates the Christian. Saying that men who lived by reason before Christ "are Christians" reads far more generously than the New Testament’s own language. "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Paul agrees with Justin that pagans have real knowledge of God from the created world, and then says what that knowledge does with them: "So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Justin has an answer, that the seed is not the harvest and that a man living by the Word is living by Christ whether or not he has the name; whether the answer is enough is a live argument among Christians still. - The argument with the Jews. The Dialogue is courteous by the standards of its century and ends in friendship rather than in anathema, the formal curse one community pronounces on another, and that is worth saying first. But it also charges Jewish scribes with cutting words out of their own Scriptures to hide a prophecy of the cross. The words are "from the wood," which he insists once stood in the psalm he numbers ninety-five and English Bibles number ninety-six (the Greek Bible he read divides and counts the psalms a little differently from the Hebrew, so its numbers run one behind through most of the book), making the line read "the Lord hath reigned from the wood." That charge does not hold up. The Hebrew has no such words and never did, and the phrase looks instead like a Christian addition that had worked its way into some of the Greek copies Justin was reading, which means the man accusing the scribes of tampering was himself quoting an altered text, and plainly took it for the original. The Dialogue also reads the catastrophe of the recent war as deserved punishment. Later Christians quarried passages like these for purposes far uglier than Justin’s, and the honest thing is to name that rather than explain it away. - The thousand years. Justin expected a literal thousand-year reign of Christ in a rebuilt Jerusalem. Many Christians have not, then or since. What is admirable is how he handled the disagreement: he states his own view, and then says plainly that many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise. That is the right way to hold a disputed doctrine, and it is a better model than a good deal of what came after him. Take the four together and Justin still comes out the way the church has always taken him: a man asking the right questions two centuries before anyone had the vocabulary to answer them, and paying for the questions with his head.