Ecumenical Commemoration
Philosopher & Martyr
June 1 · d. 165
also known as Justin Martyr, Justin of Rome, St. Justin, Justin Philosopher
Justin was a philosopher of Flavia Neapolis in Roman Palestine who tried the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Pythagoreans and the Platonists before he became a Christian, and who kept the philosopher's cloak afterward. He taught in Ephesus and in Rome, addressed a defence of the Christians to the emperor Antoninus Pius, debated a Jewish interlocutor named Trypho, and was beheaded in Rome with six companions under the prefect Rusticus about the year 165.
Justin was born at Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, a Roman colony planted near ancient Shechem, and he tells us himself that he was the son of Priscus and the grandson of Bacchius. The names are Latin and Greek; he was not circumcised, and he says so plainly in the Dialogue with Trypho, asking his Jewish interlocutor not to hesitate to trust him although he is an uncircumcised man. He was a boy of a Greek-speaking household in a land full of the memory of Israel, and what he wanted was to know God.
So he went looking, teacher by teacher. He tells the story himself. A Stoic first, who turned out to have no knowledge of divine things and thought such knowledge was not needed anyway. Then a Peripatetic, who took him in and then, quite soon, asked for his fee, which Justin took as proof that the man was no philosopher at all. Then a Pythagorean of high reputation, who would not teach him anything until he had first mastered music and astronomy and geometry. Then, at last, a Platonist, and here Justin was happy. He was making progress. He expected, he says, to look upon God at any moment.
That is when the old man found him. Justin had gone out to a field near the sea, wanting quiet and wanting to be away from people, and an old man followed him at a little distance, a man by no means contemptible in appearance, with meek and venerable manners. They talked. Justin said the confident thing, the thing his training had given him: that the Deity cannot be seen with the eyes as other living things can, but is discernible to the mind alone, as Plato says, and I believe him. The old man took that apart. He argued that the soul does not reach God by its own climbing, and he pointed Justin instead to the Prophets, men who both saw and announced the truth. Then he went away, telling Justin to attend to what he had heard, and Justin never saw him again. He does not give the man a name. He may not have known it.
What happened next Justin puts in one sentence: "But 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 turned the words over in his mind, he says, and found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable. "Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher." He did not stop being one. He kept the cloak.
There was something else working on him, and he names it too, in the Second Apology. Before any of this, while he was still delighting in the doctrines of Plato, he had heard Christians slandered and had watched them go to their deaths without fear. He reasoned it out the way a philosopher would: no man who lives for his pleasures welcomes death, and no man who has something to hide walks up and denounces himself. Whatever these people were, they were not what the rumours said. The argument that persuaded him was the courage of ordinary Christians dying well. He would one day become that argument himself.
He taught, in Ephesus and then in Rome, where he kept a school in lodgings above a man named Martinus, at the Timiotinian Bath. He wrote for the emperor. The First Apology is addressed by name to Antoninus Pius, to his sons, to the Senate and to the whole Roman people, and it asks for something simple and enormous: judge us by our deeds, not by the name. In it he described, for outsiders who had never seen it, what Christians actually do. On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place; the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits; the president instructs and exhorts; all rise and pray; bread and wine and water are brought; the people say Amen; and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. He explained the food is called among them the Eucharist, and that "not as common bread and common drink do we receive these." And he told the emperor that these people, who had once valued the getting of wealth above everything, now brought what they had into a common stock and shared with everyone in need.
He also told the emperor what happened when the law went wrong, and here he wrote as an eyewitness. A woman had become a Christian; her estranged husband, unable to prosecute her, denounced her teacher Ptolemaeus instead, and the prefect Urbicus condemned him for nothing but confessing the name. A bystander named Lucius spoke up: the man had not been found guilty of any crime. Urbicus said, you also seem to me to be such an one. Lucius answered, most certainly I am, and was condemned too, and Justin adds that Lucius professed his thanks, knowing that he was delivered from such wicked rulers. A third man, unnamed, went the same way. That was a decade or so before Justin's own turn came.
He saw it coming. He had quarrelled publicly at Rome with a Cynic philosopher named Crescens, and he wrote that he expected to be plotted against and put in the stocks by someone he had named, or perhaps by Crescens. His pupil Tatian later said Crescens was the cause. The trial record itself names no accuser at all.
About the year 165 Justin was arrested with six companions, Chariton, Charito, Euelpistus, Hierax, Paeon and Liberianus, and brought before Quintus Junius Rusticus, prefect of the city, who was also the emperor Marcus Aurelius's own teacher in Stoic philosophy. The state's philosopher sat in judgement on the church's. Rusticus asked where the Christians assembled, and Justin answered that God is not circumscribed by place. Then the prefect turned the knife toward the thing Justin had spent his life on. "Hearken, you who are called learned, and think that you know true doctrines; if you are scourged and beheaded, do you believe you will ascend into heaven?" Justin said he hoped so, if he endured. Rusticus pressed: do you suppose, then, that you will ascend into heaven to receive some recompense? A philosopher knows the difference between supposing and knowing, and both men in that room knew it. Justin said, "I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it."
They were ordered to sacrifice together to the gods. Justin said no right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety. Rusticus said that unless he obeyed he would be punished without mercy, and Justin answered that through prayer they could be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ even when they had been punished, because this would become to them salvation and confidence at the more fearful and universal judgement seat of our Lord and Saviour. Then all seven spoke at once, and it is the only line in the record they say together: "Do what you will, for we are Christians, and do not sacrifice to idols." They were scourged and beheaded at the accustomed place.
He had gone out to a field by the sea once, wanting to be alone, and had been given the prophets by a stranger whose name he never learned. At the end he was not alone, and he was not supposing.
You may have noticed how carefully Justin distinguished supposing from knowing when the prefect pressed him, and how little of his certainty came from argument. He had been a trained man with a Platonist's confidence, and what dismantled it was a stranger by the sea pointing him to witnesses who had seen; what first drew him toward Christ at all was watching ordinary people, whose names he never gives us, die without fear. He did not stop reasoning after that, but he stopped expecting his reasoning to carry the whole weight. Where in your own life have you been supposing something about God and calling it knowledge, and who are the witnesses, living or written, you would have to actually listen to in order to find out?
Justin is one of the very few second-century Christians we can hear speaking in the first person. Three of his own works survive: the First Apology, the Second Apology, and the Dialogue with Trypho. They are the source for his parentage, his birthplace, his philosophical training, his conversion, and his account of Christian worship, and they are self-presentation rather than neutral autobiography, each written to persuade a particular audience. Around them stand four other witnesses: the Acts of Justin, preserving his trial; his own pupil Tatian, writing within a decade or two; Eusebius of Caesarea, compiling his Church History about 313 to 324 from copies of Justin's books; and the manuscripts.
The manuscript situation is dramatic and worth stating plainly. All three authentic works reach us essentially through one medieval codex, Parisinus graecus 450, a paper manuscript finished on 11 September 1364, bought in Venice about 1540 by the French bibliophile Guillaume Pellicier and sent to what is now the Bibliothèque nationale de France. A second Greek copy, Claromontanus 82, written in 1571, is a copy of the first and carries no independent authority. That is a gap of roughly twelve hundred years between Justin's death and the earliest complete witness, and the witness is damaged: chapter 2 of the Second Apology is almost entirely wanting and has to be restored from Eusebius's quotation of it. One genuinely independent early fragment exists, P.Oxy. 5129, a fourth-century parchment carrying about six lines of First Apology 50 to 51, published in volume 73 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, roughly a thousand years older than the Paris codex and a spot-check rather than a rival text. The editio princeps was printed by Robert Estienne in 1551.
The dates are all reconstructions. No source gives Justin's birth year; "about 100" is a back-calculation from the datable Apology and the years of training the Dialogue implies, and the Catholic Encyclopedia's "converted to Christianity about A.D. 130" is a synthesis, not a date in any text. The First Apology is anchored by three internal clues: Justin's statement that Christ was born a hundred and fifty years ago under Cyrenius, the naming of Felix as governor in Alexandria (a prefect of Egypt attested in office in September 151 and probably c. 150 to 154 on papyrological evidence), and the fact that Marcion's error had already spread. The honest result is the early-to-mid 150s rather than a fixed year. For the death, "about 165" is where the ranges converge: Rusticus held the urban prefecture roughly 162 to 168 on modern prosopography, and Eusebius places the martyrdom under Marcus Aurelius, whose reign with Lucius Verus ran 161 to 169. No ancient text gives a consulship, a regnal year, or a day.
Two things in the corpus are genuinely contested, and the church's own reference works say so. First, whether the Second Apology was ever an independent work: Eusebius sometimes cites the second as the first, the Catholic Encyclopedia concludes with Bardenhewer and Harnack that it doubtless never existed separately, and Denis Minns and Paul Parvis reopened the whole question in their 2009 Oxford edition. Second, the Acts of Justin survive in three recensions, printed as A, B and C. Which stands closest to an actual court minute is disputed among specialists; the shorter A is often preferred as least elaborated, others argue B preserves the fuller original, and C plainly adds later devotional material. The English text most often read online identifies no recension at all.
Justin's feast has two histories that later converged. In the West he stands at 13 April in the Roman Martyrology, and the earliest dated witness this page can produce is Jacques Callot's print series Les Images de tous les Saincts et Saintes de l'Année, published at Paris in 1636, whose thirty-first plate is captioned "St. Justin, Philosopher Martyr, April 13." In 1882 Leo XIII had a proper Mass and Office composed in his honour and set the feast at 14 April: propers and a one-day shift within an existing observance, not the creation of one. The Orthodox Church has long kept 1 June for Justin the Philosopher and his companions, with its own proper hymnography, a troparion in the fourth tone and a kontakion in the second. In the 1969 calendar reform the Western feast moved to 1 June, where Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans and Anglicans now all mark it. Justin was never formally canonized; his veneration long predates that machinery, and he is honoured by immemorial custom.
Bones venerated as his rest in a reliquary beneath the high altar of San Giovanni Battista at Sacrofano, north of Rome. A card beside them records that the body was exhumed from the cemetery of San Marcello at the thirteenth mile of the Via Flaminia in the year 1724, and the town's own heritage record notes these among holy bodies excavated in the Chigi period, the expenses documented in the Chigi archives. That is an early-modern catacomb identification, of the kind Rome made and distributed by the hundred in those centuries, with no chain of custody back to the second century. The devotion is real and local; Sacrofano is a parish, not a pilgrimage destination.
He has no fixed medieval attribute. He is known by the philosopher's cloak he never took off and by a book or scroll, and by a beard that belongs to a teacher rather than to a bishop or an ascetic. No religious order, hospital or university carries his name; his institutional memory runs through parish dedications, among them San Giustino in Rome, a parish erected in 1952 with its church inaugurated the following year, and parishes and grade schools in Toronto, Miami, and California. One caution: the ancient Justinuskirche at Frankfurt-Höchst, begun about 830 and standing still, is dedicated to a different Justin, called the Confessor.
Justin's three surviving works are quoted here in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation by Marcus Dods and George Reith (Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885), the version most widely available and the one used throughout this page. The Dialogue with Trypho passages are from chapter 3 (the field near the sea, the old man's appearance, and Justin's Platonist confession), chapter 8 (the flame kindled in the soul, and "Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher"), and chapter 28 (the uncircumcised man). The First Apology supplies chapter 14 (the common stock; note that secondary works sometimes misprint this as chapter 68, which is the conclusion), chapter 46 (Christ born a hundred and fifty years ago under Cyrenius), chapter 66 (the Eucharist, and "not as common bread and common drink do we receive these"), and chapter 67 (the Sunday assembly, the deacons carrying a portion to the absent, and the collection). The Second Apology supplies chapter 2 (Urbicus, Ptolemaeus and Lucius) and chapter 12 (the Christians seen fearless of death). The trial exchange, including "I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it" and the seven martyrs' single collective answer, comes from The Martyrdom of Justin, chapter 4, in Marcus Dods's translation; that text also gives the school above Martinus at the Timiotinian Bath in chapter 2, and the individual examinations of the six companions in chapter 3. Note that the same passage circulates in at least two other English renderings, one in the Catholic Encyclopedia and one used in the Roman Office of Readings for 1 June, and they should not be mixed with this one on a single page. Justin's prediction that he expected to be plotted against, "or perhaps by Crescens," is preserved in Eusebius, Church History IV.16, in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation; Eusebius IV.12 preserves the opening of the First Apology naming Priscus and Bacchius. For the ancient testimony to Justin's lost work against Marcion, see Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.6.2. Jules Lebreton's 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia article remains the source for the traditional dating framework, the manuscript facts, and the Leonine feast. For the modern scholarship named above: Miroslav Marcovich's critical Greek editions (Patristische Texte und Studien 38 and 47, De Gruyter, 1994 and 1997); Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies (Oxford Early Christian Texts, 2009), now the standard edition with translation; Thomas B. Falls's Dialogue with Trypho, revised by Thomas P. Halton and edited by Michael Slusser (Catholic University of America Press, 2003); Leslie W. Barnard's translation in Ancient Christian Writers 56 (Paulist Press, 1997); Paul Parvis, "Justin Martyr," Expository Times 120 (November 2008), 53 to 61, a general survey; and Matthijs den Dulk, Between Jews and Heretics: Refiguring Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho (Routledge, 2018). The 1724 Sacrofano inscription and the Chigi excavation note are published on the Comune di Sacrofano's own cultural-heritage page for the church of San Giovanni Battista; the 1636 Callot plate with its April 13 caption is catalogued by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
S. Justin was born in the city of Naples, and his father was called Cryspobachia, and was a right great philosopher, which laboured strongly for the christian religion, insomuch that he composed many fair books, much profitable, as recounts S. Jerome and Hugo. He betook to the emperor Antoninus a book which he composed of the christian religion, and so much he laboured toward the said emperor that he had pity and compassion of the christian people, and not only the emperor himself, but also all his children, and all the senators of Rome. And the said emperor made sithe a commandment that no paynim should not be so hardy as have in despite the sign of the very cross. Item Pompey the Trogan, which was of the Spanish nation, composed into forty-four books all the histories that were through all the world from the time and reign of Minim that was king of Assyria, unto the time and reign of the Emperor Caesar, and wrote them in Latin, the which history S. Justin abbreviated or shorted, and also composed many other books which were too long to rehearse. To him was divinely revealed or told that much he should suffer before his death, for to maintain truth, as it appears by a writ or letter, which he sent to the emperor Antoninus, where he says thus: I shall have enough of persecutions of staves of iron, by them against whom I battle or fight for to maintain the estate of truth, but when that shall be, I then shall have knowledge that they be not philosophers, that is to wit, loving are and science, but that they may be lovers of all vanities, for he is not worthy to be called a philosopher which publicly affirms and attests that which he knows not, and that says that the christians are without a god, and put in greater error those that already are in error. All the which thing was thus accomplished, so as S. Jerome recounts and Eusebius also. For when the said emperor was passed to God from this world, after him reigned two other emperors, the which were named Antonin and Aurelian, that were great persecutors of christian people, and so as Justin persevered in holy living and in holy doctrine he composed the second book for to defend therewith the religion christian. It happed so that many other philosophers were, that great envy had at Justin as much for his holy life and honest conditions whereof he was filled, as for his great science, accused him to the emperor, saying he was christian, and that he would destroy their law. Then was Justin taken, and made to suffer many torments and divers pains, in which because that he constantly reclaimed ever the name of God, they sprinkled and shed his blood by such manner that he rendered and gave his soul to our Lord Jesu Christ with whom he rests in peace, and shall rest without end in seculorum secula. Amen.
What that leaves is a martyr-act unusually well placed among its kind. Historians of Roman law and early Christianity regard the Acts of Justin as among the small handful of plausibly documentary Christian martyr records, against a much larger later literature of invented tortures and speeches. The prefect is independently attested; the exchange has the shape of a real interrogation. The one honest caution is that even the best recension is a Christian text with an apologetic purpose, and it shapes Rusticus somewhat as the stock unreasonable magistrate. Documentary is not the same as unmediated.
A separate matter must be named rather than smoothed over. The Dialogue with Trypho argues at length that the church has succeeded to Israel's inheritance, and modern scholarship treats it as a foundational document in the history of Christian supersessionist theology; later writers built on it. That is a fair reading of what is on the page, and it is not a modern overreaction. Recent work, notably Matthijs den Dulk's Between Jews and Heretics (2018), argues that much of the Dialogue's rhetorical energy is aimed sideways at rival Christian groups, with Trypho partly serving that internal argument. That is a real scholarly reassessment rather than an excuse, and it does not remove what the text says. Whether Trypho was the Tannaitic sage Rabbi Tarfon, as has occasionally been proposed, is a conjecture most scholars reject.
Finally, a caution about superlatives. Justin is often called the first Christian philosopher or the first great Christian intellectual. That is partly a statement about what survived. Much of his generation's writing did not, and priority claims in the ante-Nicene period are frequently artifacts of transmission. Among the earliest whose apologetic writings survive at length is the safer sentence, and it is still a remarkable one.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Justin Martyr boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Nablus /ˈnɑːbləs/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12