Justin Martyr 100 AD – 165 AD

Justin Martyr was an early Christian apologist, the first Christian author known to have engaged Greek philosophy as a Christian. Born in Samaria, he sought wisdom among the Stoics, Peripatetics, Pythagoreans, and Platonists before converting to Christianity, which he came to regard as the true philosophy. His First and Second Apologies, addressed to the Roman emperors, defended Christian faith and practice against the prevailing pagan misunderstandings, while his Dialogue with Trypho is the earliest surviving Christian-Jewish disputation. He was martyred at Rome around 165.

Justin Martyr was born around 100 in Flavia Neapolis, the Roman city built over the ruins of biblical Shechem in Samaria. The son of pagan Greek-speaking colonists, he describes in his own writings a young philosophical pilgrimage through Stoicism, Peripateticism, and Pythagoreanism before settling on Platonism, and his subsequent encounter on the shore — by his account with an old man — that turned him to the prophets and to Christ.

He taught philosophy as a Christian both at Ephesus and later in Rome, where he ran a small school in the apartment of one Martin above the Timotian baths. Three of his works survive: the First Apology, addressed around 155 to the emperor Antoninus Pius; the Second Apology, an appendix on fresh persecutions in Rome; and the long Dialogue with Trypho, an exchange with a Hellenized Jew set in Ephesus, in which Justin argues for the Christian reading of the Hebrew scriptures.

Justin's project was the first sustained attempt to address Greek and Roman philosophical culture from within Christian faith: the divine logos, partially known to Socrates and the Stoics, was disclosed in fullness in Christ, and Christianity is therefore the true philosophy. Denounced by the Cynic Crescens, he was tried and executed in Rome around 165 with six other Christians, an event recorded in the authentic Acts of Justin and his Companions.