Saint Justin

Justin was born around the year 100 in Flavia Neapolis — present-day Nablus, in ancient Samaria — into a Greek and pagan family. His grandfather bore a Greek name, Bacchius, and his father a Latin one, Priscus; Justin himself acknowledged that he was a Gentile, with no roots whatsoever in Judaism. He received the careful education of a cultured young man of his time: rhetoric, poetry, and history. But there was a restlessness in him that the schoolbooks could not satisfy — a hunger to know who God is.

To answer that question, Justin knocked on the door of one school of philosophy after another. He first sought out a Stoic teacher, who could not explain to him the being of God. He moved on to a Peripatetic, but walked away when he realized the man was more interested in his fees than in the truth. He tried a Pythagorean, who demanded that he first study music, astronomy, and geometry. At last he found in Platonism a rest for his mind — the contemplation of ideas delighted him, and he believed himself close to wisdom.

It was then that the encounter that would change everything took place. Walking along the seashore, Justin came upon an old man — most likely a Syrian Christian — who struck up a conversation with him about God. The elder spoke to him of the prophets, men far more ancient than all the philosophers, who spoke moved by the Spirit of God and foretold the coming of Christ, fulfilled in Jesus. Their words, the old man said, were a surer testimony than the reasoning of the wise. Justin never forgot the effect of that conversation: “a flame was at once kindled in my soul,” he confessed, and he discovered that the Christian faith was “the only sure and profitable philosophy.” There he was converted — and gave himself entirely to spreading and defending the Christian religion.

The most beautiful thing is that Justin did not cast off the philosopher’s cloak: he went on wearing it, now as a Christian, teaching his disciples in Ephesus and later in Rome. Convinced that all truth comes from God, he taught that Jesus Christ is the Logos, the Word in whom the whole human race shares; and so Socrates, Plato, and so many others who lived before Christ, yet according to reason, touched fragments of the truth thanks to the “seed of the Word” planted within them — an insight that Saint Augustine would take up again centuries later. From this conviction his writings were born, of which there survive the First Apology, addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius in defense of the persecuted Christians, and the Dialogue with Trypho. In his texts he frequently quoted the Gospels, which he called the “Memoirs of the Apostles” — precious testimony that the accounts of the life of Jesus were already circulating and were read as authoritative in his day.

This faithfulness came at a price, and Justin paid it in full. Around the year 165, in Rome, he was arrested and, refusing to renounce the faith, died a martyr, beheaded together with some of his disciples. The Church has venerated him ever since as a saint and martyr, and recognizes him as one of the first and greatest of the Christian apologists — the philosopher who gave his life for the Truth he had found. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI devoted a catechesis to him, recalling him as a bridge between the reason of the ancients and the faith of the Gospel.