The Defense to Antoninus

Justin’s First Apology is a formal petition addressed, around the year 155, to the emperor Antoninus Pius, his adopted sons (the future Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus), the Senate, and the whole Roman people, pleading that Christians be tried by their deeds and not condemned for the bare name “Christian.” Its argument runs from the injustice of name-based punishment, through the refutation of the charges of atheism and immorality, to the great proof from fulfilled prophecy and the demonstration that Christian teaching is reasonable and benefits the state. This file treats the work as a legal and rational defense.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Address and the Date

The First Apology opens with a careful, almost legal superscription naming its addressees: the emperor “Titus Ælius Adrianus Antoninus Pius Augustus Cæsar,” his sons, “the sacred Senate, and the whole people of the Romans” (First Apology 1; ANF 1). The work is thus formally a petition (libellus) to the supreme authority, written in the persona of a loyal subject appealing for justice. The date is fixed within narrow limits by an internal clue: in chapter 46 Justin writes that Christ was born “one hundred and fifty years ago” under Quirinius (First Apology 46; ANF 1), and the work names the imperial family in a configuration that points to the mid-150s. The conventional date is c. 155, sometimes given as c. 153–157 [Disputed: a date c. 155 is standard (Barnard, Justin Martyr, p. 19); some place it c. 153 or as late as c. 157; Minns & Parvis, Apologies, pp. 41–44, weigh the indications and incline to c. 153, while noting that the “150 years” of ch. 46 is a round number and not a precise chronological peg]. What is not in doubt is the reign: the work belongs to the principate of Antoninus Pius (138–161), addressed to an emperor with a reputation for justice and clemency, which Justin repeatedly invokes (First Apology 2–3; ANF 1).

Punished for a Name

The hinge of the legal argument is the injustice of condemning men for the name “Christian” without proof of any crime. Justin presses the point as a philosopher and as a Roman: “By the mere application of a name nothing is decided, either good or evil, apart from the actions implied in the name” (First Apology 4; ANF 1). Names are empty until filled by deeds; a man is not made guilty by being called a Christian, any more than he is made good by being called a philosopher. Justin therefore demands what Roman justice in principle guarantees — that the accused be examined, the charges proved, and the innocent acquitted: “We demand that the charges against the Christians be investigated, and that, if these be substantiated, they be punished as they deserve… but if no one can convict us of anything, true reason forbids you, for the sake of a wicked rumour, to wrong blameless men” (First Apology 3, 7; ANF 1). The whole apology is, at bottom, a plea for due process: judge us by our actions, and if we are criminals, punish us; but do not punish the name.

Atheism and Immorality Refuted

The popular charges against Christians were chiefly two — atheism (because they refused the gods and the imperial cult) and gross immorality (the rumored “Thyestean banquets” and “Oedipodean intercourse,” cannibalism and incest, supposed to occur at their secret meetings). Justin answers both. To the charge of atheism he replies that Christians are indeed “atheists” with respect to the false gods — “we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned” — but worshippers of the true God, the Father of righteousness, and of his Son and the prophetic Spirit (First Apology 6; ANF 1). The pagan “gods” are in fact wicked demons, who under the names of Zeus and the rest have demanded sacrifice and worked the corruption of mankind (First Apology 5, 9; ANF 1). To the charge of immorality Justin opposes the actual moral teaching and conduct of Christians, to which he devotes a long central section quoting the words of Christ on chastity, love of enemies, truthfulness, and care for the poor (First Apology 14–17; ANF 1; treated in Christian Life and Worship).

The Argument from Prophecy

The intellectual heart of the First Apology is the proof from prophecy, which fills its central chapters (First Apology 30–53; ANF 1). Justin’s strategy is to forestall the obvious objection — that anyone could invent a teacher and credit him with divine deeds — by showing that the events of Christ’s life were foretold, in detail, by the Hebrew prophets centuries before they occurred. He marshals a long catena of texts: the prophecies of the Messiah’s birth from a virgin, of his lineage, of his entry into Jerusalem, of his healings, of his rejection and suffering, of the piercing of his hands and feet, the casting of lots for his garments, his death and resurrection, and the calling of the Gentiles (First Apology 31–53; ANF 1). The age of the prophets, Justin stresses, is beyond dispute — Moses is older than all the Greek writers, and the Scriptures were rendered into Greek under Ptolemy and lay open in the royal library at Alexandria — so the prophecies cannot be Christian forgeries after the fact (First Apology 31; ANF 1). Fulfilled prophecy is, for Justin, the rational ground of faith: it is what makes belief in Christ not credulity but the recognition of a pattern foretold. This is the very argument the old man on the seashore had used to convert him (see The Conversion).

The Demons and the Counterfeits

A distinctive and, to modern readers, strange feature of Justin’s defense is the large role he assigns to demons. The pagan gods, he argues, are not nothing — they are real wicked spirits who, since the fall, have terrified and deceived mankind, demanded sacrifices, and passed themselves off under the names of Zeus, Apollo, and the rest (First Apology 5, 9, 14; ANF 1). It is these demons who instigate the persecution of Christians, because the gospel exposes and defeats them; they moved the world against Socrates in his day for the same reason, and they move it against the Christians now (First Apology 5; ANF 1). Justin further uses the demons to explain the troubling parallels between pagan myth and Christian truth — the sons of Zeus who are said to have been born of unions with mortals, to have healed, suffered, died, and ascended. These, he argues, are demonic counterfeits, fabricated in advance by spirits who had heard the prophecies and sought to discredit Christ when he came by making his story seem one more fable (First Apology 21, 54; ANF 1). The argument is alien to the modern mind and is easily dismissed, but within Justin’s framework it does real work: it lets him take paganism seriously as a spiritual reality rather than mere superstition, accounts for the mythological parallels without conceding that Christianity borrowed from them, and casts the persecution as a cosmic conflict rather than a mere administrative cruelty (Barnard, Justin Martyr, ch. 8).

A Faith That Benefits the State

Throughout, Justin insists that the empire has nothing to fear and much to gain from Christians. They pray for the emperor, pay their taxes, and seek a kingdom “with God” rather than a human one, so that they are the most peaceable of subjects (First Apology 11, 17; ANF 1). Their doctrine of judgment and of rewards and punishments after death makes them better citizens than the fear of human law can make anyone, for they believe that nothing escapes God (First Apology 12, 17; ANF 1). The persecution, Justin argues, is therefore not only unjust but self-defeating: Rome is punishing its most loyal subjects on the strength of demon-inspired slander. The petition closes by appending, as documentary proof of Christian innocence, the text of a rescript of the emperor Hadrian requiring that Christians be tried by due process and not condemned on clamor alone (First Apology 68; ANF 1) — Justin resting his case, in the end, on Rome’s own better law.

The Apology as a Form

The First Apology is the most accomplished example of a genre that the second century made its own: the Christian apologia, the reasoned public defense of the faith addressed (at least in form) to the authorities or the educated pagan public. The word does not mean “apology” in the modern sense of regret; it is the term for a defense speech, as in Plato’s Apology of Socrates — and the parallel is deliberate, for Justin presents the Christians, like Socrates, as men unjustly accused of impiety by a society that does not understand them. The form gives Justin’s work its characteristic double movement: it is at once defensive, answering the charges of atheism and immorality and pleading for justice, and positive, expounding Christian belief, ethics, and worship so that the reader may see there is nothing to fear and much to admire. Whether any emperor ever read it is doubtful — the formal address to Antoninus Pius is partly a literary convention, a way of claiming the public square — but the real audience was wider: the educated pagan who might be persuaded, the wavering sympathizer, and the Christian community itself, given by Justin a reasoned account of its own faith to set against the slanders. The First Apology thus stands at the head of the long tradition of Christian apologetics, and it set the pattern — defense joined to exposition, reason joined to testimony — that the tradition would follow (Barnard, Justin Martyr, ch. 1; see The First Christian Philosopher).

References

Justin, First Apology 1–17, 30–53, 68. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
Barnard, L. W. Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Minns, Denis, and Paul Parvis. Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.