05 — The Second Apology
Justin’s Second Apology is a short, urgent work occasioned by a specific miscarriage of justice: the condemnation at Rome of a Christian named Ptolemaeus, and of two others, Lucius and an unnamed man, who protested. From this case Justin argues the injustice of punishing Christians for the name, and he addresses the hardest question raised by persecution — why God permits the righteous to suffer. The work also raises a famous textual puzzle: whether it is a separate apology or part of the same work as the First Apology. These files treat the shorter apology and its theology of providence.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
The Second Apology is the briefest of Justin’s three surviving works and the most tied to a concrete event. Its relation to the First Apology is one of the long-standing problems of Justin scholarship: whether the two are genuinely separate works or whether the so-called “Second Apology” is an appendix, a set of displaced chapters, or “cutting-room floor” material belonging to a single original apology. Its theology is dominated by the problem of innocent suffering and the providence of God, and by Justin’s most striking statements about the philosophers who “lived with the Logos” (treated under the Logos theology in Section 07). These two files divide the work’s text-critical and historical questions from its providential theology.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Shorter Apology | The Second Apology: the case of Ptolemaeus, Lucius, and the third martyr; the occasion and argument; and the disputed question of whether the two Apologies are one work or two. |
| Providence and the Martyrs | Why God permits the righteous to suffer; the role of the demons; the world preserved for the sake of the Christians; and Justin’s account of why he and his fellow Christians do not simply kill themselves to reach God. |
See Also
- The Defense to Antoninus — the companion and possibly parent work
- The School at Rome — Crescens, named in the Second Apology
- The Logos Spermatikos — the “seminal Word” passages of the Second Apology
- The Trial Before Rusticus — the persecution the work confronts
References
- Justin, Second Apology. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; and Minns & Parvis, Apologies (OECT, 2009).
- Minns, Denis, and Paul Parvis. Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- Barnard, L. W. Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.