The Shorter Apology

Justin’s Second Apology is a brief, pointed work provoked by a particular judicial outrage: the condemnation at Rome, before the prefect Urbicus, of a Christian named Ptolemaeus — and of two bystanders, Lucius and an unnamed third, who objected that men were being executed for the name alone. From this case Justin renews his demand for justice. The work is also the focus of a famous text-critical question: whether it is a genuinely separate apology or part of the same composition as the First Apology. This file treats the occasion, the argument, and the one-or-two-apologies problem.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Case of Ptolemaeus and Lucius

The Second Apology opens not with a philosophical preface but with a news story. A certain woman, formerly dissolute, had become a Christian and reformed her life; her pagan husband, angered by her new continence and morals, denounced her as a Christian, and when that failed turned his rage on the man who had instructed her in the faith, Ptolemaeus (Second Apology 2; ANF 1). Ptolemaeus was arrested and brought before Urbicus, the urban prefect, who asked him a single question — whether he was a Christian — and on his truthful confession ordered him led away to execution. At this a bystander named Lucius, himself a Christian, protested the injustice aloud: what crime had the man committed? He was no adulterer, no thief, no murderer — he was condemned for confessing the name of Christian, and this was unworthy of the emperor’s justice. Urbicus answered only, “You also seem to me to be such an one”; and when Lucius said he was, ordered him too led off. Lucius declared himself thankful. And a third man, coming forward, was likewise condemned (Second Apology 2; ANF 1). The episode is the First Apology’s abstract argument made flesh: men put to death for a name, by a magistrate who does not even pretend to allege a crime.

The Woman, the Husband, and the Cost of Conversion

The opening story rewards a closer look, for it shows the social texture of conversion in the second century and the way Christian discipleship cut across the ordinary structures of pagan family life. The unnamed woman had been, with her husband, given to drunkenness and vice; on becoming a Christian she reformed and tried to bring her husband to the same continence, and when he refused and persisted in his debauchery she sought to separate from him (Second Apology 2; ANF 1). Her new faith had changed not only her beliefs but her conduct and her marriage, and it was precisely this disruption of the household — a wife who would no longer share her husband’s vices — that provoked his fury and his denunciation. The episode illustrates a recurring feature of the early persecutions: Christians were often denounced not by the state proactively but by aggrieved neighbors, spouses, and associates whose lives the new faith had disturbed, and the machinery of Roman justice was then set in motion against them. It also shows the gospel reaching into the most intimate relations and exacting a cost there — the convert’s transformed life becoming an offense to those closest to her, and the instructor Ptolemaeus paying for it with his head. Justin tells the story without sentimentality, as evidence of both the moral power of the faith and the injustice of the law that punished it.

The Occasion and the Argument

This judicial scandal is the occasion of the whole work. Justin addresses it — formally, like the First Apology, to the Roman authorities, here naming “Romans” and the Senate — as fresh proof that the persecution rests on nothing but the name and the malice of accusers, abetted by the demons who hate the truth (Second Apology 1–2; ANF 1). He renews the demand for due process and answers a stock objection that the persecutors put to Christians: if you so love death and a better life with God, why do you not simply kill yourselves and go to him, and stop troubling us? Justin’s answer — that suicide would be to fight against God’s purpose and that Christians stay alive to bear witness and to keep the world supplied with those for whose sake it is preserved — opens onto the theology of providence treated in the companion file (Second Apology 4; see Providence and the Martyrs). It is in this work, too, that Justin names his enemy Crescens the Cynic and foretells that the man’s plotting will likely bring about his own death (Second Apology 3; see The School at Rome). And it is here that he sets out his most developed statements about the philosophers who shared in the Logos and about why their truth was partial (Second Apology 10, 13; see The Logos Spermatikos).

One Work or Two? The Text-Critical Problem

The relation of the Second Apology to the First is one of the classic problems of Justin scholarship, and it cannot be settled with certainty. Both works survive only in a single fourteenth-century manuscript (Parisinus graecus 450, dated 1364) and its copies, and in that manuscript the so-called “Second Apology” follows the first as a short, loosely organized piece without a fresh formal address of the kind the First Apology has. Three broad positions have been taken (Minns & Parvis, Apologies, pp. 21–31):

Two separate works. On the traditional view, Justin wrote two distinct apologies — a longer one and a shorter sequel occasioned by the Ptolemaeus affair. Eusebius already speaks of “a second book” that Justin addressed to the same emperor’s successors (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History IV.16–18; trans. NPNF II/1), and the two are transmitted as two.
One work. On a second view, the two are really parts of a single apology, the division being secondary; some chapters of the “Second Apology” read as if they belonged with, or as an appendix to, the first.
One and a half — an apology with an appendix. Minns and Parvis argue that what we call the Second Apology is essentially “outtake” material left over from Justin’s editing of a single Apology: they would move its closing chapters (often numbered 14–15) up to the end of the First Apology and read the rest as displaced fragments. On their reconstruction there was one original work, and the “Second Apology” is the editorial debris of its composition and transmission.

[Disputed: whether Justin wrote one apology or two is unresolved. Eusebius (Eccl. Hist. IV.16–18) and the manuscript tradition present two works (so most older scholarship and Barnard, Justin Martyr, pp. 18–20); Minns & Parvis (Apologies, OECT 2009, pp. 21–31) argue that there was a single original Apology and that the “Second Apology” is appendix or “cutting-room-floor” material — “one and a half” works rather than two.] The chapter-numbering of the Second Apology differs between editions partly because of this unsettled state of the text, which is why a citation to Second Apology 3 in one edition may appear as chapter 8 in another.

Why the Manuscript State Matters

The one-or-two-apologies problem may seem a narrow philological dispute, but it is a good illustration of a truth that governs the whole study of Justin and much of the patristic inheritance: we read these texts through the accidents of their transmission. Justin’s three genuine works survive essentially in a single manuscript, written more than twelve centuries after he wrote, already damaged, and already worked over by Byzantine scribes and editors trying to repair what they could no longer fully read (Minns & Parvis, Apologies, pp. 3–17). The “Second Apology” looks fragmentary and disordered not necessarily because Justin wrote it so, but possibly because the manuscript tradition has scrambled and truncated what was once part of a single, better-ordered work. The chapter numbers we cite are an editorial overlay, not Justin’s own divisions, and they differ from edition to edition. None of this undermines the substance of what Justin teaches — his theology and his testimony come through clearly — but it does mean that any responsible account must hold the arrangement and boundaries of his works with appropriate looseness, and must mark, rather than paper over, the places where the text itself is uncertain. The methodology of this collection is to carry such uncertainties as structured notes, so that the reader knows where the ground is firm and where it is not.

The Value of the Shorter Work

Brief and untidy as it is, the Second Apology is precious for three reasons. It preserves, in the Ptolemaeus–Lucius episode, a vivid eyewitness-grade account of how Christians were actually condemned in mid-second-century Rome — a magistrate, a single question, a confession, a sentence. It contains Justin’s sharpest reflection on innocent suffering and divine providence. And it carries his fullest statement of the Logos doctrine, the claim that Socrates and the others “lived with the Logos.” That so much weight rests on so short and textually troubled a work is itself a lesson in how the patristic inheritance reaches us — through a single late manuscript, imperfectly, and to be read with the editors’ cautions in hand (Minns & Parvis, Apologies, pp. 3–31).

References

Justin, Second Apology 1–4. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; and Minns & Parvis, Apologies (OECT, 2009).
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History IV.16–18. Trans. NPNF II/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.