The Debate with Trypho

The Dialogue with Trypho the Jew records, in literary form, a two-day disputation between Justin and a learned Jew named Trypho, set at Ephesus in the colonnade of a gymnasium, on the great questions dividing Church and synagogue: the abiding force of the Mosaic Law, the meaning of the prophecies, and the claim that the crucified Jesus is the Messiah and is divine. It is the longest surviving Christian–Jewish dialogue from the early Church and a primary source for second-century biblical interpretation. This file treats the work’s setting, date, structure, and argument, with its disputed historical questions marked.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Longest Early Christian–Jewish Dialogue

The Dialogue with Trypho holds a unique place in early Christian literature simply by its scale: at roughly one hundred and forty-two chapters it is by far the longest surviving Christian engagement with Judaism from the early Church, and the fullest record we have of how a second-century Christian argued the case for Christ from the Jewish Scriptures. Earlier and contemporary writings touch on the questions — the Epistle of Barnabas, the lost Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus — but nothing approaches Justin’s Dialogue in length, range, or detail. It is therefore a source of the first importance not only for Justin’s own theology but for the whole history of the relationship between Church and synagogue in the formative period, and for the early Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. Whatever its precise relation to a historical event, it preserves a wealth of scriptural argument, exegetical tradition, and theological reasoning that exists nowhere else in such fullness, and it must be read both as a theological work and as a historical document of a parting that was still, in Justin’s day, recent and raw.

The Setting and the Interlocutor

The Dialogue opens with the autobiographical prologue treated elsewhere in this collection (see The Conversion): Trypho, seeing Justin in the philosopher’s cloak, approaches him in the colonnade and asks to learn what philosophy he professes (Dialogue with Trypho 1; ANF 1). Trypho is described as a Jew who has fled “the recent war” — the Bar Kokhba revolt, crushed in A.D. 135 — and is now living among the Greeks, chiefly at Corinth (Dialogue 1; ANF 1). The dramatic setting is Ephesus, and the conversation, attended by a group of Trypho’s companions, unfolds over two days in an atmosphere that is, by the standards of ancient religious polemic, notably courteous: the two part as friends, Trypho wishing Justin well on his voyage and asking to be remembered (Dialogue 142; ANF 1).

The historicity of Trypho and of the debate is debated. The work is plainly a literary composition, shaped to its apologetic ends, not a stenographic transcript; whether it rests on a real encounter or is wholly a literary construction cannot be determined from the text [Disputed: some scholars identify Justin’s Trypho with the well-known Rabbi Tarphon of the Mishnah, or take the debate to reflect a genuine encounter; others regard Trypho as a literary figure and the Dialogue as a constructed apologetic against Judaism rather than a record of conversation (Barnard, Justin Martyr, pp. 23–24; Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy, regards Justin as drawing on a real Jewish–Christian debate tradition)]. The date of composition is after the First Apology, which the Dialogue appears to mention (Dialogue 120), and so in the late 150s or early 160s (Barnard, Justin Martyr, p. 23). However its raw material is to be assessed, the Dialogue gives us the fullest second-century Christian engagement with Judaism we possess, and a rich quarry of the scriptural arguments the early Church used.

The Three Great Questions

The argument of the Dialogue, beneath its discursive surface, turns on three connected questions (Barnard, Justin Martyr, ch. 4; Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy).

First, the Law. Trypho’s opening reproach is that the Christians claim to honor God yet do not keep the Law — they do not circumcise, do not observe the Sabbath or the feasts or the food-laws (Dialogue with Trypho 10; ANF 1). Justin’s answer is that the ceremonial Law was given to Israel for a particular purpose and a particular time: in part as a discipline suited to a people prone to idolatry, in part as a sign and foreshadowing of what was to come, and in part on account of the hardness of Israel’s heart (Dialogue 11–23, 43–47; ANF 1). The moral law — the love of God and neighbor — is eternal and binding on all; the ceremonial observances were temporary, and with the coming of Christ their season has passed. Circumcision, the Sabbath, the sacrifices were “types” that have found their reality (Dialogue 40–43; ANF 1).

Second, the prophecies. The bulk of the Dialogue is given to demonstrating from the Jewish Scriptures themselves that the Messiah was to be born of a virgin, to suffer and be despised, to die a cursed death on a tree, to rise, and to call the Gentiles (Dialogue 32–39, 68–73, 97–106; ANF 1). Justin works through Isaiah’s virgin and suffering servant, the Psalms of the passion, the prophecies of Micah and Zechariah and Daniel, contending against Trypho’s alternative readings at every turn — over the meaning of almah (“young woman” or “virgin”) in Isaiah 7:14, over whether the suffering passages refer to the Messiah or to Israel, over the two comings of Christ (one in humility, one in glory) by which Justin reconciles the prophecies of a suffering Messiah with those of a triumphant one (Dialogue 32, 110; ANF 1). This is the most extensive surviving collection of early Christian messianic proof-texts, and a foundational document for the study of how the Church read the Old Testament (Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy).

Third, the divinity of the Messiah. Hardest of all for Trypho is Justin’s claim that the Messiah is not merely a man but is himself divine — “another God and Lord” alongside the Father, the one who appeared to the patriarchs at the oak of Mamre and in the burning bush, who is called in Scripture Word and Wisdom and Angel of the Lord (Dialogue with Trypho 56–62; ANF 1). Justin argues at length that the divine appearances (“theophanies”) of the Old Testament were appearances of this second person, the Logos, not of the unbegotten Father, who cannot be contained in a place. This binitarian reading of the theophanies is one of Justin’s most influential contributions to Christian theology and is treated under his Logos doctrine (see The Word Made Flesh).

The Two Comings and the Method of Exegesis

One device deserves particular attention because it became permanent in Christian reading of the Old Testament: Justin’s doctrine of the two comings of Christ. Trypho’s strongest objection to the messianic prophecies was that they seemed to contradict one another — some foretold a glorious, triumphant deliverer, others a suffering, despised, and rejected figure; no one person could be both. Justin’s answer is that Scripture foretells two comings of the one Messiah: a first in humility, lowliness, and suffering, already accomplished in Jesus crucified; and a second in glory and power, still to come, when he will return as judge (Dialogue with Trypho 32, 49, 110, 121; ANF 1). The “suffering” prophecies belong to the first coming, the “glory” prophecies to the second; both are true of the same Christ. This resolution let the early Church hold together the whole prophetic witness without surrendering either the cross or the kingdom, and it shaped the Christian reading of the messianic texts from Justin onward.

Justin’s exegetical method more broadly is typological and prophetic: he reads the persons, objects, and events of the Old Testament as “types” pointing forward to Christ — the wood of the cross foreshadowed in the tree of life, in Moses’ rod, in the wood Isaac carried; the Passover lamb foreshadowing the crucified; the brazen serpent lifted up foreshadowing the crucifixion (Dialogue 86, 90–94, 111; ANF 1). Oskar Skarsaune’s study of Justin’s proof-texts shows that he drew not only on the Septuagint directly but on existing collections of Christian “testimonies” — pre-arranged catenae of proof-passages already in use in the Church — so that the Dialogue preserves an early stratum of the Church’s exegetical tradition, not merely Justin’s own ingenuity (Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy). This is part of what makes the work so valuable: through Justin we glimpse how the second-century Church as a whole read its Scriptures.

The Tone and the Difficulty

The Dialogue must be read with two things held together. On one side, it is a polemic: Justin is arguing that the Church has inherited the promises and that those who reject Christ have forfeited them, and his language about the sufferings of the Jews after the war, which he reads as judgment, is hard (Dialogue 16; ANF 1). On the other side, it is conducted with a respect and patience uncommon in the genre — Justin grants Trypho’s learning, answers his objections seriously, prays for his salvation, and parts from him in friendship (Dialogue 142; ANF 1). The theological substance of Justin’s claims about the Church and Israel, and the care with which his supersessionism must be weighed — neither endorsed uncritically nor flattened into mere hostility — is the subject of the companion file (see The Church and Israel). Here the point to hold is that the Dialogue is a source of the first rank: for the early Church’s exegesis of the Old Testament, for its messianic argument, for its earliest binitarian theology, and for the long and painful history of Jewish–Christian encounter, which it both records and shaped.

References

Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 1, 10–23, 32–62, 110, 120, 142. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; and trans. Falls, rev. Halton, ed. Slusser. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003.
Barnard, L. W. Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Skarsaune, Oskar. The Proof from Prophecy: A Study in Justin Martyr’s Proof-Text Tradition, Text-Type, Provenance, Theological Profile. Supplements to Novum Testamentum 56. Leiden: Brill, 1987.