The Acts and Their Value

The Acts of Justin and his Companions hold a special place among the literature of the early martyrs: unlike the legendary passiones that grew up around many saints, the Acts of Justin appear to derive, in their earliest form, from the official protocol of the court — the commentarii of the prefect’s tribunal — and so to preserve, in substance, the actual words exchanged at the trial. This file treats the document as a historical source: its three recensions, its likely documentary basis, what it tells and what it omits, and its standing among the authentic Acts of the martyrs.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Three Recensions

The Acts of Justin survive in three Greek recensions, conventionally designated A, B, and C, of increasing length and elaboration. Recension A is the shortest and is generally regarded as the closest to the original; recension B (translated in the previous file) is a somewhat expanded version, fuller in the martyrs’ confessions of faith; and recension C is a later, considerably embellished form that adds legendary and rhetorical material, including a longer notice of Justin’s career (Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, pp. xvii–xx, 42–61). The scholarly consensus is that the earliest recension stands close to the official record, and that the later recensions show the predictable growth of pious elaboration over time. Herbert Musurillo’s The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972) gives the critical text and translation of all three and remains the standard edition; the older English version in the Ante-Nicene Fathers renders a single recension under the title “The Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs Justin…” (ANF 1).

The Documentary Basis

What gives the Acts of Justin their exceptional value is their apparent derivation from the acta or commentarii — the official shorthand record kept by the court clerks of the proceedings before the urban prefect. The form of the earliest recension is exactly that of such a protocol: a bare, unadorned exchange of question and answer, prefaced by the prefect’s name and closed by the sentence and its execution, without the miracles, speeches, and authorial framing that mark the legendary martyr-acts. Scholars have long held that the core of the Acts of Justin reflects, directly or at one remove, the genuine court record — that Christians obtained or reconstructed the official protocol of the trial and preserved it (Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, pp. xvii–xx; Barnard, Justin Martyr, pp. 14–15) [Disputed: how directly the Acts depend on the official protocol. Most scholars (Musurillo; Barnard) hold that the earliest recension preserves the substance of the genuine court record; some caution that even recension A has undergone Christian editing and that the protocol form may be in part a literary convention, so that “based on the court record” should be held with appropriate reserve]. Even on the more cautious view, the Acts of Justin belong to the small and precious class of martyr-texts that rest on authentic documentation rather than free legend.

What the Acts Tell, and What They Omit

The Acts are valuable precisely for their restraint. They tell us, with the spareness of a court transcript: the name and office of the judge (Rusticus, urban prefect); the names of the seven martyrs; the substance of Justin’s confession of faith; the concrete detail of his teaching-place above the baths of Myrtinus; the prisoners’ individual confessions, with small biographical touches (the slave of Caesar, the one whose parents were Christians); the demand to sacrifice, the refusal, and the sentence of scourging and beheading (Acts of Justin, recension B; Musurillo, pp. 47–55). This is information of high quality about the mechanics of a second-century trial and about Justin’s last hours.

Equally telling is what the Acts do not contain. There is no mention of Crescens the Cynic, whose denunciation Justin had foreseen and Eusebius reported (see The School at Rome) — a silence that complicates the tradition that Crescens engineered the arrest, since the actual record names only the prefect and the charge. There are no miracles, no long martyr-speeches, no visions, no taunting crowds — the apparatus of the legendary passio is absent from the earliest form. The Acts thus serve as a kind of control on the rest of the tradition: where the synaxaria and later Lives embellish, the trial record holds to the bare, credible facts of the examination and its outcome.

The Burial and the Beginnings of the Cult

The closing notice of the Acts — that “some of the faithful secretly took up their bodies, and laid them in a suitable place, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ assisting them” (Acts of Justin, recension B, 6; Musurillo, p. 55) — is a small but historically significant detail. It records the beginning of the cult of the martyrs in its earliest and simplest form: the reverent recovery and burial of the martyrs’ bodies by the Christian community. This is the same impulse we see in the contemporary Martyrdom of Polycarp, where the church of Smyrna gathers the martyr’s bones, “more precious than costly stones and more excellent than gold,” and lays them in a fitting place to celebrate his memory. The veneration of the relics of the saints, the keeping of the day of martyrdom as a feast, the gathering at the tomb — all of this is already implicit in the bare notice that the faithful buried Justin and his companions. The cult that the Church would build around the martyr-philosopher, culminating in his feast on June 1 (see The First Christian Philosopher), begins here, in the quiet act of a community recovering the bodies of those who had died confessing the faith.

Hagiography and Its Sources

Per the repository’s methodology, the embellishments that grew around Justin’s martyrdom are pinned to their sources rather than asserted as fact. The fullest legendary material — elaborated motives for Crescens’ enmity, rhetorical expansions of the martyrs’ words, additional biographical notices — belongs to the later recension C and to the synaxarion tradition, and is to be read as the pious amplification of the spare original, not as independent historical testimony. The historically secure core is what the earliest recension and Justin’s own writings give: that Justin taught openly at Rome, that he expected to die at the hands of his enemies, that he was tried before Rusticus and refused to sacrifice, and that he was scourged and beheaded with his companions around 165. The later accretions are reported as accretions, attributed to the recensions and Lives that carry them, and distinguished from the documentary core (Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, pp. xvii–xx).

The Genre of the Martyr-Acts

To appreciate what the Acts of Justin are, it helps to know the literature they belong to and stand apart from. The vast bulk of the surviving “lives” and “passions” of the early martyrs are later compositions — devotional, rhetorical, and frequently legendary — written long after the events to edify the faithful, full of miracles worked in the arena, long speeches placed in the martyrs’ mouths, supernatural deliverances, and elaborate tortures lovingly described. These have their own value as witnesses to the cult of the saints and to later piety, but they are not, for the most part, reliable historical sources for the events they narrate. Set against this background, a small group of texts stands out for their sobriety and their evident closeness to fact: the Martyrdom of Polycarp (the earliest, c. 156), the Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne preserved by Eusebius (177), the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs (180, the earliest dated Latin Christian document), and the Acts of Justin. What these share is restraint and a documentary character — and several of them, the Acts of Justin and the Scillitan Acts above all, take the bare form of the official court protocol. They are the bedrock on which the historian of the persecutions stands, and the Acts of Justin are among the firmest stones in it (Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, pp. xi–xxxvii).

Among the Authentic Acts of the Martyrs

The Acts of Justin are reckoned, with the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, and the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, among the small handful of early martyr-texts that historians treat as substantially authentic — the documentary bedrock beneath the vast later literature of the saints. For the study of Justin in particular they are indispensable: they give us the end of his story in something close to its own words, locate his school, and let us hear the philosopher confess, before a philosopher-judge, the certainty for which he died — “I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it” (Acts of Justin B.5; Musurillo, p. 53). That a man who had argued the faith so carefully in writing should be known, at the last, through the unadorned record of his refusal to deny it, is a fitting close to the life of the first Christian philosopher.

References

The Acts of Justin and his Companions (recensions A, B, C). In Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. xvii–xx, 42–61.
The Martyrdom of the Holy Martyrs Justin, Chariton…. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History IV.16. Trans. NPNF II/1.
Barnard, L. W. Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.