Who Were the Early Church Apologists? (2 of 8)

Around the middle of the second century, Christians started writing to emperors.

Not petitions for mercy. Arguments, in the empire’s own philosophical vocabulary, making a case that the movement was being condemned on a misunderstanding and asking to be examined rather than assumed.

Who Was Justin Martyr?

A philosopher who kept the cloak after he converted.

Born around AD 100 at Flavia Neapolis, modern Nablus, to pagan Greek parents. He worked through the philosophical schools looking for something that held, and converted around 130 or 132. He went on wearing the philosopher’s cloak as a Christian, which was a deliberate statement: he had not abandoned the search for truth, he had finished it.

He is the first major thinker to argue Christianity to the empire in the empire’s own categories, and he died around 165.

What Was Justin’s First Apology?

A legal brief addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius, written around AD 150.

The core request is procedural and it is sharper than it sounds. Stop condemning people for the name alone. Examine the conduct. If Christians are guilty of crimes, punish the crimes; if they are not, the name is not a crime.

That is an argument a Roman audience could not easily dismiss, because it appeals to their own standards of due process rather than to Christian premises.

What Did Early Christian Worship Look Like?

Justin describes it, and his account is the earliest window we have from the outside.

On the day named after the sun, Christians in a city or the surrounding country gather in one place. The memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read for as long as time permits. Then the one presiding gives an address urging imitation of what was read. Then all stand and pray. Then bread and wine and water are brought, prayers and thanksgiving are offered, and the people give assent.

Two details in that are doing heavy lifting.

He calls the memoirs of the apostles Gospels, which tells us what those documents were called and how they functioned.

And they are read alongside the prophets, in the same act of worship, for as long as there is time. That places them at the same level as the Hebrew Scriptures in the church’s practice. It is canonisation happening in the room, decades before anyone produced a list.

How Did Justin Die?

Beheaded at Rome under Marcus Aurelius, and the court record survives.

The philosopher-emperor executed the philosopher-Christian, which is an irony the sources do not draw out but the reader can hardly miss.

The Acts of Justin preserve the proceedings: the interrogation, the questions about where the Christians meet, the refusal to sacrifice, the sentence. It is a primary source of a kind that is rare for this period, and it means the apologist’s last apology was delivered in court under examination.

He was executed with companions, and one of them was a woman.

Why Does the Apologetic Tradition Matter?

Because it establishes a posture the church has returned to ever since.

The apologists were not writing to their own people. They were writing outward, to hostile or indifferent readers, in categories those readers already used, and they were asking for scrutiny rather than protection.

That is a confident move and it has a cost. Arguing in the empire’s philosophical vocabulary means accepting some of the empire’s terms, and the long question of how much Greek philosophical furniture came into Christian theology through this door is a real one.

What is not in doubt is the nerve of it. A movement that could legally be killed for its name wrote to the man who could order it and asked to be judged on the evidence.

What Else Is in This Period?

More than one man, though Justin dominates the record.

Others were writing in the same mode across these decades, addressing emperors and educated readers with the same basic strategy. Quadratus produced a defence of which one sentence now survives, quoted by Eusebius, and that ratio is a fair picture of how much of this literature is gone.

Justin’s own broader arguments, particularly his account of the Word at work before the incarnation and his handling of the catechumenate, deserve their own treatment rather than a compressed paragraph here. That material is queued for a proper sourcing pass.

Part of a series on the Ante-Nicene age, following the Ante-Nicene timeline.

Sources

Justin Martyr, First Apology, especially chapters 66 to 67 for the description of Sunday worship. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

The Acts of Justin. The surviving record of his trial and execution. Widely available in translation.

Where the sourcing stops: the question of how much Greek philosophical vocabulary entered Christian theology through the apologists is raised here and not answered, because answering it properly requires more than this post carries. Justin’s wider apologetic arguments are deliberately not summarised pending a sourcing pass.

Footnotes

1. Justin’s request to be judged on conduct rather than on the name is the earliest sustained Christian argument from due process, and it is worth noticing that it does not ask for privilege. It asks for the same standard everyone else received.
2. That one sentence of Quadratus survives, preserved because Eusebius chose to quote it, is a useful measure of how much second-century Christian writing is simply gone. The apologetic literature was substantial. What remains is what later compilers found worth keeping.