Who’s your daddy? St. Justin Martyr
In the JP2 Group we’re doing a mini-series on Christian worship in the Early Church. It is for this reason that I recently posted several blog entries about St. Justin Martyr, an Early Church Father and one of the first great Christian apologists.
However, I realized as I was finishing up yesterday’s post that I haven’t actually written an introductory post about this great man. I had done this previously when we were studying St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Polycarp of Smyrna. So today I’m going to remedy this, providing a little bit of information about St. Justin’s life.
Who was this man whose writings we’ve been studying?
Searching For Truth
What we know about St. Justin mainly comes from his own writings. He was born in about AD 103 to Pagan parents in Flavia Neapolis, modern day Nablus on the West Bank. He had a great love of philosophy and studied various philosophical systems:
“…I surrendered myself to a Stoic Philosopher…but when I had not acquired any further knowledge of God (for he did not know himself, and said such instruction was unnecessary)…I left him…
A Peripatetic Philosopher… asked me for money. For this reason I left him, believing him to be no philosopher at all….
I came to a Pythagorean Philosopher, very celebrated – a man who thought much of his own wisdom… He said, ‘What then? Are you acquainted with music, astronomy, and geometry?’ Having commended many of these branches of learning, and telling me that they were necessary, he dismissed me.
In my helpless condition it occurred to me to have a meeting with the Platonists, for their fame was great. I thereupon spent as much of my time as possible with one who had lately settled in our city…and I progressed, and made the greatest improvements daily. And the perception of immaterial things quite overpowered me, and the contemplation of ideas furnished my mind with wings, so that in a little while I supposed that I had become wise; and such was my stupidity, I expected forthwith to look upon God, for this is the end of Plato’s philosophy.
– Dialogue With Trypho, Chapter 2