First Apology

Justin Martyr’s First Apology is a Greek defense of Christians framed as an address and petition to the emperor Antoninus Pius, members of the imperial household, the Roman Senate, and the Roman people. Justin’s opening demand is straightforward: Christians should not be condemned simply for bearing the Christian name. Accusations should be investigated, wrongdoing should be punished when it is proved, and innocent people should not be condemned on the basis of rumor or prejudice.

The work therefore moves between legal appeal, philosophical argument, and Christian instruction. Justin answers charges of atheism and immorality, presents worship of the one God as rational, describes Christ as the divine Logos, points to the moral transformation expected of Christians, and argues at length that the prophets of Israel foretold Christ. He also compares Christian claims with ideas familiar from Greek philosophy and mythology, sometimes arguing that pagan parallels make the rejection of Christianity inconsistent.

The First Apology is especially important because Justin does not limit himself to abstract argument. Near the end of the work he describes Christian initiation and worship in unusual detail: baptism, common prayer, the Eucharist, care for those in need, the reading of the apostles and prophets, exhortation, and the Sunday gathering. The result is both a defense of Christians before outsiders and one of the fullest surviving second-century descriptions of Christian belief and communal practice.

The First Apology belongs to the reign of Antoninus Pius and is usually placed around the middle of the second century, commonly in the 150s. Justin addresses the emperor and other Roman authorities as rulers who claim to value philosophy and justice. His central complaint is not that every Christian everywhere was being hunted by a single imperial campaign, but that people could be accused and punished because they were Christians without a fair examination of their actual conduct.

Justin wrote as a Christian teacher who continued to present himself as a philosopher. The setting of the Apology reflects the intellectual world of the Roman Empire, where competing philosophical schools, traditional cults, popular accusations, and debates about divine providence, virtue, the soul, and resurrection all formed part of the background. Justin argues in that environment that Christianity is not an irrational superstition but the true philosophy, fulfilled in Christ the Logos and anticipated both by the Hebrew prophets and, in partial ways, by those who lived according to reason.

The Greek text of Justin’s Apologies survives through a difficult manuscript tradition whose principal witness is a fourteenth-century codex. Modern printed editions therefore involve substantial editorial work. This library edition uses the Greek text of Gerhard Rauschen’s 1911 edition for the displayed and concordanced Greek, while the Voices of the Fathers Modern English translation was prepared against Edgar J. Goodspeed’s 1915 Greek edition. Those two textual provenances are kept distinct rather than being silently combined.

Chapters 1–23 open with Justin’s petition for justice and develop his basic defense of Christian belief and conduct. He argues that the name “Christian” is not itself a crime, answers the charge of atheism, explains Christian worship of God, describes Christian moral teaching and civil obedience, and introduces the resurrection and parallels between Christian claims and ideas already familiar in the Greco-Roman world.

Chapters 24–60 broaden the defense. Justin criticizes idolatry and several forms of pagan religious practice, discusses Christian chastity and the treatment of children, and then turns to an extended argument from prophecy. Chapters 31–53 collect and interpret prophetic texts concerning Christ’s birth, ministry, suffering, rejection, exaltation, and the spread of his message. Chapters 54–60 return to Justin’s claim that hostile spiritual powers imitated or distorted truths found in prophecy and that Greek thinkers such as Plato had encountered truths already present in Moses.

Chapters 61–67 describe Christian initiation and worship. Chapter 61 explains baptism; chapters 65–66 describe common prayer and the Eucharist; and chapter 67 gives Justin’s well-known account of the Sunday gathering, with readings from the apostles and prophets, exhortation, prayer, Eucharistic thanksgiving, distribution to those present and absent, and a collection for people in need. Chapter 68 closes the petition. The textual tradition then appends a rescript attributed to Hadrian concerning accusations against Christians; this edition preserves it as a separate appendix rather than treating it as part of Justin’s own discourse.