St. Justin Martyr

Justin was born around the year 100 at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria, the ancient Shechem and the modern Nablus, to a pagan Greek family. From his youth he was seized by the longing to know God, and he passed in turn through the schools of the philosophers, the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Pythagoreans, and at last the Platonists, hoping by reason to come to the vision of the divine.

His conversion he tells in his own words in the Dialogue with Trypho. Walking one day by the sea, he met an old man who questioned his confidence in the philosophers and pointed him beyond them to the Hebrew prophets, who had spoken by the Spirit of God and foretold Christ. The old man bade him pray that the gates of light be opened to him. Reading the Prophets, and seeing the steadfastness of the Christians under persecution, Justin found the philosophy he had long sought, and was baptized.

He did not lay aside the philosopher's cloak but wore it still as a Christian, holding that Christ is the Word, the Logos, in whom all reason shares, so that whatever truth the Greeks had spoken belonged already to Christ. He travelled and taught, and settled at last in Rome, where he opened a school and disputed publicly with pagans and heretics, among them Crescens the Cynic, whose enmity, the tradition says, brought about his death.

From Rome he addressed his two Apologies, the first to the emperor Antoninus Pius and the Roman Senate around the year 155, the second occasioned by the unjust execution of Christians under the prefect Urbicus. In them he asked only that Christians be judged by their deeds and not condemned for the name alone, and he set down for all time the shape of Christian worship and the meaning of the Mysteries (the sacraments).

Denounced as a Christian, Justin was brought with six companions before Rusticus, the prefect of Rome, around the year 165. He confessed Christ without wavering, refused to sacrifice to the gods, and was scourged and beheaded. The record of his trial, the Acts of Justin, survives from the hand of those who witnessed it. The Church honours him as Justin the Philosopher and Martyr, and keeps his memory on the first of June.