Justin writes in Greek, and positions himself within the world of Greek thought, even when he criticizes it. The introduction to the Trypho, with its depiction of a city setting and of a quite friendly debating relationship, creates a framework for the tract. It also introduces a complicating third party into the comparison: Greek culture, and, in particular, philosophy. It is clear from the start that the ‘barbarian’ subject-matter—for Jews were, after all, barbarians from a Greek vantage-point, and the Bible a barbarian text, while there were even Christian writers who happily embraced the designation—is made more palatable by writing about it in a format borrowed from Greek literature. Justin’s dialogue announces this with his carefully crafted, deliberately relaxed opening. He signals that his presentation is borrowed from Plato. In the rest of his dialogue, a surface similarity continues: the balance between expositor, Justin, and interlocutor, Trypho, in which the latter mixes objections, questions, shifts of ground, expostulations, and admissions of defeat, is based upon the Platonic model. Even the final outcome bears some resemblance to the way in which Socrates’ adversaries are reduced to silence, but it is considerably more extreme. Lukyn Williams’s assessment is that Tryphon was ‘not very ready in repartee’ (trans. of Trypho, p. xxv)!
The six introductory chapters seem to stand apart from the rest of the work, in terms of both form and content. We have therefore to avoid the trap of allowing these chapters to define the whole work for us. The characters, as I have said, are introduced with circumstantial detail of a literary kind, such as Plato provides for many of his dialogues. The Jew Trypho lives appropriately enough in Greece; and this may surely be taken as a metaphor for the cultural tradition still evoked by the place, given that we have no reason to suppose Trypho as other than a largely invented character. He is there, he says, to elude Bar Kokhba’s war: again, one may suggest that the war stands, by contrast, for all that is unacceptable in Judaism in Justin’s eyes and for what would discredit the Jews in the eyes of ‘civilized’ people— intemperate rebellion, misplaced Messianism (yet another demonstration that the Jews had got this one wrong). Comment was not required: the two allusions to the war in the Trypho, together with reference to it in the First Apology (31. 6), make it clear that Justin’s readers, whoever they were, were informed about it. The allusion, then, establishes a sort of civilized consensus, as well as hinting at a theological point.
Trypho the Jew, like Justin himself, is hanging around town with a group of friends—a quite plausible scenario for a comfortably-off, Greek-speaking Jew in the second century; but that is not the point. The narrative has to be set up in such a way as to pull the participants into the ambit of philosophy. The Jew is attracted by Justin’s garb, and thus Trypho too is temporarily constructed as ‘one of us’. The atmosphere is friendly, because this is appropriate to the philosophical section. This friendliness will be briefly—and unconvincingly—recaptured in the final chapter of the work. Eusebius claims to know Trypho’s identity, asserting that he was the most prominent Jew of his generation. I take this to be an ill-founded guess. What would such a man be doing in Corinth (or Ephesus)? There has been, from Eusebius on, a long tradition of treating this dialogue as a straight historical report. But there is nothing in the text to support such a view. A certain amount of circumstantial detail was required by Justin’s chosen form.
Trypho is privileged to hear the first-person story of Justin’s search for an acceptable philosophy, followed by the manner of his conversion to Christianity. Behind this section, perhaps, lies a hint of the Apology of Socrates, where, one might suggest, the motif of the personal search for the truth has its origins. By this period the search had become a topos, in which an individual tried out different schools in order to find the best philosophy by which to live. Among its exponents is Josephus in his Life. How conventional the theme had become is shown by Lucian’s mockery of it in the humorous dialogue, Philosophies for Sale.
Why is the world of philosophy so elaborately introduced into a debate between Christian and Jew? In part, we may explain this in terms of Justin’s literary personality, of which some picture is obtainable, in spite of the lack of biographical data and our imperfect knowledge of his output. To judge by Eusebius’ resume of Justin’s career in the Ecclesiastical History, Justin moved, at least at times, among philosophers; and it was an important purpose, perhaps the major purpose, of his writing career to locate Christianity in relation to philosophy, so as to establish the former’s superiority. In doing this, he had the advantage, according to Eusebius, of an educated understanding—pepaideumenes dianoias (Ecclesiastical History, 4. 18)—which we may take to mean that Justin could meet the philosophers on their own ground. The ability to handle this kind of discourse was the main mark of education at the time. Again, in reporting Justin’s disputes with the Cynic Crescens, Eusebius takes pains to show how Justin was the truer philosopher: ho tais aletheiais philosophos (literally, ‘in relation to true things’). We learn that Crescens, by contrast, for all his pretensions, should be judged no philosopher at all, because he spoke of what he didn’t know (ibid. 3. 16). These assaults, as it were from the inside, on Crescens and through him on philosophers as a breed, are offered by Eusebius as the cause of Justin’s martyrdom.
If we examine the writings, we see that Justin could manage quite effectively a kind of elenchos, a cross-examination of the type practised by the Platonic Socrates in the early dialogues; perhaps he even relished its cut and thrust. But it is worth pointing out that Justin’s use of the term logos, the word, as an active ruling force in the Trypho is in the Philonic or Johannine tradition, the word of God, and not Platonic. The extent of Justin’s education in philosophy, for all that Eusebius says, remains an open question; and an even more debatable point is the content which should be supplied for his later description of himself as a Christian philosopher. Some would see his development in terms of disjunction, others of synthesis. It is a reasonable surmise that Justin continued through life to wear two hats, though given a character of such extremism and intensity (we can see in the dialogue the stuff of which martyrs are made), it is dubious whether the balance was perfectly maintained.
Our concern, in any event, is merely with the author’s selfpresentation in the Trypho, where we may well feel that he pleads too much. He has himself referred to by the old Christian as a philologos, a type contrasted with the man of action, and also as a sophist, which amounts to much the same thing (3). Clearly, establishing the persona is important to the literary strategy. But how much does this have to do with the book’s argument?
The establishment of Christianity as the best system flows from the topos about choice of philosophies. In the Second Apology (ch. 12), Justin presents himself as a former Platonist, who has been won over by the spectacle of Christian tenacity in the face of slander, and by the quality of Christian life. Here we note that Justin is converted by an old man whom he meets on the beach. This old man is outside and beyond the other competitors—he looks different, and the interaction is of a different quality, even if he too is marked as a member of the upper classes when he is said to be seeking lost slaves. As for Judaism, not only does the Jewish way of life fail to figure as one of the philosophies; it is not presented as remotely an option for Justin. The structural asymmetry in the role of the three Greek systems, on the one hand, and the Jewish one, on the other, nicely exposes the disjunction between the introductory section and the rest of the Trypho.
Moreover, we should not forget that even those first chapters are set up not to embrace but to dismiss philosophy, just as Justin is said to have dismissed Crescens. What better locus standi from which to do this than that of philosophy itself? Platonism is given the most space in Justin’s account of his personal quest, but that is partly because its pretensions were greatest at this period, socially, intellectually, and spiritually, and there was the most interest in it. It was also, on the whole, the closest of the late Greek schools to Christian doctrine, and perhaps Justin really had spent some time with it. So Platonic philosophy is momentarily elevated; but only to lend force to the exposure of its pretensions. ‘In my stupidity’, says Justin, ‘I expected [at the end of his studies] to look on God, since that is the goal of Plato’s philosophy’ (2). We see here how monotheism emerges firmly as the premiss behind the whole enquiry. Philosophies could be interesting if they forwarded the search for God.
There are other early indications of what is to come, hints that things aren’t what they seem. That solitary old man on the seashore, dignified but gentle, who brings about Justin’s conversion, has the air of a figure of parable. He proceeds to engage in a rather plausible, extended Platonic discussion with Justin, raising issues of the soul’s knowledge and of memory, but bringing the agenda very skilfully round to sin and punishment, the question of a created world and God’s management of souls. By this point, Platonism has been entirely undermined.
Like Justin, this tract walks in philosopher’s garb. And, in spite of its unsophisticated and unappealing use of the Greek language, it has walked effectively. Readers have hastened to snap up as reality the author’s literary persona. We can lay the fault at the door of the seductive first six chapters, and their afterglow. One has only to read the general patrological handbooks and the standard Church histories to see that Justin continues to seduce by means of his philosophical posture—so much more pleasing, for almost all, than a sermon, an anthology of passages from the prophets, a triumphant justification of the true religion, or a vitriolic denunciation of the false one. The lead-in may have appealed to sophisticated Christians, or even to Greek-speaking Jews, as much as to Greeks of the pagan variety. One might add a further consideration: since the bulk of the dialogue is to lie within the realm of intricate, theologically orientated exegesis, its designation as a philosophical debate is not wholly inappropriate. It is hard to think of a better description, in a world where Christian literary forms were as yet undeveloped.