Volume 28, Issue 1 - Themenheft: Justin of Rome: Apology, Empire and Identity Gastherausgeber: James Corke-Webster & Ben Kolbeck

This introduction to the special edition presents a literature review of scholarship on Justin, demonstrating via his traditional monikers (“Justin Martyr,” “Justin of Neapolis,” “Justin the Philosopher,” and “Justin the Apologist”) the need for a fresh treatment, here dubbed “Justin of Rome”—which properly embeds Justin in his imperial setting, encompassing both the literary and historical landscape of the 2d century AD. It teases out connections between the papers that follow and offers a synthesis of the contribution of the special edition, read as a whole, to our understanding not just of this one thinker but of early Christian literature and history more broadly.

Roman ruling ideology stressed imperial control of knowledge, as well as of material and people. A range of evidence from across the empire suggests that these knowledge claims were commonly accepted, and often mobilised, by ruled communities. In his First Apology , written in Rome in the 150s and addressed to the Roman emperor, Justin Martyr leverages these ideals for his own knowledge claims concerning the life of Jesus and his fulfilment of Hebrew Bible prophecies. It has already been recognised that Justin engages with the machinery of empire through packaging his Apology as a petition presented to the emperor. On the other hand, his citation of Roman documents at several points in the text has been neglected. A close examination reveals the importance of these citations to Justin’s project, in which he utilises the supposed fidelity of Roman documents, and the idea of the emperor as a guarantor of collected knowledge, to authenticate his Christian claims. Finally, proceeding from suggestions about an internal audience for Christian apologetics, it is argued that these references should be seen as alleviating the concerns of an internal Christian readership, and not as overtures to non-Christian Graeco-Romans.

This paper presents a fresh reading of Justin’s Second Apology . It focuses on that text’s narrative sections—the so-called martyrdom of Ptolemaeus and Lucius, and Justin’s own rift with Crescens. It demonstrates both these stories’ intratextual links, and their intertextual ties with contemporary mid-2d century literature—Achilles Tatius’ Greek novel Leucippe and Clitophon , and Apuleius’ Latin Apology . These in turn reveal the sophisticated rhetorical devices Justin employs, his goals in so doing, and the consequences for our understanding of the supposed new genre of Christian “apology.”

At the beginning of Justin’s Apology, an account of injustice, Justin calls upon the emperors as ϕύλακες δικαιοσύνης, “guardians of justice.” Justin, 1 Apologia  2,2 (OECT, 80,13 Minns/Parvis). As part of a documentary and legal strategy, Justin’s Apology includes what he claims is an imperial rescript. This paper probes Justin’s Apology and its appended document(s) in relation to other contemporaneous strategies and materializations of seeking justice: appeals and imperial rescripts, on the one hand, and defixiones or “prayers for justice,” on the other. It argues that a cosmology of δαίμονες was activated not only by Justin, who awaits the imminent end of the world, but also by the curses of antiquity. These curses, and Justin’s own libellus or βιβλίδιον, must also be understood as paralegal materials reasonably intended to engage capricious and sometimes violent systems of justice.

The paper engages in a comparative analysis of two prominent figures from the 2d century CE—Lucian of Samosata and Justin the Martyr. Lucian, the epideictic orator and social commentator, reintroduces the Olympians while rethinking paganism and engaging with Justin and the Apologists. Conversely, Justin, embodying the Christian pepaideumenos , places the new religion at the literary forefront and questions the stereotype of Christian simplicity. The paper argues that, in the context of reformative, paideutic Imperial culture, Lucian and Justin challenge the literary and religious status quo and engage the readers in a reconsideration of Christianity through the lens of the Second Sophistic and vice versa.

This article considers the construction of the speaking subject in Justin’s First Apology and Tatian’s To the Greeks , two interlocking texts (often associated with the problematic genre of Christian apologetics). Bracketing questions of biographical reality, it explores the fictionalising techniques Justin and Tatian adopt to magnify their own authority, co-opt well-known narrative models (including martyrologies and imitatio Christi ) in the service of their own self-fashioning. I take their autobiographies as stylised self-dramatisations, rather than guides to historical realities. There are strong parallels with the kind of self-modelling that we see in the works of pagan sophists of the era, notably Dio Chrysostom. Reading these two authors in this way blurs the sharp distinctions they seek to draw between Christian and pagan. It also requires a reading of their texts, in line with recent scholarship, as generically complex, sophisticated and absorbent, and open to the opportunistic appropriation of elements characteristic of pagan literature of the era. Foucault has argued that the voice of early Christianity was characterised by its confessional quality, which was new, confident and distinctive; this article argues, by contrast, that Justin and Tatian at any rate were intellectual bricoleurs and experimentalists, and had much more in common with their pagan peers.

The pseudo-augustinian Sermo  167 (PL 39:2069–2070) is a text of two pieces containing a short Easter homily and a list of benedictions of the Sunday. The oldest known but reworked exemplar is part of a larger homily in the manuscript Cambridge, Pembroke College Ms. 25 (s. 11). Though, in the manuscript Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.p.th.q.28b (s. 8/9) the main parts of Sermo  167,1 and the list of benedictions as separate pieces were detected (fol. 22r–24v), similarly at the end of another larger homily; it was substantiated that Sermo  167,1 is a derivative cento of the larger Würzburg-homily which has been combined with the originally independent list of benedictions; a anglo-saxon context was proposed; the text of the whole Würzburg-homily and the list in the version of this manuscript has been emended and established; quotations and allusions were identified and indicated; a translation was added. Thus, this sermo of the manuscript Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.p.th.q.28b as the predecessor of pseudo-augustinian Sermo  167 gives insights into the process of working and reworking of homilies in the carolingian and pre-carolingian aera.