is the Jew under a new aspect that we find here, the Jew of culture, of open and tolerant mind, with the easy courtesy of the literary world. Before such, apparent openness and easy-going lightness it is perhaps not without artistic skill that Justin hints at the fierce and implacable hatred of Jew against Christian which had tortured and slain Christians without pity under Bar-Cocheba and made Jews everywhere the most violent and remorseless of the church's slanderers and persecutors (c. 108, § 335).
The Dialogue takes two days. Some fresh friends of Trypho join him on the second day (c. 118, § 346 C); he speaks sometimes of them as if only two, at other times as if many. One is named Mnaseas (c. 85, § 312). They shout disapproval once, as if in a theatre (c. 122, § 351 A). The whole is spoken as they sit on some stone seats in the gymnasium, Justin being about to sail on a voyage.
The actual argument begins at c. 10. The points especially raised by Trypho were two, i.e. how the Christians could profess to serve God and yet (1) break God's given law, and (2) believe in a human Saviour (cf. c. 10, § 227 D). The purity of Christian living is acknowledged; the problem is its consistency with its creed.
Justin's argument may be roughly divided into three parts (Otto, Prolegomena). In cc. 11–47 he refutes Trypho's conception of the binding character of the Jewish law, which refutation involves him also in a partial answer to the second part of the problem, i.e. the nature of the Christ in Whom they trust; for the passing away of the Law turns on the character of the Christ of Whom it prophesies. In cc. 48–105 he expounds the absolute divinity of Christ, His pre-existence, incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension, by virtue of which the belief in Him is proved consistent with belief in God alone. In c. 109 he passes to the necessary outcome of these two principles—the conversion of the Gentiles, the new Israel, and the abandonment of the old Israel, unless they accept the new covenant. The whole is rested on the Scriptures, on the interpretation of prophecy. Justin starts with a claim to believe absolutely in the God of Israel; here is his common ground with Trypho (c. 11)—both accept the old revelation (c. 68, § 298 A; cf. 57, § 279 B; 56, § 277 D). "I should not endure your argument," Trypho says (c. 56, § 277 D), "unless you referred all to the Scriptures; but I see you try to find all your reasons in them, and announce no other God but the Supreme Creator of the world."
The Dialogue, therefore, is a perfect storehouse of early Christian interpretation of Scripture. This forms its wonderful value; it carries us back to that first effort at interpretation which dates from St. Peter's speech at the election of Matthias, and knits itself so closely with the walk to Emmaus, when the Scriptures were first opened and it was seen from them that Christ must suffer. The O.T. is still the sacred guide and continual companion of the Christian life, the type of the written revelation; everything is there. Yet by the side of it we already feel in Justin that a new power has appeared, a fresh canon is forming, another book is beginning to assert itself. The work is full of crucial interest, just because Justin appears at the moment when this is gradually becoming clear.
In the two Apologies and the Dialogue Justin covers a large part of the theological field. His treatment is peculiarly typical of the earliest form of Christian speculation outside and beyond the immediate lines laid down by the apostolic writings. The apostolic Fathers were rather practical than speculative. The doctrinal works of people like Melito of Sardis are lost. In the Apologists Christianity, according to its preserved records, first prominently applies itself to the elucidation of its dogmatic position, and of them Justin is among the earliest and the most famous. But in considering his theology we must remember that we only possess his exoteric utterances. He is not spontaneously developing the Christian's creed, but is striving, under the stress of a critical emergency, to exhibit it most effectively and least suspiciously to an alien and unsympathetic audience, prepared not merely to discuss but to judge and kill. The whole position tended to quicken the natural tendency of Justin's mind towards an optimistic insistence on likenesses and agreements, rather than on differences between himself and his opponents. This is not said to discredit his utterances, but simply in order to consider them, as all intelligent criticism must consider them, under their actual historical conditions. Justin is on what is yet new ground to a great extent; he is pioneering, he is venturing along unmarked and unexamined roads. Christian doctrine is still forming itself under his hands, even on some essential and cardinal points.
Justin's Theology, then, begins in the presence of (1) Jewish Monotheism, and (2) of the Primal and Absolute and Universal Cause of all Existence, posited by the philosophic consciousness of paganism. He has to state how his conception of the Deity stands to these.
He answers, that he believes (1) in a God identical with the God of the Jews: "There is no other God, nor ever has been, but He Who made and ordered the Universe; that very God Who brought your fathers, Trypho, out of Egypt, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" (Dial. 11, § 228 A). his God of creation is the one cause of all existence, therefore known as the Father: ὁ πατὴρ τῶν ὅλων (ib. 114, § 342 A), or τῶν πάντων (Apol. i. 8, § 57 A). In Apol. ii. 6, § 44 D, he sums up all the names by which the absolute God may be known, πατήρ, Θεός, κτίστης, κύριος, δεσπότης. This is his cardinal and prevailing expression for God the Father—that He is the Maker and Ordainer and Lord of all creation. (2) But, besides the Father, Justin undertakes to exhibit the Divinity of a Second Person, the Son, ὁ μόνος λεγόμενος κυρίως υἱός (Apol. ii. 6, § 44). υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τοῦ ὄντως Θεοῦ (ib. i. 13, § 60 C), to whom is allotted the second place, in honour and worship, after the ἄτρεπτον καὶ ἀεὶ ὄντα Θεὸν γεννήτορα τῶν ἁπάντων. He is, primarily, ὁ Λόγος, the Word of God, with God before creation began, συνῆν τῷ πατρὶ πρὸ πάντων τῶν ποιημάτων (Dial. 62, § 285 D). With Him the Father communicated (προσομιλεῖ), having
