Embodied image

Were one to ask what allows such remarkable claims to be made about the new possibilities for human life, the Christians would tell of Jesus as the one who was the image of God. In some contrast to modern understandings of the word image, they did not mean that Jesus “reflected” God as if he were a copy of some other reality. They meant instead that precisely as the human that he was—and in the “scheme” of the human life that he thus lived—he enfleshed the God who made the world (see Phil 2:2, 5–11). The Lord of Israel has come as the Lord in the life of Jesus. When Luke speaks of the Lord of all, he means both the Lord of heaven and earth and the resurrected Jesus (Acts 4:24; 10:36; 17:24). And for Justin [Martyr], God’s very Word has taken flesh in Jesus; the speech of the Lord of Israel turns out to be the human life of the Nazarene.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 218–19

A true philosopher?

On the one hand, Justin clearly seeks to create a sense of deep continuity with the pagan tradition and to use this continuity for his own rhetorical advantage in communicating what Christianity actually is. He uses the familiar tropes ofthe philosopher such as the cloak and the movement through various philosophies to draw his readers in by means of something they already understand. This communicative strategy culminates in Justin’s audacious claim that in becoming a Christian, he has become a true philosopher.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 158

But without faith, if's just nonsense

Were Justin to have worried that he missed the chance to hear the prophets, the old man would have assuaged his worry immediately: “Their writings are still extant," he tells Justin. And “whoever reads them will profit greatly in his knowledge of the beginning and end, provided that he has believed in them” (Dial. 7.2, emphasis added). With this last phrase, the old man complicates the kind of reading Justin must do if he is to know the truth of which the prophets speak. While the prophets did provide a particular kind of testimony to the truth of their words—the events of which they foretold are happening even now, says the old man, and they performed miracles—more fundamentally their reliability is “beyond proof” (Dial. 7.2). The reader must not look to the prophets to provide knockdown arguments to win his trust, the old man implies, but must instead trust them ahead of time, as it were, have a basic faith in their reception and communication of the truth. Only in this way will Justin understand the writings. “Above all,” says the Christian to Justin, teaching him how to read, “beseech God to open to you the gates of light, for no one can perceive or understand these truths unless he has been enlightened by God and his Christ” (Dial. 7.3).—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 157

<idle musing>
Indeed! And nothing has changed in the last two thousand years. We still need to come in faith in order to understand. If not, then it all appears as foolishness, just as it did back in the first and second centuries.
</idle musing>

It's in the living

By philosophy, however, Justin does not mean what most moderns mean—an analytical discipline that applies solely to the intellect, a kind of rigorous exercising of pure reason. Justin doubtless places heavy emphasis upon philosophical reasoning, but for him reasoning philosophically means living in a certain way of life. Philosophy for Justin, as it was for Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus, is practice, an intellectually dense form of living whose justification is its ability to lead people to new life.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 155

Irreducibly complex

Like Paul’s, Justin’s language about God exhibits irreducibly complex patterns. God is the Father of all, the Logos who is Jesus Christ, and the prophetic Spirit all at once, and yet these three are not simply different words for saying the same thing, interchangeable without loss or remainder. The Unbegotten is not the Begotten; the Spirit is different still. But to speak of the God who creates and sustains the world (Dial. 29.3), watches over it in justice (2 Apol. 12.6), establishes a covenant with the Jewish people (Dial. 11.1), guides them through prophetic prediction (Dial. 7.1), acts dramatically in the first advent of Christ Jesus (Dial. 14.8), and will again in the second, is to speak of one and only one God. Again like St. Paul, the primary impetus for the complexity in Justin's theological grammar is Jesus Christ himself.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 149

Sure, they might exist, but so what?

Justin’s view of God … requires a rejection of the theological legitimacy of the polytheism in which he was born and reared and which formed the fabric of Greco-Roman life. He does not deny the existence of the beings with which such polytheisrn was intertwined, but he most emphatically denies that they are God and, hence, denies the legitimacy of their worship.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 146

Justin Martyr's turn

Because Justin is trying to cover so many bases, his way of speaking about God is culturally complex. He reaches both for Moses and for Plato; he champions continuity with the Jewish God while distinguishing the Christian view from the Stoic; he affirms the existence of other so-called gods but reduces them to God’s creatures gone wrong, and so forth.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 145