Justin against Marcion

Defining the Christian Philosophy

Andrew Hayes, Dr Andrew Hayes

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506423449
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506420400
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Andrew Hayes takes the measure of Marcion's impact on second-century Christianity through a close examination of the topics and structure of Justin Martyr's writings, especially the Dialogue with Trypho, demonstrating that Justin repeatedly described Christianity in a contra-Marcionite fashion. The chief task Justin took for himself was to seize back from Marcion the terms of Christian self-definition. Marcion is thus far more important for Justin's work than the few places where he is explicitly named might suggest: they reveal Justin's deeper agenda of presenting Marcion as a demonic instrument.

1

Who Are the “Christians”?

This chapter will demonstrate the provisional nature of Christian identity and argue that Justin attempts to usurp and correct the contemporary use of “Christian” as a shame name employed by non-Christians:

A Christian? What’s that? I can do no more than attempt to describe some phenomena; some of them may appeal to us, others may not. A quick glance at the early church, even if we break off very suddenly and very artificially in Theodosian times, will reveal that our question about “the Christian” is a question about diversity. . . . Let us confuse things still more: In addition to that kaleidoscope of perspectives—I do not call them objective perspectives because they are only internal to Christian historiography—there are further perspectives quite different from these internal ones. We can also meet a variety of external views, where the contemporaries of antiquity, whether they were Jews or so-called pagans, knew that certain individuals were Christians. I think they simply knew it from living in the same city or village, in the same street or insula-block. They knew it even though it did not normally interest them too much. . . . Diversity prevails even if the nomen Christianum and the unitas ecclesiae are not unknown but (as I would like to think) a common term for the surrounding world, at least if we follow the records of Roman administration and the fiction of Lucian.^[1]

Although Wischmeyer ignores Justin and starts his study with Tertullian, this characterization of the challenge of early Christianity is extremely pertinent to this project. Specifically, “what” a Christian is, rather than simply who (and by extension who are Christians), is of paramount importance to Justin beyond a superficial reading of him as an apologist for apologetics’ sake. Before one can know who counts as Christian one needs to know what a Christian is. Even if the name “Christian” is known and used, which Justin’s presentation suggests it is, it is by no means clear that what a “Christian” is is understood either by non-Christians or indeed by the claimants of the term themselves.^[2] This is Justin’s challenge: to make it known, definitively, what a Christian is and to demonstrate the true Christianity, which he believes comes from Christ, the apostles, and the spirit of prophecy. This was, as mentioned above, the task that Harnack attributed to Marcion.^[3] Both men were involved with and related to one another in the task of Christian identity-making and definition. The task of the historian and theologian is to reconstruct Justin’s questions, the motivations that led him to shape his account of what it is to follow Christ in the ways in which he did. As R. M. Grant has noted, this cannot be done without giving due attention to the political and social struggles of the time. Justin’s and other ancient texts are not theological vacuums but the products of precise circumstances, and it is these circumstances that require attention if the texts are to speak as intended.^[4]

The political and social struggles of the time shape how and what Justin says. The social struggle is one of identity: who the Christians are (or who is Christian) is one of the central questions of all of Justin’s texts. In particular, are they “Jews,”^[5] or are they something else? Boyarin has also drawn attention to the issue of self-definition as a central plank of the Dialogue with particular reference to “Jews.” However he has also noted that many of arguments Justin deploys against “Jews” and the identity claim can also be applied to heretics, as two sides of one coin, so a much wider debate about who the people of god are is discernible in the text.^[6] There is a political struggle that follows from this. If they are “Jews” then they are due a certain tolerance. However, “Jews” were particularly unpopular with the Roman rulers following the latest revolt lead by Simon Bar Kokhba, so very close association with the “Jewish” body politic may not have been desirable. This is a multi-dimensional question. The argument of this chapter will be that “Christian” identity has no fixed form in Justin’s period and that this is one of the key issues that motivates and drives his addresses to non-“Christians.” This involves the origins of “Christians” and their relationship to “Judaism.” As Buell has argued, the distinction between these two groups was by no means obvious in this period and identity is always negotiable and open to revision according to particular needs:

“The complex dynamism within and overlap between Christianness and Jewishness in Justin’s rhetoric make sense if we think of the mid-second century as a time when these identities are neither uniform nor wholly distinct. Justin is staking out a distinct domain and meaning for Christianness when these are murky and contested.”^[7]

Staking a claim for “Christian” identity is indeed exactly what Justin is doing, but not only in relation to “Jews.” His claims concern the wider Greco-Roman population also. The political implications of being “Jewish” or not, or being some other group in categories recognisable to Greco-Romans or not, were great. How one presented oneself and was understood could mean the difference between life and death. Presentation of identity is a subtle art, and one at which Justin was a master. Indeed, it was not just “Jews” and “Christians” who were engaged in deliberate, and unavoidable, self-presentation; Greeks and Romans were just as invested in this phenomenon:

Most identifiable perceptions of ethnicity were not passive, erudite, or antiquarian but self-aware and aimed at being meaningful and convincing. In attempting a response to the question “Who is a Greek” [most ancient writers] would play with acceptable conventions, choosing to emphasize particular aspects or even invent new ones. Greek ethnicity appears to have been something that was always both traditional and negotiable.^[8]

Something similar can be said of Romans, Egyptians, Lydians, and Aphrodisians: each has to “invent” themselves, or give an account of themselves, that reflects and creates, how they see themselves. Justin is presenting an account of what a “Christian” is but his account is not the only one. Consequently, he has to do so in such a way that is most credible to his audience and that undermines the credibility of alternative visions, particularly that of Marcion. That there are disputed claimants to Christ is the root of all the problems Justin is trying to address.

Central to my argument is the claim that the term “Christian” in the early to mid-second century is not an obvious marker of identity as we would take it to be in modern times, or as it became at least as early as the legalisation of “Christianity” after Constantine. K. H. Rengstorf in the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology characterizes the term thus:

The identification of the messiah with Jesus of Nazareth brought the disciples the name Christianoi. Compared with other names for the followers of Jesus, like disciple or believer, the word is quite rare in the NT. By its whole formation it is a word which defines the one to whom it is applied as belonging to the party of a certain Christos, very much as Herodianos is a technical term for the followers of Herod (Mk 3:6; 12:13; Matt 22:16). Its use also presupposes that for the Greek environment of developing Christianity Christos had taken on the meaning of a proper name, a process which would have been facilitated by the resemblance to the name of Chrestos, pronounced Christos. According to Acts 11:26, Christianos was first used for Christians in Syrian Antioch. This passage, like the two others in which the word occurs in the NT (Acts 26:28; 1 Pet 4:16), leads us to suppose that, being applied to Christians by outsiders, it contained an element of ridicule and that in this it did not differ from the description Nazarenos or Nazoraios. Like it and like many other names formed in the same way, it soon clearly became a name which those called by it felt honoured to bear.^[9]

This definition, short as it necessarily is for its context, matches to some extent what we will find in Justin.^[10] In agreement with Rengstorf, I argue that for Justin, the term “Christian” (Χριστιανός) functions very much like “Herodian” and that this is indeed the beginning of bearing this name as an honor. Beyond this, I argue that Justin has very particular motivations, both theological and political, for doing so.

The New Testament usage is, as Rengstorf states, extremely rare (two of three attestations coming from the same book) and should not be taken as representative of the experience of “Christians” everywhere within the empire. I agree that it functions as a term of ridicule primarily employed by outsiders. I will show that both Justin’s texts and external Greco-Roman sources support this view and suggest that it has become, or is becoming, more widely known and used.

Comparison with the attribtution of the name Jesuit is instructive here. Jesuit, an anglicized version of the Latin Jesuita, originated as a pejorative term for members of the Society of Jesus and later came to be adopted by those members as a term that makes sense apart from the derogatory overtones. This is similar to the development of the term “Christian”. However, difference can be seen in the fact that the Jesuits were not more or less loosely connected groups of Jesuits with different understandings of Ignatius Loyola’s vision. The application of the term Jesuit, albeit as reproach, was to a clearly identifiable and self-organized society.^[11] “Christians” in Justin’s period have yet to fully become such an organization and the adoption of the term, transitioning from pejorative to honorific, is part of this slow and contested transforma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations for Justin’s Works
• Introduction
• Who Are the “Christians”?
• Reading between the Lines: The Conspicuousness of Marcion in the Dialogue
• Case by Case
• Bibliography
• Ancient Literature Index
• Author Index