Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/650

 Zechariah, "Suffering," and "Jacob," and "Israel" by Isaiah, and "Rod," and "Flower," and "Corner-stone" "cut without hands," and "Son of God," Who is "despised and rejected," yet also is proclaimed "King of Kings, King of Hosts, King of Glory," and is "Set on the right hand of God," "Born of a virgin," yet "Existent before all the world," "the power of God, the glory of God," "the Word," "the Lord," "the Captain of the Hosts," "King," "Priest," yet also "Man," "the Stone," "the Child," "the Sufferer" (ib. 126, § 355 ; 61, § 284 ; 34, § 251 ). In giving force to this last characteristic of the Christ, i.e. ὁ παθετός, at the same time that he gave reality to the highest title, ὁ θεὸς προσκυνητός, Justin shews his power over the Jew, who can only hover aimlessly between the two, unable to deal with or accept either the lowest or the highest. Justin declares that no one ever understood the prophecy of the sufferings, until Christ opened it to His apostles.

(3) He is powerful in his deduction from prophecy of the failure, unbelief, and ruin of the Jewish race—as the favoured people; and in the change of the manifestation of God from them to the Gentiles. Here he had much to use which was only a stumbling-block to strict Jewish reliance on blood and privilege.

(4) He is successful in exhibiting the newness of Christ's covenant, the New Law, the New Heart; under this conception the continual discontent of God with the old sacrifices and sabbaths gains intensity of meaning; the calls to wash and be clean, and put away sins, are vivified; the prophetic types of a new and wider dispensation are brought into daylight. Cf. the whole latter part of the Dialogue.

Where Justin is weakest is, naturally, in knowledge. He is ignorant of the original tongue and very arbitrary in his interpretation of details; he uses Christ as the accepted key to the whole complicated history, in a way that to a believer is often full of devotional suggestiveness, but to an unbeliever has no argumentative force. Instances may be found in such chaps. as 77, 78 of the Dialogue, or c. 81, etc. He often takes the wrong sense of a passage. He interprets the passages condemnatory of the Jewish sacrifices, etc., in a way that wins them a new meaning from Christ, but is certainly not their intended meaning. He can only meet Trypho's sharp criticism on this point by appealing to his own presumption that God's approval of the Law can only have been an accommodation to the people's sins (Dial. 27, § 244 ).

Prophecy is to Justin the main form of Christian evidences; and this for Gentile as much as for Jew. It is to prophecy he turns to prove that the Christian story of the Incarnation is not a poetic tale, without foundation; Greek mythology offers no testimony to its own reality (Apol. i. 54, § 89 ). Christ's miracles were no magic or conjuring because they were foretold (ib. i. 30, 31, § 72 ). Justin is shy of arguing from miracles: there had been too much false wonder-working for him to appeal to them. The miracles of the old Prophets he speaks of as worthy to win them credit, since they were coincident with a lofty desire to reveal God and with prophecy of Christ (Dial. 7, § 225 ). Christ's miracles are to be believed on the ground of prophecy Apol. i. 30). Miracles are, to him, proofs, when they have been testified to, but cannot stand alone as evidence.

The other evidence to which Justin appeals is the (1) purity of Christian precepts (Apol. i. 14, § 61); (2) their constancy under torture (ib. ii. 12, § 50 ; Dial. 110, § 337 ); (3) the consecrated lives of uncorrupt virginity, the conversion of penitents to holiness (Apol. i. 15, 62, ; cf. ib. i. 29, § 71 ); (4) the exorcising of demons (ib. ii. 6, § 45 ); (5) the existence of prophetical gifts in the church (cf. Dial. 82, § 308 ), as well as of gifts of spiritual power (ib. 35, § 254 ), miracle, and healing (ib. 39, § 258 ).

We may briefly ask what knowledge Justin shows of (1) Jewish, and (2) Gentile learning.

(1) He refers frequently to Jewish modes of interpreting texts and seems used to dealing with them (cf. ib. 50, § 269 ); but perhaps he knows them rather in their polemic against Christians than in their own inner teaching. He charges them with escaping from texts against them by throwing doubts on the LXX, while all the Messianic texts that can be accommodated to human affairs they attach to whom they choose, but not to Christ (ib. 63, § 294 ). Thus they attribute the fulfilment of the triumphs spoken of in the Psalms to Solomon, in Isaiah to Hezekiah (ib. 64, § 287 ; 77, § 302 ). Justin does not seem to know of any Jewish theorizing on the problem of the Λόγος. The Jews expect a purely human Christ (ib. 49, § 268 ), to be heralded by Elias in person, and anointed by him; till which time the Christ is to be in obscurity; He will not even know Himself (ib. 110, § 336 ). The texts that speak of Christ as passible, yet as God and adorable, they are compelled, Justin says, to attribute to Christ, but they refuse to allow this Jesus to be the Christ, though they have to confess that the Christ will suffer and be worshipped. The divinity of Christ is, according to this, forced upon the Jews' belief by Christian logic, but they do not know what to make of it, and are in straits.

(2) As to Gentile philosophy, Justin's general knowledge was evidently large; but it is a question how far he held to any system accurately or scientifically; he sits pretty loosely to them all. He places Plato highest, and delights in his doctrine of Eternal Ideas, but no definite Platonic formulae are used; the Ideas do not appear; the doctrine of the Word has general relations to Platonism, but that is all; it is itself utterly unlike any teaching in Plato; it belongs to the process of thought which has its roots in O.T., and works through Philo up into Christianity. He gives us nothing of Plato's except the account of the "X" as the law of creation, in the Timaeus, which Justin supposes him to have taken from the account of the brazen serpent; and the statement of the triad character of things, which is taken from an epistle attributed till lately to Plato. He declares Plato's account of creation from formless matter to have been taken from Genesis; but he only means this in the most general way, for he seems to fancy that Plato's formula is consistent with Moses'