The First Apology Of Justin For The Christians

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Note from EWTN

St. Justin (?-165 AD) is one of the most important of the early ecclesiastical writers. A convert from paganism and secular philosophy he used his philosophical gifts to defend Christianity against its attackers. About the year 152 he wrote to the Roman Emperor in defense of Christians against the false charges leveled against them by their pagan neighbors.

Transliteration of Greek words: All phonetical except: w = omega; h serves three puposes: 1. = Eta; 2. = rough breathing, when appearing intially before a vowel; 3. = in the aspirated letters theta = th, phi = ph, chi = ch. Accents are given immediately after their corresponding vowels: acute = ' , grave = `, circumflex = ^. The character ' doubles as an apostrophe, when necessary.

Note from Jake

Jurgens' The Faith of the Early Fathers, volume 1 has this to say about the apologies of St. Justin Martyr:

Whether the First Apology and the Second Apology of Justin constitute two works or one is debatable. Eusebius knew that Justin wrote two apologies; and the single manuscript mentioned above presents what are called the two apologies, the first of sixty-eight chapters, addressed to Antoninus Pius; and the second, of fifteen chapters, addressed to the Roman Senate. Most scholars are today of the opinion that we have only one of the two apologies known to Eusebius, and that our Second Apology is in fact an appendix added later by Justin himself to the First Apology. If this actually be the relationship between the so-called two apologies, it remains a possibility also that it is really only a single apology with its appendix that Eusebius refers to as two apologies. Whether one apology or two, we will keep to the tradition of referring to them as two. Both parts belong to the years 148 to 161 A.D., the first having been completed by 155 A.D.

I have corrected some additional textual errors from the EWTN text. The XML document from which I generated this document (in whatever form: HTML, PDF, etc.) has notations showing the errors, but the errors have been omitted from this document for readability. The latest version of this document should always be available from http://www.freivald.org/~jake.

I did not have the benefit of the many footnotes in the text, but only the references to them; and those references were annoying large numbers in the middle of the text. I have therefore treated the footnote references as if the footnotes existed, even though they do not, because that decreases the size of the number in the text. This should not cause a problem in any Web browser or in the PDF as far as I know.

Date Last Published

This document was last generated from the source XML document on August 21, 2006.