Peter Toth: The Questions of Pseudo-Justin: New Manuscripts, New Texts and a New Author?

The collection of some 150 chapters, originally entitled as Answers to the Orthodox faithful (QRO) and attributed to Justin the Martyr, is one of the earliest Christian representatives of the Late Antique genre of question-and-answer literature. The importance of the work stands in that it is the first known example of a new patristic type of erotapokriseis which constitute an encyclopedic collection of all available secular and religious knowledge of the time.
The paper presents a survey of my latest research on the manuscript tradition of the work, resulting in the discovery of two new witnesses. These manuscripts, one from the early tenth and another from the thirteenth century, contain not only some portions of the QRO, but also two hitherto unknown and unedited series of questions and answers that seem to represent new items of the Pseudo-Justinian corpus.

In the second part of my paper I will present a closer study of these new texts, a collection of cosmological erotapokriseis and a series of Christological aporiae. A deeper analysis of the philosophical terminology of the first text with its explicit quotations from Aristotle and Julian's Contra Galilaeos, sheds new light on the philosophical background of Pseudo-Justin. While the further examination of the Christology and textual transmission of the second work, which also seems to be connected to the QRO, may help us to shed new light on the date and identity the mysterious author hiding behind the name of Justin the Martyr and Philosopher.

Elizabeth Digeser: Pseudo-Justin's Cohortatio ad Graecos and the Great Persecution

As with many works of unknown authorship and provenance, the significance of the Cohortatio ad Graeco,, once mistakenly included with the writings of Justin Martyr, is difficult to appreciate.  Christoph Riedweg (1994) argued that Marcellus of Ancyra had authored the Cohortatio, a thesis that is now widely accepted (Arcari [2011], Pouderon [2003], Simonetti [2011]). Although the focus on monotheism may fit Marcellus’ preoccupations in the context of the Council of Nicaea (Arcari, 2011), this perspective does not explain the author’s overarching apologetic aim, namely to convince “Hellenes” or pagans of the truth of monotheism against the way that they read their traditional canon of poets, philosophers and oracles. The author argues, not on the basis of Scripture, but through references in Greek literature and philosophy. Building on the work of Robert Grant (1958), I will argue that a careful comparison with Lactantius’ Divine Institutes show the Cohortatio to be responding to the same late Platonist theology that motivated the Latin author and surfaced in the period before the Great Persecution. The measured tone of the Cohortatio’s author suggests that Grant’s third century date may be correct. Nevertheless, the possibility that the treatise was written after the persecution remains.

C. Hoogerwerf: Pseudo-Justin on Truth and Belief: The First Christian Prolegomena

Pseudo-Justin's De Resurrectione is not only the first writing dedicated to the defence of the resurrection of the flesh, but also contains the first Christian methodological reflection about the nature of the truth and the appropriate method to arrive at the truth. Written ca. 178 CE, Pseudo-Justin's treatise is one voice in an inner-Christian debate about the resurrection. His position will be brought into relation with another Christian viewpoint as expressed in the Epistle to Rheginus and with the criticisms of Celsus, who wrote his True Doctrine around the same time. While Celsus reproaches Christians for renouncing demonstration of the truth and the author of the Epistle to Rheginus rejects entirely the philosophical approach to the truth, Pseudo-Justin argues for an authority-based epistemology: the Truth is inherently worthy of belief and therefore immune to demonstration and refutation. These prefatory considerations are the first step in the author's apologetic strategy to underpin his position regarding the resurrection. The next step is to show that the resurrection of the flesh is possible even on the basis of secular reasoning. The methodological ideas and the argumentative structure in De Resurrectione are a distinctive step in the development of Christianity and show how Christian thinkers carved out a place for theology in the intellectual world of antiquity.