Athens & Jerusalem: St. Justin Martyr, Part III

The finale opens by gathering up the summer: the pagan voices the series kept hearing — the oracle at Delphi, Apollo and Athena — and the dark verdict of Christians who were being killed in those gods’ names. It returns especially to last week’s two biblical witnesses, the Magi and Melchizedek, and to the question they force: was any of paganism legitimate? Then the courtroom assembles. Justin had predicted his own prosecution in print, naming Crescens, a Cynic philosopher who denounced the Christians to the crowd without troubling to examine them. And the judge was Junius Rusticus — not a bureaucrat with a philosophy hobby but a Stoic of rank, the teacher Marcus Aurelius thanks by name in the opening pages of the Meditations. Socrates was condemned by a democracy that did not understand philosophy. Justin would be condemned by philosophy itself, seated on the tribunal.Then the class performs the trial, every part taken, from the court protocol that survives. Justin answers the prefect with a creed; asked where the Christians meet, he says their God “is not circumscribed by place” — the doctrine of Jacob’s Well, restated to the prefect of Rome by a man who grew up within sight of it; and he gives his address, a rented room above a bathhouse, open to anyone who climbed the stairs, with no fee and no prerequisites. Then Rusticus works down the line of the accused: a woman, a slave of Caesar’s household who says he has been freed by Christ, a refugee from Phrygia, believers raised in the faith by their parents. Justin had written a decade earlier that no one ever trusted Socrates enough to die for his doctrine, but Christ was believed by artisans and the uneducated. That morning he heard it as a roll call beside him in the dock. And then the exchange the whole summer has been building toward: asked whether he merely supposes he will ascend to heaven, Justin declines the hedge Socrates held so honestly — “I do not suppose it, but I know.” Not a better argument, the session argues, but a different kind of cause: not a conclusion reached by reason but an event, a dead man returned.The session closes by reading what these people actually did on Sunday — Justin’s description to the emperor of readings, homily, prayers and the Eucharist, the earliest account of the Mass we have, recognizably the class’s own Sunday across eighteen and a half centuries — and by closing the docket of the series’ three trials. And it ends where the transcript’s sociology points: on ordinary people. Socrates was a stonecutter, Paul made tents, Jesus was a carpenter, and the six who stood by Justin met above a bath. You are not marked as a Christian by being strange, but by your love.