Athens & Jerusalem: St. Justin Martyr, Part I

Born around AD 100 to a pagan family in Samaria, within sight of Jacob's Well, Justin went shopping for God among the philosophical schools, and this class follows him station by station: the Stoic who knew nothing of God and thought such instruction unnecessary, the Aristotelian who asked him to settle the fee, the Pythagorean who demanded music, astronomy and geometry first, and finally the Platonist, whose promise that the mind could ascend to look upon God — "for this is the end of Plato's philosophy" — set him alight. The summit turned out to be vacant. Then the turn: an old man on a seashore takes the young Platonist apart using Socrates' own method, corrects Plato on the immortality of the soul, points past philosophy altogether to the prophets — men who saw and announced rather than demonstrated — tells him to pray, and is never seen again. Justin's verdict on his own conversion is the sentence the session turns over: "Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher." He kept the philosopher's cloak, and around AD 155 wore it to Rome to file a formal petition with the emperor on behalf of the Christians — the defense of Socrates, in Socrates' own genre, quoting Socrates to the future Marcus Aurelius's face: "you can kill, but not hurt us."