Justin Martyr
Early Christian apologist and martyr (c. 100 – c. 165 CE), born in Flavia Neapolis (Samaria) into a pagan Greek family, and the first properly Christian philosopher: a man trained in Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean and finally Platonic philosophy before converting to Christianity around the age of thirty, following, as he himself recounts in the Dialogue with Trypho, a conversation with a mysterious old man by the sea that revealed to him the insufficiency of Greek philosophy before the truths revealed by the Hebrew prophets and fulfilled in Christ. He founded a Christian philosophical school in Rome, where he taught still wearing the philosopher's cloak, a public sign asserting Christianity as the 'true philosophy' rather than a barbarian superstition, and counted Tatian, the later author of the Diatessaron, among his students. His crucial theological contribution is the doctrine of the logos spermatikos, the 'seed of the Word': the very divine Word that was fully incarnated in Christ had sown fragments of rational truth throughout humanity, even in pagan philosophers such as Socrates and Heraclitus, who could therefore be considered, in some sense, 'Christians before Christ' —a theory that opened a lasting bridge between Christian revelation and Greek philosophy and would decisively influence all later patristic thought. His two Apologies, addressed to Emperor Antoninus Pius and to the Roman Senate, defend Christians against charges of atheism, cannibalism and sexual immorality with rational arguments and detailed descriptions of early Christian worship —including one of the oldest surviving descriptions of baptism and the Sunday eucharist— while the Dialogue with Trypho, a literary debate with a Jewish interlocutor, is the first major work of anti-Jewish polemic in Christian literature. Denounced by the Cynic philosopher Crescens, with whom he had publicly disputed, he was beheaded in Rome by the prefect Rusticus around 165, after refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods.