Author

Dialogue with Trypho was composed by Justin Martyr, a Christian apologist. He was born around 100 AD in Flavia Neapolis (modern Nablus), in the region of Samaria, then part of the Roman province of Judaea (later, Syria Palaestina).^[3][4] Born to pagan parents, he appears to have converted to Christianity in Ephesus before later establishing a school in Rome during the reign of Emperor Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161).^[3] In the work, he presents himself as a philosopher.^[4] After a period of teaching and writing, he was tortured and executed under the Roman prefect Junius Rusticus, whose tenure ran from 162 to 168 AD.^[3]

Justin Martyr is regarded as a "proto-orthodox" writer, part of a broader group that includes Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Origen. Their works were preserved largely because of their usefulness to the 4th-century imperial Church.^[5][a]

In Justin's own day there was no unified Christian movement but rather a landscape of competing movements, some of them holding positions about scripture and salvation that differed fundamentally from Justin's own, including some that had no place for Jewish scripture at all.^[6] His thought operates within the same Middle Platonic philosophical tradition also evident in the ideas of Valentinus (from Egypt) and Marcion (from Sinope), two other second-century theologians, although they were his rivals and he was hostile toward them.^[7] Nevertheless, all three were highly educated figures who converged on Rome and found themselves confronting the same theological problem: how the divine figure of the Jewish Scriptures relates to the God revealed through Christ.^[8] They reached different conclusions, however, reflected in the dualistic theology of Marcionism and the Gnostic school of Valentinianism.^[9]

Dating

Because the text mentions Justin Martyr's First Apology, which was written sometime between AD 150 and 155, Dialogue with Trypho must have been written after it. The date of authorship has been suggested to have been written anywhere between 155 and 167,^[10] with some scholars favoring 155–160,^[11][12] or even a more specific date, c. 160.^[13]

Identity of Trypho

Justin's interlocutor is Trypho, who is described as a "circumcised Jewish refugee from the last war",^[14] in reference to the Bar Kokhba Revolt, and is said to live in Corinth. He is also presented as a student of philosophy who was encouraged by his former teacher to converse with other philosophers and now follows that advice.^[14] Marc Hirshman, a scholar of rabbinic law, notes that "the purportedly Jewish traditions are almost exclusively contained in Justin's remarks and are almost never raised by Trypho".^[14]

Theologian Manfred Hoffman writes that Trypho is portrayed in the work as "the representative of the blind and hard-hearted Jewish people." This view has been challenged by Marc Hirshman, who notes that Trypho is said in Chapter 2.10 to have read the Gospel and been impressed by it.^[14] Hirshman characterizes him as "at best incredulous, sometimes wary, but mostly respectful and appreciative of the power of Justin's argument."^[15]

The identity of Trypho as Rabbi Tarfon has been proposed, but many Jewish scholars do not accept this notion.^[16] They instead consider Trypho a fictional character invented by Justin for his literary purposes.^[16][17]

Setting

The setting is presented as a chance meeting between Justin and Trypho in Ephesus. Justin had just converted to Christianity from a philosophical background and Trypho had just fled the disturbances in Judaea.^[1] When Justin suggests to Trypho to convert to Christianity, the dialogue becomes animated. Trypho criticizes Christians on a number of grounds, and Justin provides answers to each criticism.^[1]

According to Matthijs den Dulk, the book is "the oldest preserved literary dialogue between a Jew and a Christian".^[4] However, because Trypho's role is largely limited to posing questions and listening to Justin's responses rather than actively engaging in debate, Marc Hirshman observes that the work functions more as a "soliloquy" than a true dialogue.^[14] Throughout much of the text, Trypho's questions serve primarily as prompts for Justin’s extended arguments.^[18] Sections approaching genuine debate are largely confined to chapters 45–49, on whether Jewish law remains binding, and chapters 67–68, on the Virgin Birth. Beyond these, and particularly after chapter 90, Trypho recedes into the role of an attendant listener.^[14]

Length

The Dialogue is a work of extraordinary length. No surviving Christian text from the first 150 years is longer, surpassing even the three Synoptic Gospels taken together.^[6] Its original form was apparently even longer than what survives, since scribes appear in places to have shortened long scriptural quotations, a fact detectable when Justin refers back to passages of which only a portion now remains in the text.^[19]

Structure

Although the work presents itself as an effort at persuasion, it ends after two days of discussion with neither Trypho nor his fellow Jews persuaded.^[20]

God of the Hebrew Bible

Justin Martyr states that the divine figure encountered throughout the Hebrew Scriptures is not God the Father, who is identified in the Dialogue as "the Father of All".^[27][b] Instead, it is the pre-incarnate Christ—whom he calls "the other God"—who acts as the demiurge, actively creating, speaking, and commanding in the Hebrew Bible.^[7] In his view, God the Father never spoke directly to the people of Israel; rather, it was the pre-incarnate Christ who communicated with Moses, David, and other biblical figures.^[27]

Fredriksen notes that this argument served a double purpose: it allowed Justin to counter the claims of Valentinus and Marcion, who also distinguished the god of the Jews from the highest God but drew different conclusions, while simultaneously advancing his case against Jewish readers of scripture.^[9] Jewish resistance to Justin's reading, in his own presentation, only confirmed his argument, one directed as much against his Christian rivals against Jewish interpreters.^[28]

The Law and Covenant

In chapter 16, Justin presents a negative reading of the Jewish practice of circumcision as a punitive sign, given so "that you alone may suffer that which you now justly suffer; and that your land may be desolate, and your cities burned with fire; and that strangers may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem."^[29] Justin weaves together prophetic texts from Isaiah with warning passages from the Torah, directing the resulting argument at the devastation of Judea, the displacement of its Jewish population, and Hadrian's decree restricting Jewish entry to Jerusalem, all consequences of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.^[29] Circumcision thus separates the Jewish people from the Christians, while simultaneously designating them for retribution.^[29]

Justin contends that God never truly desired sacrificial offerings. He argues that the detailed sacrificial regulations in the Torah were instituted by God only as a safeguard against what he regarded as the Jewish people's persistent susceptibility to idolatry.^[30] He further maintains that sacrifice, by its very nature, belongs to the realm of idol worship.^[30] In chapter 40, Trypho asks Justin for proof that Jesus is the Messiah. In response, Justin interprets the Passover sacrifice as an initial type in a typological sequence pointing toward the Passion of Jesus.^[31] He then discusses Deuteronomy 16:2, where the Torah restricts the Passover sacrifice to the place God will choose as his sanctuary, understood as the Temple in Jerusalem.^[31] Justin goes on to argue that the destruction of the Temple and the permanent loss of Jerusalem to the enemies of the Jewish people during the Jewish–Roman wars demonstrate that the Passover sacrifice had always been intended as temporary. In his view, its true purpose was typological—a coded prediction of Jesus’ suffering.^[31] The same logic is extended to the Yom Kippur sacrifice.^[31] Trypho is portrayed as accepting the central thrust of the argument.^[31]

Millenarianism

Chapters 80–81 of the Dialogue bear witness to Justin's commitment to millenarianism – the expectation of a thousand-year reign of the righteous on earth, centered on Jerusalem, as the culmination of history.^[32] This belief was shared by another writer active in the second century, Irenaus.^[32] It was only a generation or so later that Origen would dismiss such expectations are too bound to the material world and too close to Jewish ways of thinking.^[32]

Theological argument on the Jewish–Roman wars

Justin integrates the aftermaths of the two major Jewish revolts in Judaea, the First Jewish Revolt (66–73 AD) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 AD), into a single theologized historical schema.^[29] In this account, Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion led to the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in the First Jewish Revolt, while the Bar Kokhba war made its consequences irreversible.^[29] Justin tells Trypho that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its temple came about justly, because the Jewish people had killed "the Just One, and his prophets before him".^[33] The permanent loss of the temple proved that its ritual observances, and the covenant bound up with them, had never been intended as a lasting dispensation.^[29] By fusing these two catastrophes into a single continous narrative, Justin constructs a sequential case moving from the death of Jesus through divine retribution to a definitive verdict: that God's covenant with the Jewish people had come to an end, and that the Christian community had taken their place.^[29]

According to historian Paula Fredriksen, this argument belongs to a broader 2nd-century Christian interpretive habit of reading the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD through the biblical lens of the Babylonian destruction of the city in 587/6 BC, treating it as the expression of divine judgement.^[33]

Stance toward rival Christian groups

Justin refuses to accept that followers of rival Christian teachers are indeed Christian. In Chapter 35:5–6, he objects that followers of Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides, and others are called by that name at all, saying that they "blaspheme the Creator of the Universe".^[34][20] He characterizes them as "really godless and impious heretics", whom he accuses of teaching "blasphemy, godlessness and stupidity in all respects."^[34] At chapter 80:3–4, the Dialogue goes so far as to instruct its readers not to regard these groups as Christians at all.^[34] Fredriksen situates this polemical stance within the dynamics of second-century intellectual Christian culture, in which each major teacher sought to define authentic Christianity against rival interpretations, and in which the aim was to win the argument rather than accurately represent the other side.^[35]

The Dialogue as anti-Jewish polemic

The Dialogue is most often read primarily as a confrontation between Christianity and Judaism.^[37] Paula Fredriksen identifies the work as a foundational text for the patristic tradition of writing adversus Iudaeos, a polemical literature composed against Jews and Judaism.^[30]

Shaye Cohen places the book among the early evidence for the "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity by the mid-second century.^[38] In his reading, the very claim made by the work—that the Hebrew Scriptures have been correctly understood by Christians and misread by Jews—reinforces the assumption that the two groups already belonged to entirely separate communities by this period, at least as the text itself portrays it.^[38] He further describes it as one of two major second-century Christian anti-Jewish texts, alongside Melito of Sardis' On the Pascha, which was written around 170.^[21]

Several scholars have argued that beneath the surface of Justin's scriptural arguments lies a more fundamental aim: the discrediting of rabbinic authority itself.^[15] Since the rabbis are the guardians of Torah study, their delegitimization carries far-reaching consequences; in Marc Hirshman's words: "if they are discredited, Torah study – the oral transmission from teacher to pupil – is, in fact, moribund."^[39] Justin's exhortation to Trypho, "prefer to your own teachers the Christ of almighty God", in Chapter 142.3, is identified by P.J. Donahue as the distillation of Justin's entire polemic: the goal throughout is not to win a scriptural argument but to displace the rabbi as the authoritative interpreter of Jewish scripture.^[39] Hirshman writes that the Dialogue is "not a true conversation with Judaism, as it represented in extant rabbinic literature", but rather "a powerful and persuasive Christian readings of the Bible accompanied by an acerbic indictment of a putative Jewish reading of Scripture and its attendant life-style."^[40]

The Dialogue as intra-Christian polemic against heresies

Several scholars see the Dialogue as a polemic text against rival Christian movements, later labelled "heresies". The Greek term later used to mean "heresy" (hairesis, meaning "school of thought") appears six times in the Dialogue, alongside its cognate form meaning "heretic", in striking contrast to its single appearance in Justin’s First Apology and its complete absence from the Second.^[6]

Patristics scholar Alain Le Boulluec has argued that Justin is the figure who first gave the concept of "heresy" its distinctive Christian form, a view that has attracted criticism but has nonetheless contributed to establishing Justin as a writer whose work helped shape how Christianity identified and condemned internal dissent.^[6]

Another scholar who views the work through the lens of inter-Christian polemic is Matthijs den Dulk, who argues that interpreting the text primarily as a Christian polemic against Judaism obscures the extent to which Justin Martyr was simultaneously engaged in debate with rival Christian communities, a dimension he considers essential to understanding the work.^[6] He stresses that the work is concerned not only with Jewish–Christian relations, but also with the internal development of Christianity as a religion seeking to define and delimit its own boundaries.^[6] For him, the Dialogue is a milestone in the history of Christian heresiological discourse,^[6] describing its engagement with both Judaism and pagan philosophies as driven in significant part by his need to establish his own account of Christian faith as more credible than those of his Christian rivals.^[41] Nevertheless, he identifies the Dialogue as among the most important documents for understanding how Jews and Christians related to one another in the ancient world, and more broadly for tracing how the two came to form "two separate religious and cultural systems".^[42]

For historian David Rokeah, Justin's primary concern is not to argue against Jews, but to counter heretical challenges to the validity of the Torah. On this reading, divine law carries within it both a remedial and a retributive dimension, and the fate of the Jewish people represented the outworking of what had always been implicit in the covenant itself.^[43][44]

The Dialogue as an attempt to suppress Jewish tendencies within early Christianity

According to historian of early Christianity and Judaism, Abel Mordechai Bibliowicz, the Dialogue addresses a major point of contention within the early Jesus movement: the continued influence of the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus over much of Justin's audience, which he considers to have consisted largely of Gentile Christians adhering to what he terms the Pauline–Lukan tradition.^[45] In his view, Justin understood himself as occupying a middle position between Marcion on one side and those within the Jesus movement who championed the legacy of its Jewish founders on the other.^[45] Bibliowicz charaterizes the Dialogue as addressing what he calls "Judaism within" – the pull that Jewish-oriented forms of Christianity exercised within the movement, as distinct with any encounter with Judaism as a tradition standing outside it.^[45] He further contends that an audience of Jewish readers would have found the engagement with Jewish tradition within the Dialogue too thin to be persuasive, whereas Gentile readers would have lacked the background to notice its limitations.^[45]

English

• Justin Martyr (1885). "Dialogue with Trypho" . In Roberts, Alexander; Donaldson, James (eds.). Ante-Nicene Christian Library. Vol. II. Translated by Reith, George. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark..
• Justin Martyr (22 July 1995). Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew (PDF). Translated by Spade, Paul Vincent. Bloomington, Indiana, USA: Paul Vincent Spade. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-05-11., from the Greek text in van Winden 1971.

Greek

• van Winden, J. C. M. (1971). An Early Christian Philosopher: Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. Philosophia patrum. Vol. 1. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
• Bobichon, P. (2003). Dialogue avec Tryphon: édition critique (in French). Vol. 1. University of Fribourg. ISBN 978-2-8271-0958-6.
• Khazarzar, Ruslan (ed.). "Τοῦ ἁγίου Ἰουστίνου πρὸς Τρύφωνα Ἰουδαῖον Διάλογος". khazarzar.skeptik.net (in Ancient Greek).

References

Sources

• Bibliowicz, Abraham M. (2013). "The Anti-Jewish Strand in Justin: The Dialogue with Trypho the Jew". Jews and Gentiles in the Early Jesus Movement: An Unintended Journey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 173–178.
• Clements, Ruth A. (2012). "Epilogue: 70 CE After 135 CE—The Making of a Watershed?". In Schwartz, Daniel R.; Weiss, Zeev (eds.). Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History?. Leiden: Brill. pp. 517–536. ISBN 978-9-004-21534-4.
• Cohen, Shaye J. D. (2018). "The Ways that Parted: Jews, Christians, and Jewish-Christians, ca. 100–150 CE". In Schwartz, Joshua; Tomson, Peter J. (eds.). Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: The Interbellum 70–132 CE. Leiden: Brill. pp. 307–339.

• den Dulk, Matthijs (2018). Between Jews and Heretics: Refiguring Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780815373452.
• Fredriksen, Paula (2024). Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15769-6.
• Rokeah, David (2002). Justin Martyr and the Jews. Brill.
• Hirshman, Marc (1993). "Polemic Literary Units in the Classical Midrashim and Justin Martyr's "Dialogue with Trypho"". The Jewish Quarterly Review. 83 (3/4): 369–384. JSTOR 1455159.