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The second century apologist Justin Martyr (d. ca. AD 165) was typical of proto-orthodox christology when he described Christ as “Lord and God the Son of God” who is “deserving to be worshipped as God and as Christ” (Dial. 63.5; 128.1).

Justin definitely had a “divine” Christology and even has a triadic Godhead with the Father, Son, and Spirit.

But is this “high” Christology and is Justin trinitarian?

Dr. Dan McClellan has been challenging some popular takes on how Justin proves the Trinity and since these folks have been quoting my book Jesus among the Gods, I get caught in the crossfire. In fact, McClellan accuses me of retrojecting Nicene theology onto Justin, which I’m very emphatic that I don’t do!

For those who don’t know Dan, he’s a Hebrew Bible scholar, and his channel produces some good videos about the Hebrew Bible and the ANE, making critical scholarship accessible to a wide audience, debunking some well-meaning but misinformed apologists, and sometimes just a bit of “it ain’t necessarily so” takes on the Bible.

So in the video above and post below, I’m going to set the record straight on how high is Justin’s Christology and whether we can talk about Justin as Trinitarian.

Who was Justin Martyr?

To begin, some background on Justin.

He was born around AD 100 in Palestine, then at age 30 he met a Christian and became a Christian, attracted to Christianity for its ethics and philosophy. He then became something of an itinerant Christian philosopher, spending time in Ephesus and eventually Rome, writing his famous two apologies and a dialogue with a Jew named Trypho. According to tradition, he was martyred in Rome around 165.

Justin draws primarily on the Septuagint (OT in Greek) and the Synoptic Gospels. There are possibly a few echoes of John’s Gospel and it’s very possible that he inherited a Christian interpretation of the “Logos” from John’s prologue. But Justin’s relationship to John has a big question mark on it and we can’t be certain he had access to it or knew the same way he knew the Synoptic Gospels. And interestingly, Justin has no explicit citation of the apostle Paul or most other NT writings. This is very odd for a guy who spent time in Ephesus which was a center of both Pauline and Johannine Christianity!

Justin was influenced by Middle Platonism, he even used pagan religious figures like Hermes to explain how Jesus is the Logos or how Jesus like Perseus was born of a virgin. He rejects idolatry and the deification of human figures. Justin writes in Rome at a time when there were several varieties of Christianity present in the city: Valentinian, Marcionite, and proto-orthodox.

Justin and the Trinity

Does Justin have a “high” Christology?

The problem with the high vs. low dichotomy is that it’s premised on the notion that the only two alternatives are between Jesus as (a) merely human; or (b) totally divine. The fact is that it far more complex than that. Valentinus and Marcion had high christologies in that their Jesus was truly divine, in some cases, so divine as to be hardly be human. Perhaps even more divine than Justin’s Jesus. Everyone agreed Jesus was divine. The issue was: in what specific sense was Jesus divine and how did Jesus’s divinity relate to that of God the Father.

For me, the issues are primarily two-fold.

First, for Justin, is the Son of God a created being? Where does the Son sit on the creator-creature distinction?

Second, for Justin, is the Son an unbegotten deity or is he a begotten deity? Is the Son a true God or a being promoted to divine status?

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