Saint Justin’s Eschatology — The hope of the martyr of Christ

Abstract

Saint Justin († c. 165), often titled as philosopher and martyr, deals with eschatological questions in all his extant works, the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew and his First and Second Apologies. In my contribution I survey the main themes around which his statements related to eschatology can be grouped. They are the following: the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and the final judgement. In his Apologies he relies on philosophical ideas because they are addressed to the pagan world. The Dialogue contains a lot of arguments taken from the Bible. In this work he concentrates mainly on the idea of millenarism, i.e. the terrestrial kingdom of Christ to come. In his Apologies he describes the end of this world with the Stoic idea of the final conflagration. Despite the attempts of several scholars, this tension between the two kinds of descriptions of the end of this world cannot be completely smoothed over.