Note 163 — Chapter XX

Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho the Jew was written about a hundred years after the eunuch's conversion. It is a good specimen of the methods adopted by the early Church in dealing with the Jews. St. Philip's teaching was doubtless of much the same kind. Justin upheld the application to Christ and its fulfilment in Him alone of the fifty-third of Isaiah, repeatedly quoting large portions of it, in the Dialogue, as, for instance, in chap. xiii. The apology of St. Stephen furnished the model upon which all subsequent missionaries to the Jews framed their arguments. They all dealt largely with the transitory and typical character of the Levitical law. The apologies addressed to the Gentiles were quite different, as was natural. They dealt with the true nature of God, the conceptions men ought to form of Him, and the immoralities of the pagan deities. The newly-discovered Apology of Aristides, which I have described in the preface, dating from about 124 A.D., set a fashion which we find reproduced in Justin Martyr, Tatian's Oration to the Greeks, and in Tertullian's Apology and Address, Ad Nationes. The moral proofs of Christianity and its adaptation to the soul's wants are their leading topics. I have treated more of this point in the preface.