to decree your sabbaths; because you fell away to idols, He had to demand of you sacrifices (ib. 19, § 236 E). He ordered you a temple, lest you should worship images. All was done to distinguish the Jewish race from the heathen; and this, not on account of the race's virtue, so much as for its proneness to evil. To justify this, Justin appeals to the "everlasting voice of prophecy"; he quotes the many words of the prophets in which sabbaths and sacrifices are declared unpleasing and unavailing. "I am not inventing all this," he says, but "this is what David sang, Isaiah preached, Zechariah proclaimed, Moses wrote" (ib. 29). Where the prophets insist on the laws, it was because of the people's sin (ib. 27, § 244 B). But Justin has, still, to account for the Law being, in a relative sense, worthy of God; and this He does by distinguishing two elements in it, one eternal, the other temporal; the two stand to each other chiefly as sign and reality; so Justin discovers in the temporal provisions of the Law allegories of eternal truths. This is what was meant when Moses gave minute rules about meats and herbs and drinks; it was to symbolize the moral laws (cf. ib. 20, § 237 C), but the Jewish people took it literally. They supposed, e.g., some herbs to be evil, some good; while, in truth, God meant all to be good, if it was profitable to men. The circumcision under Joshua was allegorical (cf. ib. iii. § 332), So, again, meat was a symbol of Christ; so, too, the Passover Lamb, and the scape-goats (ib. 40, 41, § 259 A). But if the Law was allegorical, symbolic, it necessarily ceased when the reality came. So it ended with Christ Who has enabled us to sever the eternal from the temporal elements: He is the test and canon of what was real in the Law (ib. 67, § 292 C).
If Christ took away sin, He took away the reason for the Law; He gave us the circumcision of the heart, which made the carnal circumcision needless (cf. βαπτίσθητε τὴν ψυχὴν ἀπὸ ὀργῆς καὶ ἰδού, τὸ σῶμα καθαρόν ἐστι : ib. 14, 231 D). Justin does not consider that such a principle as this negatives the necessity of an outward baptism, or of an outward Sunday; fox both these he holds. Prophecy speaks of a new covenant to be made in a Christ; and this for Jew as well as for Gentile, for both are to be saved in the same Christ (ib. 64, § 287 B). Why, then, did Christ keep the Law? Out of the economy of God; He accepted the Law as He accepted the Cross, and the becoming-man: it was in order to carry out the Father's will; but He was not justified by keeping the Law; otherwise He could not be the Saviour of all men (ib. 67, § 292 A) nor have introduced a new covenant. The admission of the eternal significance of Christ necessarily carries us back behind the Law, to the conditions under which all men had always lived (ib. 23, § 241 B).
The failure of the Jews to believe in the Christ is no argument for their being right; for it is foretold all along that the Gentiles are the children of prophecy, the true Israel, the perfect proselytes; it is of them that all the good promises are spoken. The whole of the end of the Dialogue is devoted to shewing this.
We realize in Justin the complete Gentilism of the Christianity of A.D. 140. He regards the Law rather as an evidence of peculiar evil, than of peculiar good, in the Jews; so he even says in scorn that circumcision only serves to mark them out for condemnation, as the accursed who are forbidden to enter Jerusalem; it enables the Romans to exclude them from the Holy Land.
But if Justin is hard upon the Law, he is very different towards Prophecy. On Prophecy, on Scripture, he relies absolutely; he asks to be believed, only so far as he can prove his truth by Scripture. It is the word of God, given by God through the Word, or chiefly through the Spirit. This is reiterated continually. The whole O.T. is as a great drama, with various actors, but of which there is a single author, the Spirit of God (Apol. i. 36, § 76 D). It is a unity; so that Justin does not believe that any one part can contradict any Other; rather he would feel bound to confess his own ignorance, where such seemed the case (Dial. 65, § 289 C). His definition is: "Certain men existed among the Jews, God's prophets, through whom the prophetic spirit foretold things before they occurred" (Apol. i. 31, § 72 B). Moses he calls the first; after Moses he speaks of an "eternal prophecy going forth" (ib. i. 31; Dial. 30, § 247 A). They foretold Christ, His coming, His birth from a virgin, His man's estate, His curing disease and raising the dead, His being hated and despised and fixed to a cross, His death, resurrection, and ascension, His being, and being called, the Son of God, His sending out apostles, His success among the Gentiles (Apol. i. 31, § 73 A).
Justin offers a very storehouse of Christian interpretations of Scripture, such as cannot be classified briefly; the strongest lines lie:—
(1) In the exhibition of the divine plurality, through which Justin can, while retaining the absolute purity and separateness of God the Father such as the Jewish monotheism made imperative, yet justify and correlate all the manifold manifestations of Himself by God under local and temporal qualifications, all receiving their true and complete elucidation in the Incarnation. He Whose nature it is to be the expression and exhibition of the Father's will, was at the tent door with Abraham, in the dream with Jacob, in the burning bush with Moses, at the camp side with Joshua, above the cherubim with Isaiah, and now is made man of Mary (cf. Dial. 75, § 301 A).
(2) Justin ably gathers into one the many-sided characteristics of the Messianic prophecy—the many human, mingled with the many divine, names attributed to the Christ: He is man—yet to be adored; He is suffering, yet triumphant; He saves His people, He is rejected by His people. Justin, in the paradox of the Cross, has a key to the endless paradox of prophecy. All the shifting double-sided revelations of Godhead and manhood, of triumph and suffering, meet in a crucified king. He can give a unity of solution to a Christ Who is called "Angel of great Counsel" and "Man" by Ezekiel, "As a Son of man" by Daniel, "Servant" or "Child" by Isaiah, "Christ" and "God" and "Adorable" by David, "Christ" and "the Stone" by many, "Wisdom" by Solomon, "Joseph, Judah, and the Star" by Moses, "the Morning Star" by
