ABSTRACT
Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho sits at the crossroads of various discursive developments central to the formation of early Christianity. At the time of its composition in the mid-second century CE, many of the constitutive parts of what would eventually become “orthodox” Christianity were still being negotiated and the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism as well as between various rival “Christianities” remained in flux and permeable. I have argued that taking this historical setting seriously means that we must move beyond the common scholarly construal of the Dialogue in terms of “Christianity vs. Judaism.” Justin is arguing for a particular interpretation and positioning of Christianity vis-à-vis Judaism, and he is doing so in constant negotiation with rival Christian theologies. He develops his particular account of Christianity’s relation to Jewish as well as Greco-Roman philosophical traditions in response to, and with a constant eye on, Christian opponents who construed these relations very differently. Justin’s concern with such “other” Christians, most notably those who adhered to the notion that the Jewish God was an inferior Demiurge, has deeply impacted the Dialogue and must be taken into account in the interpretation of individual passages as well as of the text as a whole. Since the Dialogue is among our most important sources for such important questions as early Jewish-Christian relations and the purported “parting of the ways,” the forging of Christian identity via the invention and implementation of the orthodoxy-heresy binary, and the position of Christ-groups vis-à-vis the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, the novel interpretation of the Dialogue advanced here has implications that go beyond the Dialogue itself.
