Christianity had to figure out how to be a world religion, not just a
quirky movement.Responses to the Challenges
• Coherent responses to each challenge characterized the 2nd
century and justified the designation of “the century of Christian
self-definition.”
• As we saw in Lecture 8, the 2nd-century apologists drew the basic
line with regard to Greco-Roman culture, accepting its rhetoric and
its philosophy (especially that of Plato), which was universally
regarded as the philosophy most compatible with biblical
perspectives, but utterly rejecting all pagan religion. The apologists
adopted a variety of strategies with regard to pagan religion: It was
fictional, fraudulent, confused, or even the work of demons who
seduced and deceived humans.
o What about the boundary with Judaism? Justin Martyr’s
Dialogue with Trypho (c. 135) reports a fictive conversation
between the Jewish and Christian philosophers. The argument
centers on which version of Scripture is accurate and
authoritative: the Hebrew or the Greek Septuagint.o Connected to that argument is a dispute over Christ’s fulfillment
of biblical prophecy. Trypho insists that the prophecy in Isaiah
7:14 that Christians applied to Jesus was wrongly translated:
The Hebrew did not have “a virgin [parthenos] shall conceive”
but “a young woman [almah] shall conceive.” Justin responds
to the charge that Jesus did not fulfill messianic prophecies: In
his First Coming, he fulfilled the prophecies concerning his
suffering, but the prophecies about the Messiah’s triumph will
be fulfilled in Jesus’s Second Coming.o The relative civility of Justin is lost entirely in Tertullian’s
early-3rd-century polemic Against the Jews, which is
completely supersessionist in character: Because they rejected
the son of God, Jews have lost their status as God’s people;
they have been replaced by the “new race” of the Christians.