Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Los misterios de la vida de Cristo en Justino Martir. By JOSE GRANADOS.

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jts/flm153

1477-4607

Michaël Edwards,

Religious and Theological Studies

Was Justin Martyr an ambidextrous servant of the Gospel, a fifth columnist in the city of God, a protean controversialist, or the first apostle to reap what the Word had sown among the nations before his advent in the flesh? Critics and admirers have agreed that in his work the eternal Logos and the incarnate Christ of history sit uneasily together: it is a commonplace that the Dialogue with Trypho barely acknowledges his role in the creation of the world or the education of the Gentiles, while allusions to his ministry on earth in the two Apologies are sparse and fanciful. Harnack characteristically opined that Justin was a Greek philosopher who used texts from the Scriptures only as phylacteries; the Jesuit Alfred Feder, who saw all that Harnack missed, was none the less unable to show how Justin reconciled the eternal with the temporal. Goodenough, while denying a philosophy to Justin, argued that the chief purpose of the incarnation in Justin is to turn the eternal revelation into an audible teaching, thereby making the Word an instrument of redemption; Andresen, more profoundly, holds that Justin presents the bodily epiphany of the Word as the consummation of God's salvific design in history. It is not enough, however (Granados argues) to perceive that the work of Christ encapsulates the divine economy if we fail to deduce from this that the incarnation and its sequel are inseparable from the work of the Holy Spirit. Antonio Orbe, repairing this defect in previous studies of Christology in Justin, urged as a corollary that the baptism is a linchpin in his account of Christ's mundane career; Michel Fédou, on the other hand, defying the all but unanimous view of scholarship in the last century, has argued that a peculiar significance is accorded to the Cross.