Dialogue with Trypho

The Dialogue is the longest of Justin’s surviving works. Its setting is the aftermath of a war: Trypho introduces himself as a Hebrew who has escaped from “the war lately carried on” (1), which is taken to be the Bar Kokhba revolt. The book was written later than the First Apology, to which it refers. Eusebius says the debate took place at Ephesus (Church History 4.18).

In chapters 2–8 Justin tells how he studied with a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean and a Platonist, and how an old man he met near the sea directed him to the prophets. The story is told by Justin himself, in a work composed to persuade, and its details cannot be checked. The rest of the book argues from the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures and is a main witness to how Christians and Jews disputed over those texts in the middle of the second century.