#resurrection #catholic At the beginning of the second century, around the year 100, a man named Justin was born in the city of Flavia Neapolis. That is a town in modern day Palestine. Growing up, Justin was educated as a philosopher in the school of Platonic philosophy. He was a pagan and he heard talk about a group of people called Christians. He was told that they were terribly immoral people. But this did not make sense to Justin. He saw the Christians appearing before Roman judges and willingly being martyred for Christ. He said to himself that it was impossible that they would be doing this while living an evil life or a life of pleasure. St. Justin went on to investigate Christianity and become a convert. Since he came from the pagan world and understood it well, he was in a good position to make the right arguments with the pagans to convert them to Catholicism. St. Justin was eventually martyred when he was about 65 years old and we celebrate his feast day on April 14. One of the things that St. Justin tried to do was to convince the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to stop putting Christians to death. For this end, he wrote two works of explanation and defense of the Catholic faith that were called “Apologies”. This does not mean that he was saying sorry in these works; rather, Apology was a Greek word meaning “a formal defense of one’s opinions and conduct”. There is one part of St. Justin’s first Apology that I would like to focus upon today. It is the part where he defends the resurrection of bodies and his defense relates to today’s Gospel.
