@ABuddhist
Thank you for the kind words.
are you certain that his outright lying that none of the original twelve apostles betrayed Jesus (and that all remained loyal to the end and even afterwards) would have been an effective strategy?
No, I have little confidence that that would have been an effective strategy. I am unsure why you ask me that. I can't find the "outright lie" version in our host's on-line
Trypho
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/t ... rypho.html
nor in the Apologies. Could you please point me to the passage you're describing, or were you asking only what I would think about a hypothetical debate strategy?
@neilgodfrey
Justin narrates that all twelve were scattered at the time of Jesus's crucifixion and that Jesus then came back from the dead, convinced them that everything happened as prophesied, and sent them out to preach to the world.
The translation linked above renders the pertinent passage (at chapter 106) as follows:
... He stood in the midst of His brethren the apostles (who repented of their flight from Him when He was crucified, after He rose from the dead, and after they were persuaded by Himself that, before His passion He had mentioned to them that He must suffer these things, and that they were announced beforehand by the prophets), and when living with them sang praises to God, as is made evident in the memoirs of the apostles.
I don't see anything there one way or the other about an apostle who defected, or about the ups and downs in the staffing level of The Twelve recounted in
Luke-Acts.
This is the second post where you have pointed to the phrase
scattered at the time of Jesus's crucifixion. as if Justin misstates the timing of the 'scattering.' My initial reaction was that the canonical gospels disagree among themselves about that. The synoptics have a scattering at the time of Jesus's arrest, and then no male followers attend the crucifxion.
John, in contrast, has Jesus negotiate safe conduct for his companions, and then The Beloved Disciple (who may or may not have been one of The Twelve) attends the crucifixion, but no other male follower.
Justin's characterization of the scattering, then, seems to me reasonable for a short harmony of these somewhat conflicting reports. On further reflection, however, it also seems to me that the sentence which contains the phrase describes the apostles changing their mind over a time interval defined by three events: Jesus's death, resurrection, and his refreshment of the apostles' recollection of his earlier teachings.
Prior to the trials, the only way the apostles could have known that there would be a crucifixion would have been that Jesus had already persuaded them that that was foretold. Justin's claim here is that the apostles were persuaded afterwards, inviting the conclusion that they were unpersuaded beforehand. At the time they fled or otherwise found some other place to be, whenever that was exactly, it probably seemed like a good idea. Then later, they repented of their decision. Plausibly that change of heart might have begun when Jesus was killed. After all, until then, he'd always been able to talk his way out of whatever danger came his way.
Thus, on this reading, the crucifixion is the beginning of their repentance for having scattered, without any commitment to when it was they scattered.
Either way the passage is parsed, that apostolic repentance was a process rather than an event, or that brevity smooths over a scrupulous conflict among the 'memoirs of the apostles,' Justin has no reason to undermine his own case by pointing to Judas.
... the story of Judas in our canonical works would be very relevant because it is presented as a fulfillment of prophecies -- and that was Justin's whole agenda: to marshall a list of fulfilled prophecies (30 pieces silver, my friend who ate and drank with me) to prove the truth of the Christian message.
Justin's agenda seems to include winning the debate. Nobody disputes that the Judas problem is relevant to the topic, but some part of a winning strategy is to emphasize that portion of the relevant which is also helpful to the cause.
I agree that if Justin had introduced Judas, then there would have been plenty of appeal to prophecy. However,
how something might have been done is not a reason to have done it.