What was at the heart of the debate between Christianity and Greek philosophy?
Early Christianity engaged Hellenistic culture generally, and more specifically Greek philosophy, from the end of the first century on. We see bits and pieces of this in passages such as the prologue of the 4th Gospel where this concept of the logos comes to play. During the second century and beyond there’s a continuing engagement over a variety of issues. Some of them having to do with fundamental philosophical issues such as the nature of reality and the nature of God. Some of them having to do with issues of ethics and morality. These are two poles around which the dialogue develops during the course of the subsequent centuries. JUSTIN MARTYR By the middle of the century we see someone like Justin Martyr, for instance, one of the early Christian apologists, that is, one of the people who was trying to explain Christianity to the Greco-Roman world and doing so in the context of and using the categories of Greco-Roman thought. We see this fellow Justin Martyr active in Rome around th
