Justin Martyr was a Christian apologist and theologian of the 2nd century who played a significant role in the development of early Christian theology. He was born in Palestine around the year 100 AD and was a strong defender of the faith against paganism and Gnosticism. He is best known for his writings, which sought to explain and defend Christian beliefs to a wider audience.
In his works, Martyr used the passage in Genesis 6:1-4 to argue that pagan cultures of his time had derived their own gods and mythologies from the Bible’s original story. He believed that the “sons of God” mentioned in the passage referred to angelic beings, not human descendants of Seth, like most other early church fathers of his time. His retelling of the story seems that he was influenced by the Book of Enoch in support of this belief and linked the Nephilim and giants in the Bible to the offspring of the union between these angelic beings and human women.
Martyr argued that the pagan myths of his time, which often featured gods and demigods who engaged in relationships with mortals and had offspring, were derived from the original story of the angels who had fallen in love with women and produced the Nephilim.
He wrote in The Second Apology of St. Justin Martyr:
“God, when He had made the whole world, and subjected things earthly to man, and arranged the heavenly elements for the increase of fruits and rotation of the seasons, and appointed this divine law — for these things also He evidently made for man — committed the care of men and of all things under heaven to angels whom He appointed over them.
But the angels transgressed this appointment, and were captivated by love of women, and begot children who are those that are called demons; and besides, they afterwards subdued the human race to themselves, partly by magical writings, and partly by fears and the punishments they occasioned, and partly by teaching them to offer sacrifices, and incense, and libations, of which things they stood in need after they were enslaved by lustful passions; and among men they sowed murders, wars, adulteries, intemperate deeds, and all wickedness.
Whence also the poets and mythologists, not knowing that it was the angels and those demons who had been begotten by them that did these things to men, and women, and cities, and nations, which they related, ascribed them to god himself, and to those who were accounted to be his very offspring, and to the offspring of those who were called his brothers, Neptune and Pluto, and to the children again of these their offspring. For whatever name each of the angels had given to himself and his children, by that name they called them.
During his life, Justin Martyr faced persecution and was eventually martyred for his beliefs. He was executed during the reign of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Nevertheless, his writings have been widely read and studied, and he is remembered as an early witness to the faith and a defender of the truth.
Although Justin Martyr clearly saw Genesis 6 as an apologetic tool to demonstrate the Bible’s authenticity to a pagan culture, we must remember that his writings come a long time after the writer of Genesis wrote the very brief verses we find in Genesis, and only a few hundred years after the first appearances of the Book of Enoch and references to it.
