Commenting on Justin Marty’s theology of the Fall and that his writings do not evidence the later doctrines (there are more than one understanding) of Original Sin, F.R. Tennant wrote:
It is when we come to Justin Martyr’s writings that we first need to weigh the question whether or not an approach towards the doctrine of Original Sin is to be detected. Justin speaks strongly of the universality of sin (Dial. c. Tryph., c. 95), and of our need of grace; and he alludes to an evil inclination which is in the nature of every man (Apol. c. 10). These things, however, are not deduced from, or connected with, the Fall. When that event is mentioned, Justin would seem to represent it merely as the beginning of sin rather than as the cause of sinfulness; and he does not appear to derive from it any hereditary taint or imputation of guilt. It is by the ‘following of Adam’ that mankind became corrupted.
Thus:
“But He did it (i.e. was born and crucified) for the race of man which, from the time of) Adam had become subject to death and the deceit of the serpent, each of them having by his own fault committed sin. (Dial. c. 88)
And again:
“ . . . the human race, which were created like God, free from suffering and immortal if they should keep His commandment, and were thought worthy by Him to be called His sons, and yet, becoming like Adam and Eve, bring death upon themselves; . . . all are thought worthy to become gods, and to have power to become sons of the Most High, and will be judged and condemned each for himself like Adam and Eve.” (Dial. c. 124)
There can be little doubt that in these passages the conceptions of race-solidarity, apart from influence of environment, and of heredity, are absent. Justin takes here the individualist view of man’s sinfulness and death, which was probably the opinion prevalent amongst the Jewish Rabbis of his day and subsequently became a main tenet of Pelagianism. All men, he seems to imply, have fallen by their own guilt, and because they have all acted like Adam and Even. It is not that he deliberately adopted this view rather than its alternative; he had simply not worked out a solution of the problem. S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans had perhaps not yet attained the authority which it possessed, soon afterwards, for Irenaeus; at any rate its teachings exerted no influence on that of Justin.
This estimate of Justin’s attitude towards the question of human sinfulness is not necessarily in conflict with the passage, sometimes appealed to as implying original sin, in which he asserts that man, being born the child of necessity and ignorance, becomes by baptism the child of choice and knowledge (Apol. c. 61). The loss of right moral eeling, of which Justin speaks elsewhere, is attributed, not to the Fall, but to the influence of evil spirits or to corruption through bad education (Dial. c. 93). The individual’s sin appeared to this writer only to have its type, not its cause, in Adam’s transgression; and he knew no doctrine of Adam’s original state as one differing sharply from that into which every other man is born.
It remains to mention a passage, ascribed to Justin Martyr in Leontius Byzantinus, Against the Nestorians, Eutychians, etc., Bk. ii. (Fragment v., Otto, Corpus Apologet. Christian. vol. III. P. 250 ff.), which runs as follows:
“When God formed man at the beginning, He suspended the things of nature from his will, and made an experiment by means of one commandment. For He ordained that, if he kept this, he should partake of immortal existence; but if he transgressed it, the contrary should be his lot. Man having been thus made, and immediately looking towards transgression, naturally became subject to corruption. Corruption then becoming inherent in nature, it was necessary that He who wished to save should be one who destroyed the efficient cause of corruption. And this could not otherwise be done than by the life which is according to nature being united to that which had received the corruption, and so destroying the corruption, while preserving as immortal for the future that which had received it . . . “
The ‘corruption’ here spoken of would seem to be synonymous with mortality. It is therefore only in the sense that Adam brought death upon the race as well as upon himself, that we have here any doctrine of Original Sin. (Frederick R. Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin [New York Shocken Books, 1968], 275-78)
Such is consistent with the entire corpus of Justin Martyr’s writings wherein he affirms genuine human free-will, not a form of compatibilist freedom and determinism, a la Reformed theologies, such as the following:
In His foreknowledge He sees that some will be saved by repentance, some who are, perhaps, not yet in existence. Indeed, in the beginning when He created man, He endowed him with the power of understanding, of choosing the truth, and of doing right; consequently, before God no man has an excuse if he does evil, for all men have been created with the power to reason and to reflect. (First Apology 28)
He foreknows that some are to be saved by repentance, and perhaps some not yet born. In the beginning He made the human race with the power of thought and of choosing the truth and of acting rightly, so that all people are without excuse before God; for they have been born capable of exercising reason and intelligence." (First Apology 28)