other · 135 · Ephesus
Eusebius says he composed a dialogue against the Jews which he held in the city of Ephesus with Trypho, a most distinguished man among the Hebrews of that day. He fixes the place and gives no date at all; the year here is the dialogue's own dramatic setting, in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba war, and is a setting rather than a record. What makes it unusual is its manners. Justin opens by telling how he went through the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Pythagoreans and the Platonists before an old man on a beach turned him to the prophets, and Trypho is allowed to object at length and is never made a fool of. Trypho is a figure inside Justin's text and has no row in this dataset.
To argue the case out with a learned opponent rather than at him — the only work of its kind from the second century that lets the other side speak at length.
A book that survives, and the earliest sustained Christian argument from the Hebrew scriptures.