Read the document
“…permit each one to have four or five wives; and if any one see a beautiful woman and desire to have her, they quote the doings of Jacob.”
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho · ch. 134 (ANF translation; PG 6)
Justin describing his Jewish opponents' teaching.
“The marriages of Jacob were types of that which Christ was about to accomplish.”
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho · ch. 134
His answer: allegory.
“The patriarchs had many wives, not to commit fornication, but that a certain dispensation and all mysteries might be accomplished by them.”
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho · ch. 141
The patriarchs' households recast as dispensation and mystery.
Put it in context
Justin does not answer his interlocutors with a prohibition. He reads Jacob's marriages typologically: the women represent later spiritual realities, and the marriages belong to a dispensation fulfilled in Christ.
Why this interpretive turn matters
Typology is a normal Christian way of reading Scripture, and Justin is not wrong simply because he sees a symbol. The important question is whether the symbolic reading leaves room for the historical and legal meaning of the lives being described.
Later writers use related moves. Tertullian treats the older permission as a dispensation that ended, and Jerome places the patriarchal households inside an ascetic account of history. Justin's dialogue is an early, surviving example of the point where the discussion moves from what the marriages were to what they represented.
What is disputed
Whether Justin is arguing that the patriarchal marriages were permissible in their time, or explaining them away, is a real interpretive question, and how far a single apologetic dialogue represents second-century opinion generally is another.
How I read this record
This is my conclusion from the source, not part of the quotation.
This early surviving Christian engagement does not answer with a direct prohibition. Justin uses typology to explain why the patriarchal marriages do not establish a continuing rule for Christians.
Open the sources
- Dialogue with Trypho, chs. 125-142, at New Advent ↗ · Chapters 134 and 141 in the standard English.