St. Justin Martyr's Dialogue With Trypho is the first work of the early Church Fathers I ever bought and I am only now getting around to reading it. This is a record of a conversation St. Justin had with the Jew, Trypho. In it he seeks to show that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ of God, the long awaited Savior of the Jews as well as the Gentiles. In so doing he marshals lengthy Old Testament quotations. He often comes across as particularly anti-Semitic, calling them "stupid", "ignorant", "stubborn", and "hard hearted." But he also demonstrates that the Hebrew scriptures are Christians scriptures. In Justin we witness the allegorizing hermeneutic of the early Church and the suspicion of a solely literal interpretation, often associated with Judaism by ancient Christians. This manner of Old Testament interpretation was integral to Christianity. John Henry Newman went so far as to say, "It may almost be laid down as a historical fact that the mystical interpretation and orthodoxy will stand or fall together." He is not my favorite of the patristics but he is one of the earliest and oft cited.