Your question: "The first time? Is this true, or just limited by their (non)access to our writings?"
I haven't had time to read the entire article, and I'm afraid that my contributions to this will be pretty simplistic compared to the more elevated fare.
I think that it is pretty common to conceive of "theology" as what writers in the Church taught, wrote, or thought after the time of the writing of the Scriptures. (Whereas we as Orthodox would look at theology as a seamless robe that is part and parcel in the life of the Church from the founding of the Church outside the gates of the garden of Eden up until this present day. Christian theology didn't start with the post apostolic era, or even with the apostolic era.. Regardless of that, St. Justin is a very early writer, so by these lights, it wouldn't surprise me that any number of things might "appear first" there."
That, of course, does not mean that it is a new idea. As the author of the article states, St. Justin "insisted that human wisdom was impossible without the testimony of the Prophets." I think that it is always important to remember that the early Christian apologists made no claims to be able, in their disputes with pagans, to "prove" the truth of Christianity via logic. Their task was to prove that the Christian faith was reasonable. That it was reasonable, and not complete and utter foolishness to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed by the prophets, and now known in Trinity and revealed on earth in the person of the God-man Jesus Christ.
What makes this bit of revelation vs. human speculation new is that with the advent of Christ, the faith of the Church is now free to and must come into direct contact and interaction with pagan philosophy. It certainly pops up in the New Testament where the framework of the apologetics directed towards both pagan and Jew were encapsulated in St. Paul's statement that the Cross was foolishness to the former and a stumbling block to the latter.
Faith itself, for the apologists, could only come through divine revelation -- in Scripture, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the continuing living presence of the Holy Spirit in the church. Their job was to remove intellectual and religious barriers to faith in Christ. They partly did that by showing the reasonableness of the faith itself, and partly by showing the unreasonableness and outright foolishness of pagan beliefs and teachings.
Looking at the article, the quotation cited from St. Justin is "We cannot know God as we know music, arithmetic, or astronomy." The author goes on to state that St. Justin is saying that "it is necessary for us to know God not with an abstract knowledge but as we know any person with whom we have relations."
It is interesting that the author elsewhere discusses the experience of the Prophet Moses with the burning bush. The Hebrew is usually translated as "I am that I am." The Greek phrase that contains -- 'o On -- (which is on every single icon of Christ, identifying him explicitly as Jehovah who revealed himself to man and interacted with man in the Old Testament) literally means "he who is." This is even more personal than "I am," which can have a bit of an abstract flavor to it.
Perhaps an interesting place to look for where these things could have been discussed would be in the Alexandrian Jewish writings -- Philo, etc... Surely they wrestled with the issue of the relationship of philosophical speculation and divine revelation. I suspect that because entrance into the religious community that worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was so difficult and relatively rare prior to the time of Christ, and because there was no directive to convert people prior to the Christian era, such apologetics wouldn't have been engaged in much, if at all. Anyway, those are my thoughts off the top of my head.
Thanks for the ping to the interesting article, which I will later read in more depth (although I probably won't understand the philosophical parts...)
And in spite of the best efforts of those apologists who tirelessly defend the faith, pagan beliefs are daily being promoted (wittingly or unwittingly) by professing Christians.
For instance, one of the pagan beliefs about the soul is back in popular fashion again today in some religious circles.
Pre-existentianism is the term used for the idea that the souls of people exist in heaven long before their bodies are conceived in the wombs of their mothers, and that God then brings the soul to earth to be joined with the baby's body as he or she grows in the womb.
But this view is not held by either Roman Catholic or Protestant theologians and is dangerously akin to ideas of reincarnation found in Eastern religions.
There is no support for this view in Scripture. Before we were conceived in the wombs of our mothers we simply did not exist, in spite of what pagans would like to believe.
Oh, what a glorious and heart-wrenching essay, Agrarian (e.g., esp. re: St. Paul's statement). Thank you oh, so very much for this post!