Anonymous (sub-apostolic)
2nd c. · 2nd c. · 1 work
The Epistle to Diognetus is a short anonymous Greek apology for Christianity, generally dated to the second century, though scholarly estimates range from shortly after the apostolic age to the third century. Bishop J. B. Lightfoot, who praised it as one of the noblest of early Christian apologies, favored a date around A.D. 150, while Adolf von Harnack and others argued for a later composition. Both the author and the addressee are unknown; the work was preserved within a collection ascribed to Justin Martyr, but its restrained eloquence and limpid style mark it as the work of a different hand.
Cast as a reply to an inquiring pagan named Diognetus, who is greeted as "most excellent," the letter sets out to explain what Christians believe and how they live. The author opens by ridiculing the worship of idols fashioned by human hands as lifeless and absurd, then turns to criticize Jewish sacrifices and ceremonial observances as offering nothing pleasing to the one God and Creator of all. The apology was evidently composed during a period of severe persecution, and it commends the Christian way of life as a distinct and attractive alternative to both paganism and Judaism.
The epistle's most celebrated passage describes Christians as living in the world without belonging to it: scattered among all nations, sharing in ordinary life yet citizens of heaven. In its memorable image, what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world. They are diffused throughout every part of it, hold it together, and are mistreated by it even as the soul, imprisoned in the body, sustains and animates the whole.
The text is cited by no ancient or medieval writer and survived antiquity in a single manuscript, the Codex Argentoratensis, dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century and rediscovered in the fifteenth. That sole manuscript perished by fire at Strasbourg in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, so the text now depends entirely on earlier printed editions and collations, including Henri Estienne's editio princeps of 1592 and the nineteenth-century collations made for Otto's edition. The final two chapters, florid and unrelated to the rest, are widely regarded as a fragment of a later homily appended to the original work.
Sources: Encyclopædia Britannica — Letter to Diognetus · Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent) — Epistle to Diognetus · Encyclopedia.com — Diognetus, Epistle to