Introduction

The Author

The letter that follows names its reader and hides its writer. From the first sentence we learn a great deal about a certain Diognetus—that he is well disposed, cultivated, and genuinely curious about the Christians—but of the man who answers him we are told nothing at all. He gives no name, no city, no office. He is simply an educated Christian of the Greek-speaking world, trained in the rhetoric of his day, who has been asked to explain his faith and has taken up the task with evident delight. The work is, and has always been, anonymous, and the honest thing is to receive it as such rather than to press a name upon it.

That the piece survived at all it owes to an accident of transmission that also planted a lasting confusion. In the single manuscript through which it reached the modern world, the letter stood among the writings of Justin Martyr, and so for a time Justin was taken to be its author. The ascription did not hold. The temper of the two writers is different: where Justin argues as a philosopher marshalling proofs, the author of this letter writes with a restrained and lyrical eloquence that is entirely his own, and later readers found it difficult to believe the same hand produced both. Other names have been proposed across the centuries—the apologists Quadratus and Aristides, the catechist Pantaenus, and, for the closing chapters, Hippolytus—but each rests on inference rather than evidence, and none has won a settled following. The prudent verdict is the oldest one: we do not know who wrote it.

One further caution belongs here. In the closing section the writer describes himself as “having become a disciple of the apostles” who is “becoming a teacher of the nations,” and from this self-description the Greek word for “disciple,” mathetes, has sometimes been lifted out and printed as though it were the author’s proper name—“Mathetes to Diognetus.” It is not a name. It is the writer’s own modest account of where he stands: a learner of the apostolic tradition who now passes it on. The letter is best read, then, as the voice of the early Church itself speaking to an inquiring outsider, unburdened by the personality of any single figure and all the more universal for it.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The occasion is stated with unusual clarity, because the author begins by repeating the questions his reader has put to him. Diognetus wants to know what the Christians believe about God and how they worship him, such that they can despise the world and think nothing of death; why they reject the gods of the Greeks and yet also refuse the observances of the Jews; what the source is of the love they show one another; and—the sharpest question of all—why this “new race or way of life” has appeared in the world only now, and not long ago. These are the questions of a serious and skeptical pagan, and the letter is the answer to them, taken up point by point.

Who Diognetus was cannot be established. An attractive tradition identifies him with the Diognetus remembered as a tutor of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, a man praised for his freedom from superstition; the dates are not impossible, but the identification is a guess and is best left as one. What matters is the type he represents: a thoughtful adherent of the old religion, neither hostile nor credulous, asking in good faith why anyone would abandon the settled pieties of Greece and Rome for a movement so young, so persecuted, and so strange.

The letter thus belongs to the family of early Christian apologies—works addressed outward, to the pagan world, to explain and commend the faith to those who did not share it. It stands alongside the apologies of Aristides, Justin, Athenagoras, and Melito, written in the same Greek and in the same climate, a time when Christians were a suspect minority, liable to slander and to sudden violence, and when to profess the name could cost a life. The author writes into that pressure. His aim is not merely to refute but to persuade: to clear away the misunderstandings, to show the emptiness of what Diognetus already worships, and then to unfold, warmly and at length, the God who has made himself known. It is apology shading into invitation, and by the final chapters the tone has become frankly that of a teacher drawing his pupil toward the threshold of faith.

Argument and Structure

The letter moves in a clear arc from demolition to disclosure. It opens (chapter 1) with the preface, where the writer sets out Diognetus’s questions and asks God’s help to answer them well. He then clears the ground on two fronts. Against pagan idolatry (chapter 2) he presses a simple, devastating observation: the “gods” are stone and bronze and wood and silver, shaped by craftsmen, guarded against thieves, indistinguishable in substance from the household pots made in the same workshop—lifeless things that can neither see nor hear, and to worship them is to insult even them. Turning to the Jews (chapters 3–4), he grants that they rightly honor one God and reject idols, but faults the notion that God, who needs nothing and supplies everything, could be served by blood and burnt offerings, or honored by scruples about food, Sabbaths, circumcision, and the calendar of feasts and fasts. Both errors, in his telling, mistake the nature of the God they mean to approach.

With the ground cleared, the letter rises to its most celebrated passage (chapters 5–6): the portrait of the Christians in the world. They are marked off by no land, language, dress, or diet; they live in whatever cities their lot has placed them, following local custom, and yet their manner of life is “wonderful and admittedly extraordinary.” They dwell in their own homelands as sojourners; every foreign land is their homeland, and every homeland is foreign. They marry and bear children but do not abandon them; they share their tables but not their beds; they are in the flesh but do not live by it; they obey the laws and by their lives surpass them; they love all and are persecuted by all. Then comes the image that has carried the letter’s fame down the centuries: what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world. The soul is spread through every part of the body yet is not of it; it is shut in the body yet holds the body together; it is hated by the flesh whose pleasures it restrains, yet it loves that flesh—and so, the writer says, Christians are held in the world as in a prison, and yet they themselves hold the world together.

From the life of the Christians the letter turns to its source (chapters 7–9). This way of life, the author insists, is no human discovery. God did not send a servant or an angel to teach it but the very Craftsman and Creator of all things, his own Word, sent not in tyranny and terror but in gentleness, “as one who persuades, not as one who compels—for compulsion is not fitting for God.” No one truly knew God before he chose to reveal himself; the philosophers only guessed. And when the appointed time came, God did not reject the unrighteous but bore with them, and gave up his own Son as a ransom—“the holy one for the lawless, the innocent for the evil… the immortal one for mortals.” Here the writer breaks into the exclamation that generations of readers have carried with them: “O the sweet exchange!… that the lawlessness of many might be hidden in one righteous man, and the righteousness of one might justify many lawless people.” Chapter 10 draws the practical conclusion: the one who receives this faith will love the God who first loved him, and will become an imitator of God’s kindness—not by lording it over others but by taking up a neighbor’s burden and supplying to the needy what he himself has received, so becoming “a god to those who receive from him.”

At the close of chapter 10 the argument breaks off, and the two chapters that follow (11–12) stand somewhat apart, in a more ornate and homiletic key. They celebrate the Word who is “from the beginning,” who “appeared as new and was found to be old,” ever young in the hearts of the holy; and they turn to the paradise of Genesis, reading the tree of knowledge and the tree of life together—for “there is neither life without knowledge nor secure knowledge without true life”—and closing with a doxology to the Father. Their tone and vocabulary differ enough from the first ten chapters that most readers regard them as a later appendage, joined to the letter in the course of its transmission; the point is discussed further below. Whatever their origin, they extend the letter’s central conviction—that truth is a gift unfolded in love—into a final meditation.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

For so short a work, the letter is remarkably rich, and its importance lies less in argument than in the freshness with which it states the heart of the Christian message at a very early date. Three of its themes have proved especially durable.

The first is its account of redemption. The “sweet exchange” of chapter 9 is one of the earliest and most lyrical statements in Christian literature of the great reversal at the center of the gospel: the righteous One given for the unrighteous, taking their sins upon himself so that they might be clothed in his righteousness. The writer does not systematize it—that would come later—but he sees it whole and sings it, and the passage has been treasured across the Christian traditions as an unforced witness to what the Church believed about the cross well before the councils gave the belief its technical language.

The second is its understanding of God and his Word. The letter is emphatically a theology of revelation: God is unknown to human searching and is made known only because he chose to disclose himself, and he disclosed himself not through an intermediary but through his own Son, the Word by whom all things were made. That God persuades rather than compels, that he sends his Son “as one loving, not judging,” gives the letter a warmth and a confidence in the divine goodness that still moves readers. Alongside it runs the bold summons of chapter 10 to become an “imitator of God”—a vision of the human person raised, by grace and by self-giving love, into a likeness of God’s own kindness. It is a theme that the later Fathers of East and West would develop at length, and it is stated here with disarming simplicity.

The third is its picture of the Church in the world. The soul-and-body image is not merely beautiful; it carries a whole ecclesiology. Christians are neither to flee the world nor to be absorbed by it. They are dispersed through it as the soul through the body, sharing fully in its common life yet holding an allegiance that is not of it, and by that presence they hold the world together. It is a vocation of engaged pilgrimage—citizens everywhere and strangers everywhere—and it has spoken with fresh force to Christians in every age who have had to work out how to live faithfully within a culture not their own.

Reception and Influence

The later history of the letter is, until modern times, almost a silence. No ancient writer certainly quotes it; it seems to have circulated little and to have hung by the single thread of one manuscript. Its rediscovery belongs to the Renaissance, and its first printed edition appeared only at the end of the sixteenth century. Yet what was nearly lost has since been prized. Once brought to light, the letter was quickly recognized as one of the small masterpieces of early Christian prose, and the passages on the Christians in the world and on the sweet exchange have become among the most frequently anthologized of all patristic texts, read and loved across the Christian traditions. Its very anonymity has helped: belonging to no party and no later controversy, it is received simply as an early and eloquent voice of the undivided Church, and it is quoted with equal warmth by readers who agree on little else.

The Text and This Edition

The letter reached the modern world by a single, slender line of transmission, and its textual history is worth knowing. It survived in just one manuscript, a Greek codex of the thirteenth or fourteenth century known as the Codex Argentoratensis, in which the letter stood among works attributed to Justin Martyr. The manuscript itself had a wandering life: it is said to have been recovered in the fifteenth century from a stack of papers in Constantinople and eventually made its way to the municipal library of Strasbourg. There, in 1870, it was destroyed by fire during the bombardment of the city in the Franco-Prussian war. Every modern text of the letter therefore rests not on the manuscript but on the copies and collations made while it still existed—the first printed edition of 1592, prepared from an earlier transcription, together with careful nineteenth-century collations made before the fire. Two places in the text, in chapters 7 and 10, show gaps where the manuscript was already damaged, and these are marked as lacunae rather than smoothed over.

A word is also owed to the final two chapters. As noted above, chapters 11 and 12 differ enough in style and thought from the first ten—more florid, more homiletic, and self-identified as the words of “a disciple of the apostles”—that most readers regard them as a later addition, joined to the letter at some point in its transmission after the original had lost its ending at chapter 10. They are presented here in continuity, as they have come down to us, so that the reader has the whole of what the tradition preserved; the judgment about their origin is left with the reader.

This edition offers a fresh English translation made directly from the Greek. It is not a reprint of any earlier English version, and it is not a parallel or bilingual edition: the Greek stands behind the English but is not set beside it. The aim has been a clear, dignified, readable modern English that follows the Greek closely while letting the letter’s own eloquence come through—the compact antitheses of the soul-and-body passage, the rising exclamations of the sweet exchange. Scriptural echoes, of which the letter is full, are rendered in its own idiom rather than conformed to any standard version, so that the reader hears them as the author wove them in. In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work’s anonymity is preserved rather than resolved—no author is supplied where the text names none—and those who prepared the translation are credited as translators, never as the author. Chapter and section numbers, and any scriptural citations, are given in ordinary Arabic numerals. Where the Greek is damaged or genuinely uncertain, the difficulty is marked plainly rather than papered over, and editorial notes are kept to the few places where the reader would otherwise be misled.

Suggestions for Reading

The letter is short—it can be read in a single sitting—and it rewards being read straight through, as the unfolding answer to Diognetus’s questions that it is. A reader new to it might begin with chapters 5 and 6, the portrait of the Christians in the world and the soul-and-body image, which are the letter’s most famous pages and give at once the flavor of the whole. From there, chapters 7 through 9 are its beating heart: the sending of the Word and the sweet exchange. Keep the opening questions in view as you go, for the letter is structured as a set of replies, and its polemic against the idols and against Jewish observance is best heard as the answer it was—the reasoned account a second-century Christian gave to a pagan friend of why he could no longer worship as his neighbors did—rather than as an attack meant for our own day. Read in that spirit, irenically and with an ear for its evident love of its subject, the letter still does what its author hoped: it makes the faith intelligible, and it makes it attractive.