DIOGNETO, EPISTOLA a. — Only one manuscript is known (that of Strasbourg, destroyed in 1870, once in the possession of the humanist Reuchlin), which contained, among spurious works of Justin, the Epistle to D.
The work, which was known neither to Eusebius nor to Photius, answers the questions of why Christians do not follow the pagan or Jewish religion, what the Christian religion consists in, and why it appeared so late in the world. The little work, written in an elegant, homiletic-rhetorical style (for the end of ch. 9, V. Elio Aristide, 32, 2), has been greatly admired (especially the description of Christian life in chaps. 5 and 6), but it has also raised not a few critical problems. In ch. 7, 7 there is a lacuna (perhaps an entire leaf has been lost), and the present chaps. 9 and 10 are the conclusion of another writing (by Hippolytus 7). From the doctrinal point of view, too, the work is surprising for the systematic character of its doctrine of Grace and justification (almost Protestant in flavor, ch. 9, 3 ff.). While many are willing to attribute the Epistle of the Anonymous (Justin cannot be its author) to the second or third century, others have thought of a later period, and A. Donaldson has supposed it to be the forgery of a humanist. A definitive judgment is not possible. Andriessen’s attempt to identify in the Epistle the lost Apology of Quadratus does not seem to have succeeded. The attribution of the Strasbourg manuscript to the thirteenth or fourteenth century is not certain.