DIOGNETUS, EPISTLE TO
Only one manuscript is known (from Strasbourg, destroyed in 1870, once in the possession of the humanist Reuchlin) which contained, among spurious works of Justin, the Epistle to Diognetus.
The work, which was unknown to both Eusebius and Photius, answers the questions why Christians do not follow pagan or Jewish religion, what constitutes the Christian religion, and why it appeared so late in the world. The little treatise, written in an elegant, homiletic-rhetorical style (cf. the end of chap. 9, V. Aelius Aristides, 32, 2), has been much admired (especially the description of Christian life in chaps. 5 and 6), but it has also raised no small number of critical problems. In chap. 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?). Even from a doctrinal standpoint, the work is surprising for the systematic character of its doctrine of grace and justification (almost of Protestant flavor, chaps. 9, 3 ff.). While many are disposed to attribute the Epistle of the Anonymous (Justin cannot be the author) to the 2nd–3rd century, others have thought of a later period, and A. Donaldson has supposed it to be a humanist forgery. A definitive judgment is not possible. The attempt of Andriessen to see in the Epistle the lost Apology of Quadratus does not seem successful. The attribution of the Strasbourg manuscript to the 13th–14th century is not assured.