The document known to us as the Epistle
to Diognetus is a perplexing text. Its origins are obscure since the author
is anonymous, the identity of the recipient remains unknown, the text has several
lacunae, the integrity of the final two chapters is questionable, and nothing in
the document indicates a specific date or provenance. What is more, Diogn.
is entirely unknown to Christian authors of the patristic and medieval periods
since no-one mentions or cites the document as far as we know.
Whatever its origin, the document was
quickly forgotten and lost until its discovery in Constantinople in 1436 in a fishmonger’s
shop. The text of Diong. was preserved in a single manuscript, codex
Argentoratensis Graecus ix, dated to the thirteenth/fourteenth century, located
at the end of a series of works by Justin Martyr. The document was eventually
taken to France and was first published in 1592 by Henri Estienne. The manuscript
was housed in the library of Strasbourg but was destroyed by a fire during the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and is now extant only in transcriptions made by
several scholars. (Michael F. Bird and Kirsten H. Mackerras, “The Epistle to
Diognetus and the Fragment of Quadratus,” in The Cambridge Companion to the
Apostolic Fathers, ed. Michael F. Bird and Scott D. Harrower [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2021], 309)
