Monday, November 27, 2023

Michael F. Bird and Kirsten H. Mackerras on the Epistle to Diognetus

  

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)