Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Apologetics

The Epistle to Diognetus

Anonymous

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Πρὸς Διόγνητον

Cover: Landscape with Saint John on Patmos by Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665), Wikimedia Commons (Art Institute of Chicago), which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:diognetus:en:1

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.

Preface to Diognetus

1 Since I see, most excellent Diognetus, that you are exceedingly eager to learn about the worship of God by the Christians, and are inquiring very clearly and carefully about them—in what God they trust and how they worship Him, so that they all despise the world and scorn death, and neither regard the gods acknowledged by the Greeks nor observe the superstition of the Jews, and what affection they have for one another, and why this new race or way of life has entered the world now and not before—I welcome this eagerness of yours, and I ask God, who grants us both to speak and to hear, that it may be given to me to speak in such a way that you may become better by hearing, and to you to hear in such a way that the speaker may not be grieved.

On the Futility of Idols

1 Come then, cleanse yourself from all the thoughts that preoccupy your mind and cast off the habit that deceives you, and become as it were from the beginning a new human being, since you are about to be a hearer of a new word, as you yourself have confessed. See not only with your eyes but also with your understanding what substance or what form those beings have whom you call and consider gods.

2 Is not one of them stone, like what is trampled underfoot, another bronze, no better than the vessels forged for our use, another wood, already rotted, another silver, needing a human being to guard it lest it be stolen, another iron, corroded by rust, another earthenware, no more attractive than what is fashioned for the most dishonourable service?

3 Are not all these things made of perishable material? Were they not forged by iron and fire? Did not a stonecutter fashion one of them, a bronzeworker another, a silversmith another, a potter another? Before they were shaped into their present form by the crafts of these artisans, was it not possible for each of them to have been transformed into something else—and is it not still possible even now? Could not the vessels now made from the same material become like these idols, if they happened to meet the same craftsmen?

4 Could not these very things you now worship be turned by human hands into vessels just like the rest? Are they not all deaf? all blind? lifeless? without feeling? motionless? Are they not all rotting? all decaying?

5 Do you call these things gods? Do you serve them? Do you worship them, and in the end become completely like them?

6 Is this why you hate Christians—because they do not consider these things to be gods?

7 For when you suppose and imagine yourselves to be praising them, are you not in fact showing them far greater contempt? Are you not mocking and insulting them all the more—leaving the stone and earthenware ones unguarded as you worship them, while you lock up the silver and golden ones at night and post guards over them by day, so that they will not be stolen?

8 By the honors you think you are offering them, if they have feeling, you are rather punishing them; but if they are without feeling, you are exposing them by worshiping them with blood and burnt fat.

9 Let one of you endure these things; let anyone allow these things to happen to himself! But no human being will willingly put up with this punishment, for he has perception and reason. But the stone endures it, because it has no feeling. So are you not exposing its lack of perception?

10 Now concerning the fact that Christians are not enslaved to such gods, I could say many other things; but if even these things do not seem sufficient to someone, I consider it superfluous to say more.

Concerning Jewish Religious Observance and Sacrifices

1 Next, concerning the fact that they do not practice godliness in the same way as the Jews, I think you especially desire to hear.

2 The Jews, therefore, if they abstain from the aforementioned worship, are right to revere one God of all things and to consider him Master; but if they offer this religious observance to him in the same manner as those previously mentioned, they are mistaken.

3 For what the Greeks, offering to insensible and deaf things, provide as a demonstration of foolishness, these same things the Jews, reckoning to offer to God as though he were in need, would reasonably consider to be folly rather than godliness.

4 For he who made heaven and earth and all things in them and who supplies to all of us the things we need would not himself need any of these things which he himself provides to those who think they are giving them.

5 But those who think they are performing sacrifices to him through blood and smoke and burnt offerings, and who suppose they are honoring him with these rites, seem to me no different from those who show the same devotion to deaf idols—the latter to things that cannot partake of the honor, the former imagining they are offering something to the One who needs nothing.

Concerning the Jewish Laws and Observances

1 But as for their scrupulousness about food, their superstition concerning the Sabbath, their boasting about circumcision, and their pretense about fasting and new moons—these are ridiculous and unworthy of any discussion, and I do not think you need to learn about them from me.

2 For to accept some of the things created by God for human use as well made, but to reject others as useless and superfluous—how is that not unlawful?

3 And to slander God as though he forbids doing anything good on the Sabbath day—how is that not ungodly?

4 And to boast of the mutilation of the flesh as a sign of election, as though they were especially beloved by God on account of this—how is that not worthy of mockery?

5 But as for their attending upon stars and the moon to observe the months and days, and to divide up God’s providential arrangements and the changes of the seasons according to their own impulses—some for feasts, others for mourning—who would consider this a sign of godliness and not rather of foolishness?

6 Now then, I think you have learned sufficiently how rightly Christians abstain from the common frivolity and deceit, and from the meddlesomeness and arrogance of the Jews. But do not expect to be able to learn from a human being the mystery of their own godliness.

Christians living as sojourners in the world

Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World

1 For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind by land or language or customs.

2 They do not dwell in cities of their own, nor do they use some distinctive dialect, nor do they practice a peculiar way of life.

3 Nor indeed has this teaching of theirs been discovered by the invention and speculation of meddlesome men, nor do they champion a human doctrine, as some do.

4 They dwell in Greek and barbarian cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and while they follow the local customs in clothing, food, and the rest of life, they display a way of life that is wonderful and admittedly extraordinary.

5 They inhabit their own homelands, but as sojourners; they share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners; every foreign land is their homeland, and every homeland is foreign.

6 They marry like everyone else, they have children; but they do not cast out their offspring.

7 They share a common table, but not a common bed.

8 They are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh.

9 They pass their time on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.

10 They obey the established laws, and by their own lives they surpass the laws.

11 They love all people, and are persecuted by all.

12 They are unknown, and are condemned; they are put to death, and are given life.

13 They are poor, and make many rich; they lack everything, and abound in all things.

14 They are dishonoured, and in their dishonour they are glorified. They are blasphemed, and are vindicated.

15 They are reviled, and they bless; they are insulted, and they honour.

16 When they do good they are punished as evildoers; when they are punished they rejoice as though being given life.

17 They are attacked by Jews as foreigners and persecuted by Greeks; yet those who hate them cannot give the reason for their hostility.

Soul and Body in the Condition of Christians

1 To put it simply, what the soul is to the body, Christians are in the world.

2 The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians throughout the cities of the world.

3 The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world.

4 The soul, invisible, is guarded in the visible body; and Christians are known to be in the world, yet their piety remains invisible.

5 The flesh hates the soul and wars against it, though suffering no wrong, because the soul prevents it from indulging in pleasures; the world also hates Christians, though suffering no wrong, because they oppose its pleasures.

6 The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and its members; and Christians love those who hate them.

7 The soul is enclosed in the body, yet it holds the body together; and Christians are held in the world as in a prison, yet they themselves hold the world together.

8 The soul, immortal, dwells in a mortal tent; and Christians sojourn among corruptible things, awaiting the incorruption in heaven.

9 The soul, mistreated by food and drink, is improved; and Christians, punished daily, increase all the more.

10 God has placed them in so great an office that it is not lawful for them to decline it.

God Sent His Word

1 For this was not, as I said, an earthly discovery handed down to them, nor do they consider it their duty to guard so carefully a mortal invention, nor have they been entrusted with the stewardship of human mysteries.

2 Rather, the Almighty Himself, the Creator and invisible God, Himself from heaven established and firmly fixed in their hearts the truth and the holy and incomprehensible word—not, as one might suppose, by sending to human beings some servant or angel or ruler or one of those who direct earthly affairs or one of those entrusted with the administration of things in heaven, but the Artificer and Creator of all things Himself, by whom He created the heavens, by whom He enclosed the sea within its proper bounds, whose mysteries all the elements faithfully guard, from whom the sun has received the measures of the courses of the day to keep, whom the moon obeys when He commands it to shine by night, whom the stars obey, following the course of the moon; by whom all things have been ordered and bounded and subjected—the heavens and the things in the heavens, the earth and the things on the earth, the sea and the things in the sea, fire, air, the abyss, the things in the heights, the things in the depths, the things in between—Him He sent to them.

3 Was it, as a human being might suppose, for tyranny and fear and terror?

4 By no means! Rather, He sent Him in gentleness and meekness, as a king sending a son who is a king; He sent Him as God; He sent Him as a human being to human beings; He sent Him as one who saves; He sent Him as one who persuades, not as one who compels—for compulsion is not fitting for God.

5 He sent Him as one calling, not pursuing; He sent Him as one loving, not judging.

6 For He will send Him as judge—and who will withstand His coming? …[1]

7 … being thrown to wild beasts so that they would deny the Lord, and yet not being overcome?

8 Do you not see that the more they are punished, the more others increase?

9 These do not seem to be the works of a man; these are the power of God; these are proofs of His coming.[2]

[1] Translator’s note: ‘coming’: παρουσίαν rendered contextually for the eschatological advent; alt. ‘parousia’.

[2] Translator’s note: ‘coming’: παρουσίας rendered contextually; alt. ‘parousia’.

The Knowledge of God Through the Word

1 For what human being at all knew what God is before He came?

2 Or do you accept the empty and foolish arguments of those trustworthy philosophers, some of whom declared that God is fire (they call ‘God’ that into which they themselves are about to depart), others that He is water, and still others that He is some other one of the elements created by God?

3 And yet, if any one of these arguments is acceptable, each one of the rest of created things could likewise be declared to be God.

4 But these things are the trickery and error of charlatans.

5 No human being has either seen or known Him, but He revealed Himself.

6 And He revealed Himself through faith, by which alone it is granted to see God.

7 For the Master and Creator of all things, God, who made all things and arranged them in order, not only proved to be loving toward humanity, but also patient.

8 But He always was such and is and will be: kind and good and without anger and true, and He alone is good.

9 But having conceived a great and inexpressible plan, He communicated it to His Son alone.

10 So as long as He kept it in mystery and guarded His wise counsel, He seemed to neglect us and be unconcerned about us.

11 But when He revealed it through His beloved Son and made known the things prepared from the beginning, He granted us all things at once: both to share in His benefits and to see and understand—things which none of us would ever have expected.

Christ the Logos sent from the Father

The Kindness of God and the Mission of the Son

1 So having already arranged all things with his Son, until the former time he allowed us to be carried along by disorderly impulses as we wished, led away by pleasures and desires—not at all taking pleasure in our sins, but bearing with them, nor approving of that former time of unrighteousness, but creating the present time of righteousness—so that having been convicted in that former time by our own works as unworthy of life, we might now be made worthy by the kindness of God, and having shown ourselves unable to enter into the kingdom of God, we might be made able by the power of God.

2 But when our unrighteousness had been fulfilled and it had been fully revealed that its wages—punishment and death—were to be expected, and the time came which God had appointed to reveal at last his own kindness and power (O the surpassing love for mankind and love of God!), he did not hate us or reject us or bear a grudge, but was patient, endured, and in his mercy took upon himself our sins; he himself gave up his own Son as a ransom for us, the holy one for the lawless, the innocent for the evil, the righteous one for the unrighteous, the incorruptible one for the corruptible, the immortal one for mortals.

3 For what else was able to cover our sins except his righteousness?

4 In whom was it possible for us, the lawless and ungodly, to be justified except in the Son of God alone?

5 O the sweet exchange! O the inscrutable work of creation! O the unexpected blessings—that the lawlessness of many might be hidden in one righteous man, and the righteousness of one might justify many lawless people!

6 So having demonstrated in the former time the inability of our nature to attain life, and now having shown the Saviour able to save even the impossible, from both he willed that we should trust in his kindness, and consider him nourisher, Father, teacher, counsellor, healer, intellect, light, honour, glory, strength, life, and not be anxious about clothing and food.

An Imitator of God Through Kindness

1 If you too long for this faith and receive it, first you will gain knowledge of the Father.[1]

2 For God loved humankind, for whose sake He made the world, to whom He subjected everything on the earth, to whom He gave reason and intellect, whom alone He permitted to look upward toward Himself, whom He fashioned after His own image, to whom He sent His only-begotten Son, to whom He promised the kingdom in heaven—and He will give it to those who have loved Him.

3 And once you have come to know Him, with what joy do you suppose you will be filled? Or how will you love the One who first so loved you?

4 And by loving Him you will become an imitator of His kindness. Do not be amazed that a human being can become an imitator of God: he can, when God wills it.

5 For happiness does not consist in lording it over one’s neighbors, nor in wanting to have more than the weaker, nor in being rich and using force against those of lower station; nor can anyone imitate God in such things—these lie outside His majesty.

6 Rather, whoever takes up his neighbor’s burden, whoever is willing to use his own advantage to benefit someone worse off, whoever supplies to those in need what he has received from God and so becomes a god to those who receive from him—this person is an imitator of God.

7 Then, while still on earth, you will see that God lives as a citizen in heaven; then you will begin to speak the mysteries of God; then you will love and admire those who are punished for refusing to deny God; then you will condemn the deceit and error of the world, once you come to know what it truly means to live in heaven, once you despise what only seems to be death here, once you fear the death that is real, which is reserved for those who will be condemned to the eternal fire that will punish to the very end those handed over to it.

8 Then you will admire those who endure for the sake of righteousness, and you will count the temporary fire as blessed, when you come to know that other fire.

[1] Translator’s note: The sentence trails off with an ellipsis in the source; rendered as a complete clause for English readability.

The Word is Eternal and Ever New

1 I am not speaking of strange things, nor am I pursuing irrational inquiries; rather, having become a disciple of the apostles, I am becoming a teacher of the nations. What was handed down I worthily minister to those who are becoming disciples of the truth.

2 For who that has been rightly taught and has come to love the Word would not seek to learn clearly the things plainly shown through the Word to disciples—to whom the Word, once manifested, made them known, speaking openly, not understood by unbelievers, but explaining them to disciples who, being reckoned faithful by him, came to know the mysteries of the Father?

3 For this reason He sent the word, that He might appear to the world—He who was dishonoured by the people, proclaimed through the apostles, believed by the nations.

4 This is He who is from the beginning, who appeared as new and was found to be old, and is always being begotten young in the hearts of the holy.

5 This is He who is forever, who today is reckoned as Son, through whom the Church is enriched and grace, unfolding among the holy, is multiplied—grace that bestows intellect, reveals mysteries, announces seasons, rejoices over the faithful, and is given to those who seek, those by whom the oaths of faith are not broken nor the boundaries of the fathers transgressed.

6 Then the fear of the law is sung, and the grace of the prophets is known, and the faith of the gospels is established, and the tradition of the apostles is kept, and the grace of the Church leaps for joy.

7 If you do not grieve this grace, you will know what the word speaks through whom He wills, when He wills.

8 For whatever we were moved to declare with labour by the will of the commanding word, we become sharers with you out of love for the things revealed to us.

Knowledge and Life in Paradise

1 When you encounter these things and listen to them with eagerness, you will know how much God provides for those who love rightly, who have become a paradise of delight, raising up within themselves a fruitful tree flourishing, adorned with various fruits.

2 For in this place the tree of knowledge and the tree of life have been planted; but it is not the tree of knowledge that destroys, but disobedience that destroys.

3 For what is written is not without meaning: that God from the beginning planted a tree of knowledge and a tree of life in the midst of paradise, showing life through knowledge; those from the beginning who did not use it purely were stripped naked by the deceit of the serpent.

4 For there is neither life without knowledge nor secure knowledge without true life; therefore each has been planted near the other.

5 Perceiving this power, the apostle, reproaching knowledge that is practiced for life without the truth of the commandment, says: Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

6 For the one who thinks he knows something without true knowledge that is attested by life has not known; he is led astray by the serpent, not having loved life. But the one who has come to know with fear and seeks life in hope plants, expecting fruit.

7 Let your heart be knowledge, and life the true word that is received.

8 Bearing its tree and taking its fruit, you will always gather the things desired by God, which the serpent does not touch nor does error taint; nor is Eve corrupted, but the Virgin is believed;

9 and salvation is shown, and the apostles are made wise, and the Lord’s Pascha comes forth, and the seasons are gathered together and harmonised with the world, and the Word teaching the holy ones rejoices, through whom the Father is glorified; to whom be glory for ever. Amen.

Scripture Index

Every Scripture reference identified in this book, sorted in canonical Bible order. Tap a reference to jump to the verse where it appears.

Genesis

Genesis 1:26–2710. An Imitator of God Through Kindness (2)

Genesis 2:912. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (2)

Genesis 2:1512. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (1)

Genesis 3:112. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (8)

Genesis 3:1–712. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (3)

Genesis 3:612. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (8)

Genesis 3:1312. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (6)

Exodus

Exodus 20:117. God Sent His Word (2)

Exodus 34:68. The Knowledge of God Through the Word (7)

Psalms

Psalms 2:711. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (5)

Psalms 8:610. An Imitator of God Through Kindness (2)

Psalms 115:4–72. On the Futility of Idols (4)
Psalms 148:7–87. God Sent His Word (2)
Proverbs

Proverbs 22:2811. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (5)

Isaiah

Isaiah 1:13–144. Concerning the Jewish Laws and Observances (1)

Isaiah 53:311. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (3)

Daniel
Daniel 5:42. On the Futility of Idols (7)
Malachi
Malachi 3:27. God Sent His Word (6)
Matthew

Matthew 3:178. The Knowledge of God Through the Word (11)

Matthew 5:1010. An Imitator of God Through Kindness (8)

Matthew 5:446. Soul and Body in the Condition of Christians (6)

Matthew 6:259. The Kindness of God and the Mission of the Son (6)

Matthew 13:1111. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (2)

Matthew 19:23–249. The Kindness of God and the Mission of the Son (1)

Mark

Mark 10:188. The Knowledge of God Through the Word (8)

Mark 16:1511. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (3)

John

John 1:1411. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (2)

John 1:188. The Knowledge of God Through the Word (5)

John 3:1610. An Imitator of God Through Kindness (2)

John 3:177. God Sent His Word (5)

John 16:2511. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (2)

John 17:166. Soul and Body in the Condition of Christians (3)

Acts

Acts 17:243. Concerning Jewish Religious Observance and Sacrifices (4)

Romans

Romans 5:199. The Kindness of God and the Mission of the Son (5)

Romans 8:45. Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World (8)

Romans 11:3612. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (9)

1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians 2:912. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (1)

1 Corinthians 2:1411. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (2)

1 Corinthians 4:125. Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World (15)

1 Corinthians 8:112. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (5)

1 Corinthians 8:212. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (6)

2 Corinthians

2 Corinthians 5:16. Soul and Body in the Condition of Christians (8)

2 Corinthians 6:8–95. Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World (14)

2 Corinthians 6:95. Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World (12)

2 Corinthians 6:105. Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World (13)

Galatians

Galatians 4:104. Concerning the Jewish Laws and Observances (5)

Ephesians

Ephesians 4:242. On the Futility of Idols (1)

Ephesians 5:110. An Imitator of God Through Kindness (6)

Philippians

Philippians 3:205. Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World (9)

1 Timothy

1 Timothy 2:711. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (1)

1 Timothy 3:1611. The Word is Eternal and Ever New (3)

1 Peter

1 Peter 1:46. Soul and Body in the Condition of Christians (8)

1 Peter 2:116. Soul and Body in the Condition of Christians (5, 8)

1 Peter 2:125. Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World (16)

1 Peter 4:89. The Kindness of God and the Mission of the Son (3)

1 John

1 John 4:1910. An Imitator of God Through Kindness (3)

Persons

Persons mentioned in this book, with short notes and back-links to every occurrence.

Diognetus

The addressee of the second-century Greek apologetic letter that bears his name. He is greeted as κράτιστε (“most excellent”) and described as eager to learn the substance of Christian worship; nothing further is known of him with certainty.

Mentioned in: 1. Preface to Diognetus (1).

Eve

The first woman in Genesis, wife of Adam. In patristic typology she is often paired and contrasted with the Theotokos as the “new Eve” whose obedience reverses the disobedience of the first.

Mentioned in: 12. Knowledge and Life in Paradise (8).

Illustration Credits

Sources and attribution for every illustration in this book. Each entry lists the photographer or artist when known, the licence under which the image was released, and a link to the original page on Wikimedia Commons or the equivalent host. Images released into the public domain are listed without further obligation; images released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence are reproduced here under the same licence.

1. Christians living as sojourners in the world

Licence: Met Museum Open Access (CC0).

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

2. Christ the Logos sent from the Father

Image by Photograph: Myrabella.

Licence: Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Colophon

The Epistle to Diognetus
by Anonymous.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Landscape with Saint John on Patmos
by Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665), Wikimedia Commons (Art Institute of Chicago), which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 25, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Preface to Diognetus
- On the Futility of Idols

- Concerning Jewish Religious Observance and Sacrifices

- Concerning the Jewish Laws and Observances

- Concerning the Condition of Christians in the World

- Soul and Body in the Condition of Christians

- God Sent His Word

- The Knowledge of God Through the Word

- The Kindness of God and the Mission of the Son

- An Imitator of God Through Kindness
- The Word is Eternal and Ever New
- Knowledge and Life in Paradise
- Scripture Index
- Persons
- Illustration Credits
- Colophon