Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/275

 to quote the words of Diodorus in his defence, though he regarded him with reverence (σέβω), as "a holy and blessed father" (Theod. Ep. 16). In the hope of rehabilitating his credit, Theodoret wrote a treatise to prove the orthodoxy of Diodorus, which led Cyril to peruse them and to pronounce them categorically heretical (ib. Epp. 38, 52). All attempts, however, to depreciate the authority of Diodorus, both by Cyril and Rabbulas of Edessa, only exalted him in the estimation of the Nestorian party, and the opposition contributed to the formation of the independent and still existing Nestorian church, which looks upon Diodorus and Theodorus with deepest veneration as its founders. The presbyter Maris of Hardaschir, in Persia, translated the works of Diodorus into Persian, and they, together with those of Theodorus, were also translated into Armenian, Syriac, and other Oriental tongues (Neander, Ch. Hist. vol. iv. pp. 209, 284; Clark's trans. Liberat. Breviar. c. 10). Diodorus was naturally anathematized by Eutyches and his followers. Flavian III., also bp. of Antioch, was compelled by the Monophysites to pass an anathema on the writings of Diodorus and Theodorus in 499. The controversy respecting the orthodoxy of Diodorus was revived in the 6th cent. by the interminable disputes about "the Three Articles." There is a full defence of his orthodoxy by Facundus in his Defensio Trium Capitulorum" (lib. iv. c. 2). Photius asserts that Diodorus was formally condemned by the fifth oecumenical council held at Constantinople 553, but it does not appear in the acts of that council. Diodorus was a very copious author, the titles of between 20 and 30 distinct works being enumerated in various catalogues. The whole have perished, except some fragments, no less than 60 having been burnt, according to Ebed-Jesu, by the Arians. His writings were partly exegetical, mainly controversial. He wrote comments on all the books of O. and N. T., except the Ep. to the Hebrews, the Catholic Epistles (I. John however being commented on), and the Apocalypse. In these, according to Jerome (de Vir. Illust. No. 119), he imitated the line of thought of Eusebius of Emesa, but fell below him in eloquence and refinement.

[E.V.]

Diognetus, Epistle to. The Greek writing known under this name was first printed in 1592 by Henricus Stephanus, along with a companion piece To Greeks, as hitherto unknown writings of Justin Martyr, taken by him from a single faded exemplar.

In his edition, as in the transcript in his own handwriting extant at Leyden, the writing To Greeks was not prefixed, but appended to the writing To Diognetus; but in the MS. from which he took the pieces (identified by Gebhardt with that collated by Cunitz at Strasburg, where it perished in 1870) three works, each ascribed by name to Justin, were followed by the two pieces Of the Same to Greeks and Of the Same to Diognetus. The correctness of the ascription of each of these two pieces to Justin was separately called in question by subsequent critics; but the connexion between the two pieces, the contrast in style presented by both alike to the spurious or dubious works of Justin to which in the MS. they were appended, and the fact that it was not directly to Justin Martyr, but to the author of the address To Greeks that the address To Diognetus was in the MS. ascribed, were forgotten.

In the MS., again, the text given under the heading To Diognetus was broken into three fragments by two clear breaks with marginal notes from the old 13th-cent. scribe, saying, "Thus I found a break in the copy before me also, it being very ancient." Of these two breaks the former, occurring near the end of c. vii., is ignored by Stephanus in his division of the writing into chapters. Whether more or less be missing, the writing comprised in cc. vii.-x. is plainly the continuation of the writing commenced in cc. i.-vii. In the concluding fragment (cc. xi. xii.), appended after the second break, the writer calls himself "disciple of apostles," and on this ground the writer To Diognetus has been included among the apostolic Fathers. But the contrast between cc. i.-x. and cc. xi. xii. is so great that critics have concluded the final appended fragment to be no part of the writing to Diognetus, but the peroration of another treatise by another writer.

No other ancient copy of the Greek of any of the writings published in 1592 has been found; but the writer To Greeks, with whom the writer To Diognetus was in the MS. immediately identified, has been plainly distinguished from Justin by the discovery and publication by Cureton in his Spicilegium Syriacum from a 6th or 7th cent. MS. of a Syriac version of an almost identical discourse ascribed to one "Ambrosius, a chief man of Greece, who became a Christian, and all his fellow-councillors raised a clamour against him." We may thus say that the true traditional writer To Greeks and To Diognetus is a certain otherwise unknown Ambrosius, convert like Justin from Hellenism to Christianity—the reply To Greeks, the assailants of the writer, being naturally followed by the response To Diognetus, the inquirer.

This conclusion is confirmed by internal evidence. The style of the two writings is identical. In each there is the same Attic diction joined with the same Roman dignity. Nay, in each there is the same occurrence of two contrasted styles, the same passage from the scornful vigour of the satirist to the joyous sweetness of the evangelist.

"Come, be taught," says the writer To Greeks (c. v.); and it seems that Diognetus came. Common as the name was, the only Diognetus known to us after Christ was a painting master who c. 133 had charge of the young Marcus Aurelius. Whether this was the Diognetus who came to the Christian teacher we do not know. The writing addressed to him is not in form an epistle, it seems rather to be a discourse delivered in a Christian Assembly into which the eminent inquirer had found his way. His coming implied a triple question: (i) "On what God relying, Christians despise death and neither reckon those gods who are so accounted by the Greeks, nor observe any superstition of Jews"; (ii) "What the kindly affection is that they have one for another"; and (iii) "What, in short, this new race or practice might be that has invaded