Christians and
not by any literary motive.[2] This is a universal trait of primitive
Christian writings; so that to speak of primitive Christian "literature"
at all is hardly accurate, and tends to an artificial handling of their
contents. These sub-apostolic epistles are veritable "human documents,"
with the personal note running through them. They are after all personal
expressions of Christianity, in which are discernible also specific
types of local tradition. To such spontaneous actuality a large part of
their interest and value is due.

Nor is this pre-literary and vital quality really absent even from the
writing which is least entitled to a place among "Apostolic Fathers,"
the Epistle to Diognetus. This beautiful picture of the Christian life
as a realized ideal, and of Christians as "the soul" of the world, owes
its inclusion to a double error: first, to the accidental attachment at
the end of another fragment (S ii), which opens with the writer's claim
to stand forth as a teacher as being "a disciple of apostles"; and next,
to mistaken exegesis of this phrase as implying personal relations with
apostles, rather than knowledge of their teaching, written or oral.
Whether in form addressed to Diognetus, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, as
a typical cultured observer of Christianity, or to some other eminent
person of the same name in the locality of its origin, or, as seems more
likely, to cultured Greeks generally, personified under the significant
name "Diognetus" ("Heaven-born," of. Acts xvii. 28 along with S iii.
4)--the epistle is in any case an "open letter" of an essentially
literary type. Further, its opening seems modelled on the lines of the
preface to Luke's Gospel, to which, along with Acts, it may owe
something of its very conception as a reasoned appeal to the lover of
truth. But while literary in form and conception, its appeal is in
spirit so personal a testimony to what the Gospel has done for the
writer and his fellow Christians, that it is akin to the piety of the
Apostolic Fathers as a group. It is true that it has marked affinities,
e.g. in its natural theology, with the earliest Apologists, Aristides
and Justin, even as it is itself in substance an apology addressed not
to the State, but to thoughtful public opinion. But this only means that
we cannot draw a hard and fast line between groups of early Christian
writings at a time when practical religious interests overshadowed all
others.

If