A guide to ‘true’ Christianity was found in a fish market in 1436
The strange story of the “Letter to Diognetus”
In 1436, an Italian Catholic man was visiting Constantinople, trying to convert Muslims. He noticed a fish merchant using pages of an old book to wrap his product.
Thomas D’Arezzo examined the book, and found a collection of early Christian texts—with one he’d never seen. It was a guide on how to “do” Christianity from the early days of the faith.
But what the text described was unrecognizable.
How do you be a “Christian”?
That’s a trick question. Nobody knows. You can go to many types of churches, Catholic to Orthodox, Southern Baptist to Pentecostal, and experience the religion as very different activities.
But the Bible isn’t too specific about a religious practice. There’s a mention of a ritual called ‘baptism’. Do you think you know how it’s done?
Try to find it described.
Even the term ‘Christianity’ is unknown to the Bible. The early followers called their spiritual path “the Way” (cf. Acts 9:2, 24:14, etc.). They never said how to do it.
In the 2nd century, non-Christians were very unclear what being “Christian” meant.
That’s the impression one gets from the text found in the book at the fish market. It was a letter to a Roman man who was apparently an official or important person, in that he is called “most excellent Diognetus.”
Diognetus had wanted to know: How does one be or do ‘Christian’?
He wrote someone he thought would know, and got a reply. The writer isn’t identified, but claims to be “a disciple of the Apostles.” This was someone who knew the people who knew Jesus.
The writer doesn’t speak of much that one might expect.
There will be no mention of church buildings, clerics, conversion or rituals. There is no impression, as a scholar notes, “of Christianity as an institutionalised religion…”
There are no overt references to any Bible verses.
There is no prompt to do the practices of Jews, or Old Testament law.
There is no talk of marriage, or children, or ‘family values’.
For the writer of the ‘Letter to Diognetus’, the ‘Christian’ activity only concerned an inner reflection on the figure of Jesus.
The style of the letter in Greek is very notable.
It reads as very well-written, rather artistic, “more befitting of a poet than a polemicist,” as a scholar notes.
But the writer’s idea of the religion seems more ‘poetic’ than religious. It seems elusive and mysterious. The idea was an not an outer practice but an inner awareness.
And it’s cultivated largely on one’s own. The writer says: it will not come from any human instruction.
“…do not expect to be able to learn from any human the mystery…”
The practice is not following cultural styles.
The writer says that Christians “do not differ” in lifestyle from their fellow humans in whatever place they live.
There is no Christian language, or nation. Christians are everywhere, and seem like everyone around them, in fact, in every respect except one.
They do not belong where they are. They have no ‘home’ on earth.
As the writer puts it: “Every foreign country is their native land, and every native land foreign.”
Christians do not worship local gods.
The writer is emphatic on this point, and analyzes the process of worship of pagan deities in a very interesting way.
“These are what you call gods. These are what you serve. These are what you worship. And in the end, these are what you become like.”
This is a key point: A ‘god’ is what you are trying to become. A deity is a model of consciousness.
The Christian deity is kind and gentle.
That’s very unusual for ancient gods. But God is different from others. His nature is ‘love’, and His practice is then to love people.
The venue for the practice is not a building seen as a temple. It’s about human-to-human interactions out there in the world.
In many religions, you’re forced to do practices or observances. You have to, or the god is upset. The writer emphasizes: “God does not work through coercion.”
Rather, a new mode of interaction with others is the goal. You worship by being ‘good’ to them. As the writer puts it:
“For whoever takes up the burden of his neighbor, who ever wants to use his own abundance to help someone in need, whoever provides for the destitute from the possessions he has received from God — himself becoming a god to those who receive them — this one is an imitator of God.”
God sent Jesus to model this approach.
The writer thinks that Jesus shows how it’s done. To reflect on the messiah’s life is to learn the way of representing God on earth.
Curiously, the messiah is not named. And the figure is stressed as a cosmic being, described as “the Designer and Creator of the universe…”
The crucifixion isn’t mentioned. The religion is not a process of thinking about Jesus dying, but about his life.
The prompt is not to think of Jesus as some kind of overlord or ‘judge’.
As the writer puts it, God “sent him to show forth his love, not to judge.”
The Christian path is not just to do ‘good’ things.
You can do good things all day long and not really be doing the ‘Christian’ activity, it seems. Rather, one does good things as part of an effort to learn the character of God.
One is learning to ‘see’ as God sees. As the writer puts it:
“Then even while you happen to be on earth, you will see that God is conducting the affairs of heaven. Then you will begin to speak the mysteries of God.”
You learn to see how heaven and earth interact. Others, who focus just on the earth, will only see the earth instead of this interplay.
And as the writer puts it, “you come to know the true life of heaven…”
You will become part of a subtle force that infuses the world.
This is the rather eerie teaching of the letter. The writer seems to think that Christians function as the ‘soul’ of the human race—its higher consciousness, its divine spark.
The writer explains:
“To put the matter simply, what the soul is in the body, this is what Christians are in the world. The soul is spread throughout all the limbs of the body; Christians are spread throughout the cities of the world.”
The writer had said more, but a section appears to have been removed.
Thomas D’Arezzo purchased the book from the fish merchant who used it to wrap product.
Christianity had no interest in it. The book was received into the library of a German humanist. He died in 1522, and his library was taken to a monastery. The book spent two centuries there.
Around 1794, it was given to a city library in Strasbourg, France. In 1870, that library was bombed during the Franco-German war. The book was destroyed. But several copies of the letter had been made.
Where it came from remains unknown.
But possibilities are mentioned. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius refers to a key teacher named ‘Diognetus’, who taught him philosophy.
It might be notable that Marcus Aurelius was known as a ‘protector of the Christians’. Could the letter have helped to create a favorable impression of the early church with the man who became the Roman emperor?
There might be possibilities for the writer of the letter. A few Christians of the early 2nd century were said to have been disciples of the apostles of Jesus. An obvious candidate: Papias.
Scholars think about the “Letter to Diognetus.”
In a 2012 study, the scholar Doru Costache reflects on the ‘new’ idea of the ‘Christian’ it describes:
“They are a new race, entirely remade by the creator and savior of the universe, and thus not of this world. Existentially free, no matter how strange this might sound today, they are above any narrow frame of reference, like God himself…”
Whatever ‘Christians’ are doing lately—is different? 🔶
