g. Finally, we must here include an epistle to a certain =Diognetus= by an unknown writer, who has described himself as μαθητὴς τῶν ἀποστόλων. Justin Martyr, among whose writings this epistle got inserted, cannot possibly have been the author, as both his style and his point of view are different. The epistle controverts in a spirited manner the objections of Diognetus to Christianity, views the pagan deities not, like the other Church Fathers, as demons, but as unsubstantial phantoms, explains the Old Testament institutions as human, and so in part foolish enactments, and maintains keenly and determinedly the opinion that God for the first time revealed Himself to man in Christ. He thus, as Dräseke thinks, to some extent favours the Marcionite view of the Old Testament, so that he regards it as not improbable that our epistle was composed by a disciple of Marcion, one perhaps like Apelles, who in the course of the later development of the school had rejected many of his master’s crudities (§ 27, 12). He addresses his discourse to Diognetus, the stoical philosopher who boasts of Marcus Aurelius as his master. On the other hand, Overbeck assigns its composition to the Post-Constantine Age, and the French scholar Doulcet, setting it down to the age of Hadrian, thinks he has discovered the author to be the Athenian philosopher Aristides. This idea has been more fully carried out by Kihn, who endeavours to make out not only the identity of the author, but that of him to whom the epistle is addressed: Κράτιστε Διόγνητε, “Almighty son of Zeus,” that is, Hadrian.