The Didache

A window on the earliest Christians

Thomas O'Loughlin

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281059539
• eBook ISBN: 9780281064939
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The Didache is one of the earliest Christian writings, earlier than most of the documents that make up the New Testament.

It provides practical instructions on how a Christian community should function, and offers unique insights into the way the earliest Christians lived and worshipped.

In this highly readable introduction, Thomas O'Loughlin tells the intriguing story of the Didache, from its discovery in the late nineteenth century to the present. He then provides an illuminating commentary on the entire text, highlighting areas of special interest to Christians today, and ends with a fresh translation of the text itself.

1

A chance discovery

It’s the stuff of scholars’ dreams and the plot of a hundred films. A young library-bound academic turns over the leaf of an ancient manuscript and there, there before his eyes, is a long-lost text. People had heard of it and wondered about it, but now, without a doubt, he has found it. It is a eureka-moment. The scholar’s life will change: from obscurity behind bookshelves he will become world famous. Indeed, the whole discipline will be changed by his discovery. What has he found in this ancient hand-written codex? A booklet used in the very first decades of his religion. It is older than most of his religion’s most famous records, and gives a completely new slant on how its adherents lived their lives, saw themselves and expressed their beliefs. It is a short text, and deceptively simple, but it will cause an earthquake that will shake thousand-year-old certainties, beginning a revolution that changes the way a world-wide religion looks at its most august books and thinks about its own origins. The only element from the movies that is missing in this story is that of a secret plan to hide the discovery and destroy the evidence! It seems too bizarre to be true, but that, in a nutshell, is the story of the discovery of the Didache in 1873.

Philotheos Bryennios was born in Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1833 (see Figure 1.1 overleaf). His family, who lived in a Greek and Christian suburb of what was then the capital of the Ottoman Empire, was very poor but they managed to obtain some basic education for their son, and this allowed him to become the leader of the singing in his local church. There, he came to the attention of a local bishop – who later became patriarch – who, no doubt noting ability, sponsored his entry into the seminary on the island of Halki just outside Constantinople in the Sea of Marmara. By the age of 23 Bryennios’s abilities as a scholar were clearly seen by his superiors for they then took the unusual step of sending him to Germany for training in the latest scholarly methods. This education was paid for by a Greek banker, George Zariphe, who no doubt had been asked to sponsor this young man because he was so promising, and without this gentleman’s generosity to theological education we would all be so much poorer! So off Bryennios went, and attended courses in Leipzig, Berlin and Munich (> Schaff, 1885).

Figure 1.1 Engraving of Bryennios

This engraving of Bryennios is from the frontispiece of Philip Schaff’s The Oldest Church Manual called The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, published in New York in 1885; this was the first scholarly study of the Didache in English.

Why was this so significant? In the nineteenth century very few Orthodox clerics would have been exposed to the new methods in historical investigation that were being pioneered in Germany at that time. In German universities the long-held views about the amount of information we had on the origins of Christianity were being questioned; the historical worth of the Gospels was being debated; and new standards were being set in the rigour of historical enquiry in theology. Moreover, on the technical side of historical enquiry, these universities were setting new standards in the way that ancient texts were edited – our standard edition of the New Testament in Greek, Nestle-Aland, still bears the name of one of these German pioneers: Eberhard Nestle (1851–1913) – and German scholars were no longer content with just looking at what had been handed down, but were actively seeking new evidence for the history of Christianity through archaeology and through searching obscure libraries for ancient, forgotten treasures. A man typical of this new spirit was Konstantin von Tischendorf (1815–74) who spent the years 1840 to 1860 searching libraries in Europe and the Near East for ancient manuscripts of the Scriptures that might throw light on the origins of the New Testament or help solve problems with its texts. His greatest discovery came in 1844 when he found in the Monastery of St Catherine – in the middle of the Sinai desert – the Codex Sinaiticus which is one of the oldest books we still have that contains the whole of the New Testament, along with the Old Testament, and a few other ancient Christian writings. Our image of Christian origins was changing with each new discovery – and the German universities were leading the advance (> McKendrick, 2006). Tischendorf became a professor in Leipzig in 1859: did Bryennios meet him, hear him, or had he moved on from Leipzig by then? We shall never know, but the young man from the East would certainly have heard of the discoveries in ancient libraries and he clearly imbibed the new spirit of enquiry and learned its careful and meticulous methods.

After just four years in Germany, at the beginning of 1861 Bryennios was summoned back home by the patriarch – who earlier as a bishop had spotted his promise – and made professor of church history at Halki and soon afterwards ordained a presbyter. Then in 1867 he was moved to the seminary in the Phanar district of Constantinople as director. Phanar was a suburb where there were many church institutions and their libraries: Bryennios had rich pickings on his doorstep. Between 1867 and 1875 when he became Bishop of Serrae (and after 1875 his time was mainly taken up with being a bishop and acting as a representative of the patriarch) he not only ran the large seminary but also searched the manuscripts of the libraries around him with the aim of finding better texts of the earliest Christian writers. The first fruits of this search were published in 1875 in Constantinople and were editions of two ancient letters which we call 1 Clement (a late first-/early second-century letter; > Gregory, 2006) and 2 Clement (a second-century homily; > Parvis, 2006) but which were then thought to be the work of St Clement who was a bishop in Rome.

It was during this period, probably in 1873, that Bryennios, while working in the library of the Constantinople house of the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre (Jerusalem) on a manuscript written in AD 1056, found the Didache. However, rather than a burst of publicity, Bryennios took his time: he let the significance of what he had found sink in, then he carefully prepared an edition, and his discovery finally became public in Greek in 1883. Within months the work was being published in German, French and English (> Schaff, 1885). A facsimile of the manuscript’s text appeared in 1887 (> Harris, 1887), and, after that, the Didache was public property.

So how had he found it? It would be nice to have a romantic story of a codex covered in dust or hidden in some secret place or lost and stumbled upon by accident! Alas, the manuscript was well known for other early Christian texts it contains, but no one had gone carefully through the whole book and looked at everything with care! Other scholars went to check on what they already knew about; Bryennios, by contrast, looked at whole codex carefully and was willing to be surprised – there is surely a moral there for every student of the early Church.

What is ‘The Didache’?

The title, ‘The Didache’, comes from the heading Bryennios found at the head of the short text in the manuscript. It reads Didache kuriou dia tōn dōdeka apostolōn tois ethnesin which translates literally as ‘the Lord’s teaching to the nations through the twelve apostles’. Moreover, it is the same title as that referred to in ancient writers who mention that there was a book with this title used by the earliest Christians. But, as we shall see later, this long title was probably added to the text later – originally it was just called ‘the Didache’. But saying that ‘the didache’ means ‘the teaching’ does not take us very far because almost every Christian book ever written could be described as ‘a book of teaching’ in one way or another. Equally, a quick look through the text does not tell us much either. There are sections that deal with what Christians should and should not do, guidance on prayer and fasting, information on baptism and on what should be said when Christians gather to eat together; there are rules and regulations on how the community should relate to other groups of Christians; and there is a little homily on the return of Christ. It seems more like an album of bits than a single literary creation.

When it was first found this sense of a jumble of discrete items of information reminded scholars of later collections of Church law and so they saw it as a very simple set of guidelines for clerics. So they called it a manual – thinking in terms of the manuals that digested the training of nineteenth-century clergy into handy rules – and so they referred to it as ‘a manual of church discipline’ or the ‘earliest church order’. After all, it is the church officials that are concerned with communicating rules, teaching, and inculcating morality! But there were many problems with this view. Not least, this assumes that the earliest churches had the level of organization that we only see developing much later and that they used a distinction between ‘ministers’ and ‘laity’ that was formalized only after several centuries. Moreover, the Didache assumes that its teaching is for all Christians, the whole Church in a particular place, and that its information affects everyone within it. However, one stills sees it referred to as both a ‘church order’ and as a ‘manual’, even though these are not helpful descriptions as they presuppose late nineteenth-century ways of viewing the early Church.

Another view – found during most of the twentieth century in one way or another – was to assume that, as Christianity spread from synagogue to synagogue and from place to place, the new gatherings of followers of ‘the Way’ needed guidelines and advice on how they should organize themselves for their community meals – we will see later that these are the kind of meals Paul is referring to in 1 Corinthians 11.17–26 when he reminds the Corinthians that they must eat in a Christian way at the Christian meal – and advice on other matters. For example, they had to know about the Christian discipline of prayer three times a day. Moreover, they had to know the importance of the Christian way of acting, and for this reason (particularly if they were not familiar with Jewish ways of teaching morality) might be glad of a short text of the ‘Two Ways’ (i.e. ‘the Way of Life’ and ‘the Way of Death’). So what is the Didache according to this view? It is a folder of useful information for early churches: information that they found valuable in helping them to get themselves organized. Then, for us, it is a window to their communities; and valuable as a source of background information on the communities that first heard the gospel or who received letters from St Paul. Not only is this the most common approach to the Didache but also, since most of the people who read it do so in the context of their studies of the New Testament, the Didache becomes a document belonging to ‘the Background to the New Testament’ and it is read not so much for what the text itself tells us as for what it might tell us about other texts. The problem with this approach (apart from encouraging a view that the Didache is only important as ‘background’ to other ancient writings) is that it does nothing to explain the...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. A chance discovery
• 2. Choosing a way
• 3. Joining the group
• 4. Prayer and fasting
• 5. Meeting and eating
• 6. A network of service
• 7. Fears and hope
• 8. The challenge of the Didache
• The Teaching of the Lord Given to the Gentiles by the Twelve Apostles
• Further reading
• Search items for biblical and ancient texts
• Search items for authors and subjects