The Didache

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The Didache — the word is Greek for “teaching,” and the manuscript heads it “The Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations” — is a short Christian church manual, generally dated to the late first or early second century, that instructs a small community in how to live, baptize, pray, and govern itself. It is the briefest of the writings grouped as the Apostolic Fathers, and one of the earliest glimpses of what an ordinary congregation did when the apostolic generation was passing. Where the rest of that shelf preserves letters and visions and sermons, this one preserves something rarer: the working rulebook of a congregation, written for use rather than for posterity, and so candid about the seams of an institution still being assembled that no later editor would have left it so.

Its date is a layered thing, and the layering is the point. The text as it stands was most likely compiled in the early second century, but it is stitched together from older materials — a moral catechism, a set of liturgical directions, a piece of church order — several of which reach back into the first century, into the same decades that produced the gospels. Proposals have run from around the year 50 to about 150; the working consensus settles the final redaction near the turn of the century or a little after, with the sources it absorbs older still. The manual is therefore not the composition of a single author at a single moment but a sediment, a community’s accumulated practice set down and lightly arranged. That is precisely what makes it useful: it records not what one teacher thought ought to be done, but what a congregation had already settled into doing.

The Two Ways

The text falls into recognizable parts. It opens with the “Two Ways” — the way of life and the way of death — a moral catechism that gathers sayings of Jesus alongside older Jewish ethical material. The way of life begins with the double command to love God and neighbor and the negative form of the golden rule, then fills out a long inventory of conduct: the commandments against killing, adultery, theft, and false witness, expanded with the harder sayings of the Gospel of Matthew — to bless those who curse you, to give to everyone who asks, to turn the other cheek. The way of death is its mirror, a catalog of vices and of the people who walk them. The doctrine of the two ways was not invented here. The same material appears, in a closely related arrangement, at the end of the Epistle of Barnabas, where it is cast as the Way of Light against the Way of Darkness and set under two angelic powers; the relationship between the two — which drew on which, or whether both drew on a shared source of Jewish moral instruction older than either — is among the durable problems of the field, and the weight of opinion falls on a common source rather than direct borrowing. The scheme of two paths set before the human will is itself ancient, running back through the wisdom literature of the Hebrew scriptures and the sectarian writings of the period, where two spirits were imagined contending over the heart. The compiler of the manual took that inherited frame and filled it with the commandments of his own community.

The practical directions

After the moral instruction come the practical directions, and these are what give the document its peculiar value. Baptism is to be done, by preference, in running water and in the threefold name; standing water is allowed if no running water is at hand, and where water is scarce, pouring three times over the head is permitted in its place — a concession to circumstance written plainly into the rite, fasting beforehand commended for the one who baptizes and the one baptized alike. Here the architecture of baptism appears already in something like its enduring shape, the washing read as entry, the threefold name fixed, and yet still flexible enough to bend to a dry country. Fasting is set on Wednesdays and Fridays, deliberately marked off from the days the manual assigns to “the hypocrites,” who fast on Mondays and Thursdays — an early instance of a community defining its calendar against the synagogue’s. The Lord’s Prayer is to be said three times a day, in a form very close to the one in Matthew, closing with a doxology — “for thine is the power and the glory forever” — that the gospel manuscripts mostly lack, evidence that the prayer was already circulating in worship with an ending the gospel text had not yet absorbed.

The thanksgiving prayers

Then come the thanksgiving prayers over cup and bread, among the oldest eucharistic texts to survive in any language, and among the strangest to a reader who knows the rite only in its developed form. The order is unusual — the cup is blessed first, then the broken bread — and the prayers are pure thanksgiving, with no words of institution and no account of the Last Supper at all. Over the cup the community gives thanks for the holy vine of David, made known through Jesus; over the bread, for the life and knowledge made known through him, and then the image that has carried farthest: as the bread was once scattered as grain upon the hills and gathered into one loaf, so let the church be gathered from the ends of the earth into the kingdom. A second prayer, to be said after the meal, thanks God for the holy name made to dwell in the heart and for the knowledge and faith and immortality made known through Jesus, and closes with the cry Maranatha — “Our Lord, come” — and a gate flung open to any who are holy and a warning off to any who are not. These prayers belong to the long history of communion, and they sit at its very head; what is missing from them is as telling as what is present. There is no theology of the bread as body or the cup as blood, no Passover frame, no passion — only a meal of thanksgiving that draws the scattered into one. Whether the manual describes a full communal meal or the eucharist proper, or the two not yet pulled apart, is itself a question the scholarship has worked over for a century.

Apostles, prophets, and the orders of the church

The manual then turns from worship to government. It sets out how to receive traveling apostles and prophets — figures who arrive from outside, claiming the authority of the Spirit — and how to tell the genuine from the freeloader by a shrewd, almost mercantile test: an apostle who stays more than two days, or who asks for money, is a false prophet; a prophet who orders a meal in the Spirit and then eats of it is exposed by the eating. The community is to support the true charismatic and to refuse the imposter, and the rules for doing so are specific enough to suggest the abuse was real. Alongside these itinerants the manual instructs the congregation to appoint for itself bishops and deacons, worthy and tested men, and not to despise them, for they too perform the ministry of the prophets and teachers. This is the older church order caught mid-transition: the wandering charismatic and the settled local officer side by side, authority passing slowly from the one to the other. The text ends abruptly, without peroration, on a chapter of watchfulness — an instruction to be ready, lamps lit, for the coming of the Lord, with signs of the last days and a final reference to the Lord descending on the clouds of heaven. It breaks off there, in the middle of the end, the way a working document breaks off when it has said what it was for. That ending plants the manual squarely in the eschatology of the early communities, awaiting the second coming as near and unscheduled.

Loss and recovery

The document’s modern history is itself a small drama of recovery. Ancient writers knew a “Teaching of the Apostles” and disputed its standing. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the great survey of Christian books in his Ecclesiastical History, placed the Teachings of the Apostles among the disputed works — the notha, the books read with respect but not counted scripture — in the same company as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. Some decades later Athanasius of Alexandria, in the festal letter of 367 that first lists the twenty-seven books of the New Testament exactly as the later church would hold them, named the Teaching of the Apostles not among the canon but among the books appointed for the instruction of those newly come to the faith — read, but at one remove from scripture. After such notices the work itself dropped from view and was thought lost for more than a thousand years. Then, in 1873, the Greek Orthodox metropolitan Philotheos Bryennios, working through a collection at the library of the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople, found a complete copy bound into an eleventh-century manuscript — the Codex Hierosolymitanus, dated 1056 and signed by a scribe named Leo, which also carried the two epistles of Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the long recension of Ignatius. Bryennios published the Clement letters first, in 1875, and only later returned to the manual he had passed over; the full text of the Didache appeared in 1883. Its arrival reset the study of early Christian worship and order overnight, and reopened questions long settled by silence: how fluid the early liturgy still was, how loosely the line between scripture and church order was yet drawn, how much of later Christian practice was already in place and how much was not.

Texts and scholarship {#research}

The Greek of the manual survives almost entirely from the single Constantinople manuscript Bryennios recovered, supplemented by a few small fragments and by ancient translations and adaptations — a Coptic leaf, a Latin version of the Two Ways, an Ethiopic form, and the later church orders that absorbed it whole, above all the Apostolic Constitutions, whose seventh book is a swollen reworking of the Didache. Reconstructing the original from this scatter is the discipline’s standing problem. The text is read today in the major critical commentary by Kurt Niederwimmer, The Didache: A Commentary, translated by Linda M. Maloney for the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press, 1998), which treats the structure, the manuscript tradition, the Two Ways problem, and the reconstruction of the work’s origin and remains the scholarly benchmark; a full English edition with text, translation, and analysis was produced by Aaron Milavec, The Didache: Text, Translation, Analysis, and Commentary (The Liturgical Press, 2003). The manual is printed with the rest of the corpus in the standard bilingual collections — Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Baker Academic, 2007), and Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 24 (Harvard University Press, 2003). The Victorian translation by which most English readers still first meet it, made by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson for the Ante-Nicene Library, is freely readable in full; Eusebius’s notice placing the work among the disputed books stands in the twenty-fifth chapter of the third book of his Ecclesiastical History.

What the Didache offers is less a theology than a household economy of the faith — rules of thumb for a community still improvising its institutions. Its prayers thank God for the “knowledge and faith and immortality” made known through Jesus, and ask that the church be gathered from the ends of the earth as scattered grain is gathered into one loaf. Set beside the developed sacramental systems and the fixed liturgies that came after — beside, much later, the careful choreography of a book like the Book of Common Prayer — it is striking for what it lacks: no fixed creed, no settled canon, no clergy sharply set above the congregation. For the historian of Christianity it is a rare fixed point in a period otherwise reconstructed from fragments. The community that wrote it has left almost nothing else; this one manual is most of what it has to say.

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