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.

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; scholars take the doctrine of the two ways to draw on a source the Didache shares with other early writings rather than to have invented it. Then come practical directions: baptism, by preference in running water and in the threefold name, with pouring permitted where water is scarce; fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays; the Lord’s Prayer to be said three times a day, in a form close to Matthew’s. A sequence of thanksgiving prayers over cup and bread follows — among the oldest eucharistic texts to survive, and notably without an account of the Last Supper. The manual then turns to the reception of travelling apostles and prophets, setting out how to tell the genuine from the freeloader, and to the appointment of bishops and deacons. It ends abruptly on the watchfulness owed to the Lord’s coming.

The document’s modern history is itself a small drama of recovery. Ancient writers — Eusebius, Athanasius — named a “Teaching of the Apostles” and disputed its standing, but the work itself was thought lost until 1873, when the Greek metropolitan Philotheos Bryennios found a complete copy bound into an eleventh-century manuscript in Constantinople; he published it a decade later. The discovery 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.

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. Read beside the developed sacramental systems that came after, it is striking for what it lacks: no fixed creed, no settled canon, no clergy sharply set above the congregation. For the historian 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.

→ Related: Gospel Of St Matthew · Book Of Common Prayer · St Matthew