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).

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 title. However, we know that the text was always known by the name ‘didache’ and we know that it was widely used over a long period (because we have fragments of it in other ancient languages). It was valued and used as containing information that Christians needed – and not just to help them get organized in the first months or years after they became Christians. Whatever else we say about it, we have to explain its title and its extensive use – it is far more than the lucky survival of a set of ‘how to’ notes.

Up to now we have been speaking of the reception of the Didache by those who were excited by the prospect of getting background to the texts of the New Testament or who saw it as fresh historical evidence on how the earliest churches organized themselves. But excitement was far from total: it also produced ‘allergic reactions’ among those whose views of the early Church or early Christian preaching were most upset by it. Indeed, we can formulate this little rule of thumb: the more that any group bases their current practice on the assertion that they are doing/preaching what was done by either Jesus or the apostles the more they will be antagonized by the Didache. We see this illustrated in the two main groups which argued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the Didache was either a very late document or else a peripheral document.

On the one hand, there were many Roman Catholic scholars who found one part of the Didache repulsive: a meal which looked suspiciously like a Eucharist, but which they confidently asserted could not be one as a Eucharist had to have a presbyter and the words of Jesus at the Last Supper for a consecration. They liked the stuff about morality, prayer, fasting and an option for baptism by sprinkling (here was ancient evidence to use against Protestants and the Orthodox churches of the East), but they spilled gallons of ink telling people that the meals were something other than the Eucharist. They were certain of this because what the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century had said was infallible, and so it could not be contradicted by a fact – the fact was wrong! This led these scholars into a further conundrum: if the text was early, then it was far harder to claim it as deviant; if it was late, then it was far harder to explain all its early features. The solution was to imagine that in the early churches there were two types of meal: there were boisterous meals that were called ‘Eucharists’ (as we see in 1 Cor. 11) and there were boisterous meals that were called ‘agapes’ (love feasts) as we see in the Didache and Jude 12. So that was that! However, there was also a tendency to date it as late as possible (they opted for a second-century date) and as far from the mainstream as possible (either Syria or Egypt – but certainly not around the Aegean or in Italy). We might find this sort of special pleading – hammering facts to fit with existing dogma-driven views of the past – amusing; but the legacy of years of books expressing these views without comment is still with us. Within the last few years I have seen an ‘explanation’ of why the Didache does not have ‘an institution narrative’ (i.e. the words ‘this is my body…’) where the author does not realize that historical study has moved on and we now know that these words only entered the Prayer of Thanksgiving in the fourth century (> Ligier, 1973; > Taft, 2003). Alas, it is very hard to get confused ideas out of the bloodstream of a religion.

The other group who found the Didache repulsive were extreme Protestants. While these welcomed ‘the omission’ of the words of Jesus that were disturbing Catholics – to them it showed that Roman Catholic teachings were not historically demonstrated – they found the prescription of fasting on fixed days (Wednesdays and Fridays) clear evidence that the Church that used the Didache was already corrupt and in need of reformation. Fasting had been one of the explosive points during the sixteenth century: it was a ‘work’ which implied that works could purchase or obtain ‘righteousness’. As such, it was a denial that justification came ‘by faith alone’; and abandoning fixed days of fasting and abstaining from meat was often the public sign that a town or city had abandoned Catholicism and embraced the Reformation. Now it had been known from the writings of Tertullian (c.AD 160 –c.225) that by the third century this practice of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays was widely established, but this had been explained by the presence even in the early centuries of a virus called ‘Early Catholicism’ – taken from the German term, Frühkatholizismus, and used as a technical term (> Smith, 1990). But if the Didache was as early as the time of the New Testament, then the virus was there even before the death of the last ‘inspired writer’ – and that would not do! So how was the circle to be squared? It was a deviant and late document, possibly a historical forgery, but it was fully infected with the virus that would only be expelled after it had wholly corrupted the Christian body. So this group described the Didache as ‘the spoiled child of criticism’ (implying that New Testament scholars were wasting their time when they looked to it for background) and argued that it dated from the late third or fourth century (implying that its ‘early’ features were fraudulent reconstructions). Again, these views became so widespread that many books opted for the ‘safe’ position and said the Didache ‘might be as late as the fourth century’. The sad fact is that because this little comment appeared in a widely used textbook for theology students – and because textbooks tend to copy textbooks – one still finds it in students’ essays half a century after most scholars gave up trying to show that the Didache was a post-first-century document! As we have noted already: confused ideas can have a very long shelf life!

Apprenticeship

To answer the question properly about what the Didache is, we must start by looking at what we think it means to call someone ‘a Christian’. If one thinks of this as primarily an individual’s option (as it is for most people today) then one picks Christianity because one likes some of its ideas, because one thinks them true, or one likes what Christians do. If this is one’s model for being a Christian, then ‘the teaching’ you would want is about what Christians believe or the ‘teachings of Jesus’ – and there are umpteen books today that are catechisms of just this sort. However, if you think that Jesus came to form a new people, to establish a group, to show a way that people as a community (and not just as a collection of individuals) can go ‘to the Father’, then how the group is to behave, and how you as a member of the group should behave, becomes as central to being taught to be a Christian as knowing the stories about Jesus. We may not like this ‘church-centred’ approach, but that is our cultural choice, not a reflection of early Christian living.

Jews in Jesus’ time saw themselves as a people, the chosen people of the covenant, the children of Abraham, a community set among the ‘nations’ – and it was the whole people who were loved by God, and the individual’s task was to be a worthy member of the people, a worthy inheritor of the promises made to the patriarchs. Within this community came Jesus who announced a new way of living the covenant: this was his new testament, and a new relationship of the community to the Father. Now the people could address God as our Father – note that Christians still pray, in an individualist age, to our Father not to my Father – and rejoice and thank God for his goodness in sending them the Christ. Soon the followers of Jesus realized that this new way of being the people of God did not just include the Jewish people but could include people ‘from every tribe and tongue and people and nation’ (Rev. 5.9 [RSV]) and all could become part of this new family of Abraham (Rom. 4) through Jesus. So what does it mean ‘to become a Christian’? In a context like this ‘being a believer’ is more akin to seeking to join a community rather than simply giving assent to a set of teachings or expressing a personal preference. Equally, the act of ‘joining the Christians’ is not simply ‘a moment of conversion’ – remember Paul described his conversion moment as exceptional (> 1 Cor. 15.8; and Eph. 3) – nor was it just the moment of baptism: to join this new community took time. One had to learn how to live this new lifestyle, one had to be shaped and formed, one had to be gradually initiated into its values and activities, as well as its beliefs. This was more like joining a group where there is an apprenticeship, one learns slowly by learning to belong, and one has to show the group that one’s initiation is taking place. The ‘didache’/the ‘teaching’ means not what one downloads in a moment or in a classroom, but what we would call ‘the training’ that one needs to absorb before one is fully one of the ‘chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light’ (1 Pet. 2.9 [RSV]). Just as apprentices have to spend time before being accepted fully into the group of skilled workers and have to show that they have mastered the skills common to the group – they have ‘done the training’ – so people becoming Christians had to have mastered the training on how the group lived. Put another way: they had to have absorbed the didache (> Milavec, 2003, pp. 51–172)!

So the Didache was not specialist information for just the leaders – a sort of specialists’ crib – but something every Christian should know. We will see this again and again as we go through the text: whether it is knowing what are the list of things to do and to avoid, prayers, or group policy on visiting experts – this was the common property of the whole community and it was expected that everyone knew how to act in these circumstances because they had learned the Church’s ways during the period of initiation. While apprentices they were formed and shaped as Christians; then, when ready, they entered the group, entered the Christ, at their baptism.

Indeed, there is evidence not only that the Didache was intended as a guide for forming those wanting to belong to a church but also that it was intended to be committed to memory. We should bear in mind that there are elements of the Didache such as the Two Ways and the Lord’s Prayer that were certainly intended for learning by rote (most Christians today can still recite the Lord’s Prayer by heart) and that in earlier times people used their memories far more than we do who have ready access to recording devices, whether a pencil and paper or a computer. It was not unusual for people to learn off many long texts so that they could use them when they were far from books: Psalms, hymns and lists of various sorts were all items that a ‘well stocked mind’ just had available from memory – and it was not considered a great feat to be able to use these without a book. Then there were specialists who could commit whole books to memory and use them to entertain or instruct – people who had learned great long stories and could perform them when needed. We might think of these storytellers as those who could recite the tales from Homer (the equivalent to actors who have learned off Shakespeare’s plays), but the same skills were needed by those who could announce the gospel – we shall meet this group later: ‘the evangelists’ – and who could arrive in a church and recite the whole story of Jesus. So the idea of having the whole of the Didache in the memory is not as daunting as it sounds; and the whole text is phrased in such a way that it facilitates commitment to memory (> Milavec, 1994).

So what is ‘the teaching’? It is basic information about the Christian group’s lifestyle and their activities as the New People on the Way of Life. Once one had absorbed this teaching one had finished one’s own apprenticeship and was ready to enter fully into the body of Christ. Then, having mastered the teaching, one was in a position, without needing books or anything else, to act as a mentor in the process of shaping others as apprentice Christians. The didache was not just for teaching classes or for teachers, it was not just a set of lessons, it was meant to be absorbed so that its possessor would function as a part of Christ (> Rom. 12) and help others to join ‘the Way’ (> Acts 9.2).

Why is the Didache important?

Over the past 125 years the Didache has been studied in all sorts of ways and been used – usually as a supporting document – by biblical scholars, historians of the early Church, liturgists and those who examine how Christian theology has grown and changed over the centuries. And while each group might highlight the importance of the Didache in their own way because it throws light on this or that theme which they consider important, we can pick out three more general reasons why it is worth studying this short text – remembering that it only takes between 20 and 30 minutes to read the whole text.

Probably the most common reason why someone today picks up a book like this on the Didache is that they have already been studying the collection of early Christian writings that we now refer to as ‘the New Testament’. We know that these were addressed to, and first heard by, the churches around the Mediterranean world and we naturally would like to know as much about that audience as we can. The more we know about the audience’s situation, and all those factors we lump together under the label ‘context’, the more our understanding is enhanced. This is an aspect of biblical studies that has been transformed out of all recognition in the last few generations. Our knowledge today of ‘context’ is so much richer than that of the period before 1950 that earlier books of exegesis are now redundant. We have had the great discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of the Nag Hammadi Library, but we have also had advances in the study of the place of religion in Graeco-Roman society, how that society worked, and how different religious groups lived side by side in its cities (> Meeks, 2003). When we talk about ‘the church in Corinth’ we now have a far clearer picture of what we mean, we know much about what was important to that group, and can make sense of many of the remarks of Paul about the conduct of its members that were opaque to earlier readers. But with all these advances in our knowledge it is the earlier discovery of the Didache that alone shows us, from the inside, a church organizing itself. The more we learn, the more we understand the Didache; and the more important the Didache becomes as our most detailed insight into the life of those early churches.

A second reason many people study the Didache is a special refinement of the notion of context. When we set aside the Gospels and Acts, most of the documents that we have from the first and early second centuries are letters: those of Paul; those attributed to Paul; then those linked with the names of James, Jude, John, Peter; then the letter to the Corinthians we call 1 Clement; and then the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Letters were links between churches; their exchange formed the network that formed ‘the Church’ out of the churches. The problem with most letters is that they belong to conversations: they either expect an answer or are given as an answer to an earlier letter – and we know that those that have survived are only a fraction of those that were sent. Frequently, when we are reading Paul we have to try to guess what questions he is trying to answer, what the problems were about which his guidance was being sought, or what had annoyed him within a church that caused him to pick up his pen. So reading these letters is often like overhearing one side of a long telephone conversation. We try to make sense of what we hear, but we do not know what the other end is saying: sometimes it is clear what is being said at the other end, sometimes we can have a good idea, but often we can only guess. The Didache shows us some of the standard concerns of these churches: from issues of lifestyle, to the importance of eating together, to the problem of visiting preachers who are really just seeking an easy life. Here is a little example. In 2 Thessalonians 3.10 we have a comment by Paul which seems somewhat strange. After making a point of the fact that he paid for his own food while with them, he says: ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: if any one will not work, let him not eat’ (RSV). The last command seems both harsh and not a little moralistic. Why is this an issue for Paul – had he not better things to be worried about? However, we know from the Didache that there were wandering Christians known as ‘apostles and prophets’ going from church to church, and one of the problems was telling the genuine prophets from those who were using the gospel for their own ends. So the Didache sets up a test: unless there is a special need, they must only stay for one day as guests; but, if they stay three days, they are false prophets! To a poor community this rule provided for welcome – and allowed them to hear the apostles but also made sure that they were not exploited (Did. 11). Now we can understand Paul. He was demonstrating his authenticity in that he did not exploit his hosts, but earned his own keep. Moreover, he endorses the very same rule: no work, no food!

While not wishing to downplay these ‘contextual’ reasons for reading the Didache, if we just read it for what it tells us about other documents, and not for what it tells us itself about Christianity, then we are missing out on a whole stratum of early Christian wisdom. We have Gospels which tell us the good news that was announced, we have letters that show us how Christians were formulating their beliefs, we have Acts which shows us how they imagined their world-wide activity, and in the Didache we see their approach to day-to-day living as Christians. It presents us with a string of insights into what they considered to be the important issues that ‘had to be got right’ if they were to be disciples on the Way of Life. Some of these aspects are still with us and reading the Didache can be a way of refocusing on what is really at issue beneath centuries of encrustation. Some are long gone and now meaningless, but others, though long forgotten, are aspects of Christianity that are worth looking at afresh. Jesus preached and formed a people – and the people formed by the Didache were only a generation later. When we view it in this way, we can see that if this little text is a ‘spoiled child’ then it repays the attention paid to it.

Christianity is a historical religion. It stakes its basic claim on the historical fact of the birth of Jesus in history, the community he founded is the basis of later communities, and his good news lives within the vagaries of human history. As communities in history we are always forgetting bits of what it is to be Christian, while discovering other implications of discipleship. In this process of seeing what we might have forgotten, or being inspired to grow in new ways, studying our past is a central and core activity. Henry Ford said that ‘history is bunk’ and someone else passed over history as simply ‘prologue’; but, for Christians, history is revelation. If Christians are to understand today, we must remember yesterday. Or, as Cardinal Newman put it:

[T]he history of the past ends in the present; and the present is our scene of trial and to behave ourselves towards its various phenomena duly and religiously, we must understand them; and to understand them, we must have recourse to those past events which led to them. Thus the present is a text and the past its interpretation.

(Newman, 1890, p. 250)

For us, looking backwards is a help to understanding Christianity today and tomorrow, and the more ancient the discipleship we examine the more it is likely to throw our activity into relief. And because Christians spend so much of the time debating matters relating to how churches are organized – just look at the energy, indeed venom, that can be expended by a community whenever there is some change in its ritual – looking at a document like the Didache can often set matters in perspective. When, today, the Eucharist, and conflicting presentations of ‘what it means’, can be the issue that divides groups of Christians, it can be thoroughly refreshing to look at the Didache where the Eucharist is what keeps people together – and which, incidentally, reveals that most of the quarrels relate to later developments when the Eucharist had changed almost beyond recognition from the meal practice of Jesus and the first churches. In short, the Didache is a mirror we can hold up to our practice as members of churches, and let it help us to see ourselves in perspective.

What does the Didache show us?

There are many ways that religions could be classified, but a simple one would be to note the relative proportions of interest that a religion gives to the kitchen of an average house and the amount of time it gives to special places such as temples or libraries. Every religion gives some attention to each. It might be that there are food laws or practices at meals or ways of dressing – this is the domestic side of religion and it affects every adherent every day. In this domestic setting religions and life intermingle, and the practices and values are transmitted – almost imperceptibly – to the next generation. Every religion also has special buildings and places – shrines – and major public events, and these need religious specialists: priesthoods. These specialists organize the public events/places and become such a public face for a religion that there is the constant tendency for this public face to appear to be the religion. Then there are the religion’s stories: its explanations of what it believes about the world, the world beyond, its tales of origins and purpose. These may become its sacred books – and so there are the experts that interpret them, preserve them, and often turn them into great systems of law and philosophy. The ‘kitchen’ and the ‘temple’ are usually distinct, sometimes at loggerheads, but they are mutually dependent and often interact with one another through a calendar: a pattern of practices, fasts and feasts that work over the cycles of time – day, season and year. Christianity is no exception – though in our contemporary world we have a tendency to ignore the kitchen and identify religion with ‘going to church’.

This distinction can also help us look at Christian origins. We know quite a lot about the distinction between kitchen and temple in Palestinian Judaism at the time of Jesus – and we know that he laid more emphasis on the ‘kitchen’ than on the ‘temple’ aspects of faith. We meet him gathering at meals in houses, walking through the fields, and being very critical about those who were concerned about the ‘temple-end’ of religion while ignoring the domestic end: become reconciled to a brother before going to offer a sacrifice (Did. 14.2/Matt. 5.23–24). Moreover, the first generations of Christians, as they became separate from Judaism, did not have the great public expressions of religions that are well established in societies. They gathered in one another’s houses; their central ritual, when they ate together, was very closely related to the kitchen – but evidence for the ‘kitchen-end’ of religion tends to be ephemeral. And, unlike Judaism, there was no special ritual group: they believed that in Jesus they had all become priests – all could stand in the Father’s presence and offer sacrifice – and were ‘a priestly people’.

Thus, we have the irony that for a religion that was more kitchen centred than the religion that preceded it or, indeed, than the religion it later became, we have actually little from the kitchen-end of early Christianity. Most of the evidence we have comes from the formal end of religion: we have the great formal stories, the Gospels and the views of the religions’ experts, the epistles; but, aside from the Didache, almost nothing about the day-to-day structures of this new movement. The Didache shows us the disciples living out their Christianity when they were not listening to the Gospels and not hearing great teachers. It may not tell us much about their lives, but is more or less all we have.

Why did the Didache disappear?

So if the Didache was so valuable in the shaping of early Christians why did it disappear, and why did it not become one of those treasured texts that eventually were seen as the new Scriptures?

Although the Didache was discovered by Bryennios in the 1870s, it never really disappeared. This may seem like a contradiction, but can easily be explained by the history of the text. It is the nature of training texts that they are constantly changing in different tiny ways: bits are added to meet new situations and bits drop off as no longer relevant. The differences might hardly be noticed over the period of a year or two, or between one user and the next, but if you checked on a training manual that had been in use over a long period you would see major changes. And if this is true in the age of printing which promotes uniformity, then it is even more true in the age of manuscripts when each copy was made with a new user in mind – and it was far easier to add or subtract from a text – especially a text seen as meeting practical everyday needs. So it was with the Didache: there were probably many ancient versions, each slightly different, some with more than we have and some with less. The text was being adapted to new situations, but few would have noticed the incremental changes. So we see the morality section in many different early Christian writings – all are related in style, but no two are identical. We can trace the texts of the eucharistic prayers that we find in the Didache as they evolved to become the more elaborate prayers of the more formal liturgies of the third and fourth centuries: they did not stop being used, but changed and changed until it was hard to recognize that the oak with its many branches and gnarled trunk started life as a small, smooth acorn. Then with regard to the regulations, these too became more complex, and eventually became some of the elements of canon law. Indeed, once the Didache had been found by Bryennios, it became immediately apparent that most of its text was known as ‘Book VII’ in a collection of law from the later fourth century called the Apostolic Constitutions. However, until Bryennios found the text on its own, we did not realize that the ancient text whose name we knew was actually embedded in the Apostolic Constitutions. By that time, Christians did not need to remind each other that they fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays, because it was so much part of what was handed down among Christian households that it was just taken for granted – and its presence in the later book was nothing remarkable.

A far more interesting question is why did Christians abandon the notion of mentoring new members and the notion of there being need for an apprenticeship? The notion of the need for a long initiation did survive for many centuries in the churches. Indeed, the season of Lent is a survival from that practice. It was originally the final period of preparation before baptism – and, as in the Didache, this was a period of fasting. Later when baptism was mainly something that happened in infancy, Lent, now no longer needed as a preparation for baptism, evolved its new rationale as a period of penitence (> Talley, 1986). Moreover, as Christianity became more and more an accepted part of society, the notion that one needed an apprenticeship became less and less obvious – and what training there was became something that was more and more in the hands of the religious experts rather than a common task of every member of the church.

When the first Christians set out to preach the good news of Jesus they did so by announcing that ‘what had been foretold in the scriptures had come to pass’ (> Acts 3.18, for example) in Jesus. Jesus had been born, as written in the prophets (Matt. 2.4–6); he had fulfilled the Scriptures (Matt. 26.54); the Scriptures bore witness to him (John 5.39); he had risen in accordance with the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15.4); then he opened the Scriptures to the apostles so that they could see what the Scriptures said about him (Luke 24.45); and they went out and preached him by ‘showing by the scriptures that the Christ was Jesus’ (Acts 18.28). So the Christians started off with a large library that they held as sacred – indeed the early Christians held a larger collection of Old Testament books to be ‘scripture’ than most Christian churches today.

Then there were their own memories: and above all their memory of Jesus, of his life, his teachings, his death and his resurrection. But initially this was a story that was recited among the churches and gradually it became the work of special preachers, evangelists, and their books were not seen as ‘scripture’ but simply a way of recording the speech of the evangelists. The arrival of an evangelist in a church, or getting a letter from Paul, was an event – and so the memory and its recording on papyrus was kept safely – but it was not until several generations later that these records began to be accorded the status of ‘scripture’ by parallel with ‘the Scriptures’ (of the Old Testament). As the second century progressed our four Gospels emerged as the cornerstone of the Church’s memory: here was our story and our good news – and by the end of that century they were being accorded a status equivalent to ‘the Scriptures’. Around this time the various letters of Paul and other apostles, which had been circulated from the start (> Col. 4.16), also came to have a special status, then the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation were added along with a few other texts here and there. It was only in the fourth century that the notion of a ‘canon of the New Testament’ really took hold. But by then, there had been umpteen versions of the Didache: it was not the sort of document that was held as precious but simply useful. It was used and used, but it never got the extra cachet of being the work of an apostle or evangelist. It is the fortune of all such useful training texts that they did not make it into libraries. Think of how many training manuals you have received over the years: it might have been a ring binder you got for a course; it might have been your notes which were priceless in their day; or it might have been a guide to how to run a computer. Where are they now? In a sense they are still with you – you have absorbed their contents and/or you have got more recent versions. But would you put them with your books in a bookcase? It was the same with the Didache: it did its job, but it was valued only for its use; the Gospels and epistles were valued not only for their use in the liturgy but also for their famous associations. There must have been many training manuals in use among the early Christians – we see only reflections of them in the canonical collection, but they did their duty: they formed the communities that heard and valued the gospel.

Gospel and didache

We have just been contrasting the text of the Didache with the texts of the four Gospels, so this is an appropriate point to introduce the difference between training/teaching (in Greek called didache) and the good news/gospel that is proclaimed/announced (in Greek called kerugma). The distinction can be seen in this way: you rejoice at the announcement (kerugma) that God loves us and is sharing his life with us in Jesus; then, having chosen to follow Jesus, you learn how to be a disciple and how to live in a Christian community – this is didache. The gospel is the treasure: it tells what God has done, is doing, and has promised; the ‘teaching’ spells out the implications. Without the good news, Christianity would be just another set of rules and rituals: without the training it would be lovely words in our ears but it might never inform living. Kerugma and didache are two sides of the same coin. Moreover, we often refer to ‘the kerugma’ meaning the content of the announcement of the gospel – in its shortest form this is the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ (> 1 Cor. 12.3) – and to ‘the didache’ meaning all the teaching/lifestyle that has to be imbedded in one’s life if one is to live as a disciple. We see the two ideas in this early piece of pastoral wisdom: ‘preach the word [i.e. the kerugma], be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching [i.e. the didache]’ (2 Tim. 4.2 [RSV]).

It is this distinction that explains why the text we are going to look at does not contain any stories about Jesus, nor parables, nor even his words laid out as such. All that belongs to the kerugma. Our text has a far more down-to-earth purpose: if you have heard the good news, now you must make it a part of your life. We today make a distinction between ‘discipleship’ and ‘discipline’; the first is a life-long endeavour, the second is rules and regulations. For the early Christians there was no such division: the Didache was concerned with the discipline – if you knew its demands, you were on the Way because this was what a disciple manifested.

Where and when

A favourite occupation of scholars is trying to tie down exactly where and when ancient documents were written. Indeed, they often pursue the task in such a way that they imagine they can get to a ‘place and date’ that is parallel to what we find in a modern bibliography. The Didache was compiled in Greek and is found in fragments of numerous languages: so wherever it was written it obviously had wide appeal. However, if it had such appeal, then it was found useful in many places – and, therefore, attempts to isolate its place of origin are fruitless! The alternative is to say that it belongs to the Graeco-Roman world or the Mediterranean world – but the same can be said about every early Christian document. So why does one find references in books saying that the Didache ‘may have originated in Syria’ and others saying it ‘might have come from Egypt’, or others which say that it ‘might have appeared in Egypt or Syria’? Egypt was favoured by many early students of the Didache as there were no New Testament documents associated with Egypt and it was long known that there were Christians in Egypt from the earliest times – so here was a document without a home, so why not say it comes from Egypt! The scholars who adopted this view were mainly Germans.

However, in the Eucharistic Prayer in the Didache we have the phrase ‘as the broken loaf was once scattered over the mountains and then was gathered in…’ (Did. 9.4). This is a reference to a theme in the prophets (> Ezek. 36.4 and Nahum 3.18) that the people have been scattered on the mountains and will be gathered back together by the Christ – and now it is realized in the people gathered at the Lord’s table. Some scholars, almost all of them French, read the passage literally, asking where mountains for wheat to grow on were to be found in Egypt. Since there were no such mountains, the prayer had come from somewhere with mountains: Syria! This might look like a piece of fine detective work but, in fact, it is silliness. It was with the messianic images from the Scriptures that the first Christians sought to understand the person and work of Jesus, and hence their use of the prophetic image of the great gatherer of Israel for Jesus. Focusing on ‘mountains’ as a physical object – as if prayers have to be geographically precise – is an example of ‘missing the wood for the trees’.

What is far more important to note is that wherever in the Graeco-Roman world it was compiled, it was a place where the separation of Christians from the larger Jewish community was still taking place. The Didache assumes that the followers of Jesus know a great deal about Jewish ways and have few problems with them; but at the same time it is anxious to assert the distinctiveness of the Way of Jesus. Most of those who used the Didache were not yet a distinct religion, they seem to have seen themselves as a distinct group within Judaism – but some of their distinctive attitudes were bringing them into ever-greater conflict with their coreligionists.

When the Didache first came upon the stage of scholarly attention two dates were proposed. Those who looked at the very early structures and the close relationship to Judaism proposed a first-century date; while those who compared sentences in the Didache with similar (but not identical) statements in the Gospel of Matthew argued that it must therefore be later than Matthew, so, if Matthew is late first century, the Didache could be early second century. Later, often worried by the doctrinal problems of an early date, some scholars proposed a much later date for the work – third or even fourth century – and that it had ‘disguised’ itself to make itself look primitive. The problem with such conspiracy theories is that once uttered they are hard to disprove: and so that late date still sometimes crops up. However, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948 was the complete answer to the conspiracy theorists. This discovery changed for ever our views of Judaism at the time of Jesus (many argue that it is better to speak of the ‘Judaisms’ of that time) and our views of the Didache.

New scholarship from the 1950s could point positively to a first-century date, indeed one before 70 (> Audet, 1996). Moreover, our understanding of how the Gospels emerged (> Bauckham, 1998) – earlier views tended to imagine the Gospel writers sitting in the equivalent of a study surrounded by the books they were using and writing for a distinct church – meant that it is just as likely that Matthew was using phrases that were in the Didache or were in common use (> Garrow, 2004; Draper, 2006a; summary of arguments in Milavec, 2003, pp. 693–739). So the broad consensus today is for a first-century date. This could be as early as 50 (so we could use the Didache to give us background for the sort of Christian life being lived in the churches to which Paul was writing) or as late as 80 or 90 (in a church which had welcomed Matthew or was looking forward to his visit). However, while I am adamant about the need to see this as a reflection of the earliest churches – and so a first-century date – I am less concerned with arguments for before/after 70 or before/after Matthew. My reason for this apparent indifference is that training was not uniform – there was no ‘central planning office’ – nor does every aspect of a group’s practice change when the latest book arrives! So when was it in use? In all probability a version of the Didache was being committed to memory by groups of followers of Jesus by the middle of the first century – and what we have reflects a very early stage in that text’s life and influence. The training would gradually have changed as the churches developed and changed, and in many places, by the early second century, much of what we find in the text would have seemed out of date – and, eventually, much of it would have seemed out of date everywhere. So we study it as a window on the first and second generation of Christians, who were close to the patterns of Jewish faith, seeking to understand the new way of Jesus, Christians who would have known that there were still many alive who had met and heard Jesus, and who belonged to a church that might have longed for a visit by an evangelist and an opportunity to hear his telling of the gospel.