The figure of Judith – one of the heroines who saved her people – is not one with which we are very familiar; indeed, some churches no longer even print the book of Judith in their Bibles. But the story was very popular around the time of Jesus, and part of its popularity was derived from the fact that it is a very good story. While the storyline is religious – how good Jews should behave – it tells the story with all the elements of a thriller movie with a woman in the lead role. Looking at Judith in the story (the plot is set in the sixth century BC, but the story was written sometime between 150 and 100 BC), we see the ideal of religious behaviour regarding fasting and prayer that would have been deep inside the religious culture of those who first followed Jesus. The story is set just after the exile and King Nebuchadnezzar – a proverbial bad-guy – has sent an army led by Holofernes – another bad-guy – to destroy the people and carry away all that they have. Faced with this calamity, the High Priest in Jerusalem orders prayer and fasting:
So the Israelites did as they had been ordered by the high priest Joakim and the senate of the whole people of Israel, in session at Jerusalem. And every man of Israel cried out to God with great fervour, and they humbled themselves with much fasting.
(Judith 4.8–9 [NRSV])
Meanwhile, in the enemy camp Holofernes is told that, so long as Israel serves God, God will defend them – this is the basic covenant – and so if he marches against them, he will fail (Judith 5.20–21). But this does not scare him and he sets off with a massive army confident that Israel ‘will not be able to resist our mighty cavalry’ (Judith 6.3). Holofernes then decides that he will lay siege to the first of their towns, ‘Bethulia’ (a fictional place chosen so that no town could claim Judith as one of its own, and thereby distract any attention from Jerusalem), and drive its inhabitants to surrender through hunger and thirst. Eventually, the people decide they have had enough and say they want to give in: God has abandoned them and is punishing their sins (Judith 7.1–28). Uzziah their leader asks them to hold on for just five days more, because ‘by that time the Lord our God will turn his mercy to us again, for he will not forsake us utterly’ (Judith 7.30). Then enters Judith.
Judith was both rich and beautiful (the story gives many details about her clothes and jewellery); all spoke well of her and knew she ‘feared God with great devotion’ (Judith 8.8). Three years and four months earlier she had been widowed and from the death of her husband Manasseh she had dressed as a widow; she spent her nights in prayer; and ‘she fasted all the days of her widowhood, except the day before the sabbath and the sabbath itself, the day before the new moon and the day of the new moon, and the festivals and days of rejoicing of the house of Israel’ (8.6 [RSV]). When she heard what Uzziah had said she was furious: she saw it as putting God to the test with an ultimatum – save us in five days or we will give in! She then gives out a key piece of teaching about prayer:
Do not try to bind the purposes of the Lord our God; for God is not like a human being, to be threatened, or like a mere mortal, to be won over by pleading. Therefore, while we wait for his deliverance, let us call upon him to help us, and he will hear our voice, if it pleases him.
(Judith 8.16–17 [NRSV])
She then tells the people that God will deliver Israel through her hand: she will be the saviour sent by God (Judith 8.33). To prepare for her task she begins to pray at ‘the very moment when the evening incense was being offered in Jerusalem’ (Judith 9.1) and pleads that God will hear her tears. Then she dresses up ‘to entice the eyes of all the men who might see her’ (Judith 10.4 [RSV]), leaves the city, and is apprehended by an enemy patrol. Asked who she is she says that she is fleeing the Hebrews and wants to see Holofernes and give him information about his enemies. Amazed by her beauty, the patrol brings Judith into his tent and she declares that she will tell him when the people have sinned and therefore the right time to attack. Over the next three days she prays, avoids unclean food, and purifies herself by bathing each day (Judith 12.7). Finally, Holofernes decides to seduce her; she accepts his advances and drinks with him until he is drunk; then they go to bed and he sleeps. Then, praying for strength, Judith decapitates him, places his head in a bag, and with her maid – on the pretence of going out to pray – makes her getaway. You can guess the outcome: when the Israelites see the head they rejoice and praise God; when Holofernes’ army see the head on Bethulia’s walls they despair. Israel is triumphant, Judith sings a great thanksgiving song in Jerusalem (Judith 16.1–17), and they all live in security and peace (> Moore, 1985).
But what has this ancient thriller to do with the Didache? If you want to understand modern culture, then it is a good idea to see the sort of stories we find attractive on television; so to understand an earlier culture, it is very valuable to see the sort of stories that attracted them. The story of Judith was popular (> Maher, 2003), so note the themes of covenant, God sending a saviour, the notion of fasting linked with prayer, and the notion of fasting and praying at specific times which united prayers in scattered places with the sacrifice in the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, we could look at the Judith story as a guide to the spirituality of the sort of family in which Jesus grew up, and of the families whose sons and daughters would become his followers and the first users of the Didache.
Now let us read what the Didache says about fasting and prayer:
You must not let your days of fasting be at the same time as those of the hypocrites. They fast on the second day of the sabbath [i.e. Monday] and on the fifth day of the sabbath [i.e. Thursday], so you should hold your fasts on the fourth day of the sabbath [i.e. Wednesdays] and on the Day of Preparation [i.e. Fridays].
Nor should you offer prayers as the hypocrites do.
Rather, you should pray like this, just as the Lord commanded in his gospel:
Our Father, who is in the heaven
Hallowed be your name
Your kingdom come
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors
And do not lead us in the trial
But deliver us from evil
For yours is the power and glory for ever.
Say this prayer three times each day.
(Did. 8.1–3)
As with the information on baptism, this might all seem straightforward. The Lord’s Prayer in this form – let us ignore for a moment the slight change at the end of the prayer – is the prayer of all Christians everywhere. And for many Christians fasting, on specific days, is, or was until recent times, a normal part of their religious lives. Even the statements about not fasting nor praying ‘as the hypocrites do’ are familiar: similar statements can be found in Matthew’s Gospel at 6.5 and 15. Still today, in a secular culture, we know about Mardi Gras, the Carnival and Pancake Tuesday: all reminders of when whole communities fasted. Fish still appears on menus on Friday: a recollection of when Catholics fasted from meat. We are also familiar with similar instructions in other religions: Muslims pray five times each day at specific times and they fast in Ramadan. So what is significant about these instructions apart from their quaintness?
When we look at the Jewish writings from before the time of Jesus (e.g. the book of Judith) and at early Christian books (e.g. the Didache and Matthew’s Gospel) we learn that fasting was seen as intrinsically linked to personal prayer – these were twin columns in the spirituality of the pious member of the community. And with prayer and fasting often went a third element: almsgiving (e.g. Did. 1.6; and Matt. 6.2–4). We see the three linked in the story of the Pharisee praying who points out that he fasts twice a week and gives tithes of all he gets (Luke 18.11–12). Prayer without fasting seemed to lack seriousness: words seem such fluffy things! But when you feel something in your stomach, then you are in earnest with your words. Then you are taking prayer seriously and asking God to take your needs seriously.
Moreover, as we saw in the last chapter, once a religious practice has become a regular custom, then it becomes ingrained in our lives and imaginations and it will persist come what may! So the practices of Israel remained with the new group within Israel (the followers of Jesus); and then, later, when the parting of the communities into separate religions came about, the followers of Jesus continued the practices. Fasting linked with prayer in the churches is therefore another part of the legacy of Judaism. However, the reality was not nearly so smooth. We can set the teaching on fasting within a context of disagreements between the approaches of normal Jewish practice (including that of John the Baptist) on the one hand and that of Jesus on the other. We can also locate what became standard Christian teaching on fasting within a dispute between ‘ordinary Jews’ and ‘Jews who are followers of Jesus’ about fasting and their sense of common identity – an early indication of how the communities were pulling apart even before AD 70, from which time we see the groups go more and more their own ways while each side sought to place clear distance between itself and the other.
One of the features of Jesus’ behaviour that shocked many religious people at the time was his indifference to all the customs relating to food: what to eat and not eat, when not to eat, and with whom not to eat. Not only did this put him at odds with the ‘officials’ of Judaism but also it made him clearly different from John the Baptist. Jesus was prepared to liken life with the Father to a banquet with an open welcome (Luke 14), and this was anticipated in his own joy and openness in dining – there was little attention to fasting. We see this in the statement:
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine; and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of man has come eating and drinking; and you say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’
(Luke 7.33 –34 [RSV]/Matt. 11.18–19)
which we can trust as a historical memory because it is so much at variance with the fasting practices of the churches where these Gospels were preached. We also see this divergence of Jesus from the customs of fasting in Mark 2.18 –20 [RSV]:
Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day.’
The implication here is that so long as Jesus was with them, they need not fast: but when he would not be with them, then they could fast! So, was fasting to begin on the day of Ascension? Not quite! Because for the evangelists the risen Lord is with his disciples at all times, and the only time that the Lord was not with them was during his three days ‘in hell’ between the crucifixion and Easter morning. This reading of Mark (and the other evangelists: Matt. 9.14–17; and Luke 5.33–39) is confirmed by a resurrection story that has survived from The Gospel according to the Hebrews. There we hear about James, Jesus’ brother, who has fasted from the time of the crucifixion and then meets the risen Jesus who tells James that he can end his fast, and the breakfast takes place with Jesus sharing a eucharistic meal with him (> O’Loughlin, 2009). For some, the sadness implicit in fasting was incompatible with the Father’s all-embracing love and the continual presence of Jesus in the midst of his disciples. But just as John’s disciples brought baptism and the notion of the impending crunch of God’s justice, so too they brought his earnestness about fasting, and for many more fasting was so embedded in their notions of living an orderly devout life that the idea that Jesus would be ‘against it’ seemed too much! So while it was fine for Jesus himself not to fast, or for the disciples who were with him in Galilee, for them, in communities more than a decade later, fasting was the norm. The solidity of established custom in piety was far more powerful than the seemingly insubstantial image of God that Jesus proclaimed. His disciples might refer to God as ‘Father’ but for many of them – including many trained in the harder vision of John the Baptist – God was still a fearsome Justice who was more likely to hear those prayers backed by fasting. But for the young apprentices learning the didache, all such subtleties belonged elsewhere: they would fast and pray with the community.
But there is another tension regarding fasting just below the surface of the Didache. One of the indicators of the early date of the Didache is the easy familiarity it assumes with the patterns of Jewish life in the generation before AD 70. While the Didache assumes that gentiles are being brought into the community – and not necessarily being circumcised – it is also clear that most of the community think of themselves and their lives within the customs and framework of a Jewish community. We see this not only in that the community is sticking with the Jewish practice of twice-weekly fasts but that also they are still naming the days of the week using the Jewish system of reckoning. For Jews at the time the week ended with the day of rest, the sabbath; but the days of the following week were identified by being counted after that sabbath. The seven-day week was already a feature of Graeco-Roman life at this time, but in Greek and Roman society the days were distinguished by names linking each day to a planet (both the Sun and the Moon were planets in their eyes because they wandered across a belt – the zodiac – of the fixed stars; see Table 4.1).
|
Jewish name |
Gentile name |
Our name |
|
First day of the week |
Day of the Sun |
Sunday |
|
Second day of the week |
Day of the Moon |
Monday |
|
Third day of the week |
Day of Mars |
Tuesday |
|
Fourth day of the week |
Day of Mercury |
Wednesday |
|
Fifth day of the week |
Day of Jupiter |
Thursday |
|
Preparation Day |
Day of Venus |
Friday |
|
Sabbath |
Day of Saturn |
Saturday |
The Didache makes clear that others with whom its readers are in religious contact – and with whom there is friction as we see in the reference to them as ‘hypocrites’ – fast on Mondays and Thursdays: so they will do otherwise. It is a sad phenomenon of human history that any two religious groups which are very close in beliefs tend to blacken each other’s image by declaring them ‘traitors’, ‘hypocrites’ or only a sham of the real thing: and we see a case here. The sadder aspect here is that it was because both parties shared a common origin in the covenant – and so have common views of fasting and prayer – that the one group was deliberately seeking to set its times of fasting in such a way that it was not in union with the others. So when most Jews were fasting on Mondays and Thursdays (note what we saw in the Judith story: she fasted every day except Fridays and Saturdays), the disciples of Jesus would fast on Wednesdays and Fridays, the second choice indicating that, although they still used the Jewish way of reckoning time, the sabbath (a key marker of Jewish identity) was already receding from their consciousness (otherwise they would not have fasted on the Day of Preparation). We shall see more about this move to ‘the Lord’s Day’ (i.e. Sunday) in the next chapter.
Many people reading this – and many who have written on the Didache indeed – have found this move of the days on which people should fast very perplexing: how does it make one different from someone else to simply make a choice of a different day? This incomprehension arises from our modern approach to time as a commodity. We live in a world of ‘time’ and ‘time off’; put another way, ‘time’ is regular work and then when we are ‘not doing something productive’ (i.e. working/producing) then we can do what we like (e.g. in the evenings and at the weekend), and anything that belongs to religion automatically belongs in this section. So, today if anyone fasts, it is taken for granted that this must not interfere with the work; it is a private matter for her/him. However, this attitude to time is recent in our society (> Thompson, 1967). In earlier societies, time is the common commodity which unites the whole group, and in which the individual has to make time for that which is not belonging to the group. Think of how the call from the minaret can mark time in an Arab city or how the bell regulates time in a monastery: time, sharing time, unites all those who share it. Today, we only get odd glimpses of this way of thinking as when we want to be with friends for a wedding and say, ‘I just could not miss this!’ – but, for most of us, time is what we see on our watches, not what our neighbours are doing at the same time. To share a time is to be united with people: to fast deliberately at a different time is to separate from others. We see this notion of shared time in many ways in the time of Jesus. In the Judith story, she was careful to make her prayer at the same time as the offering in Jerusalem: by sharing the same time, her prayer was united with that of the High Priest in the Temple. She was not just one person praying alone, she was praying with Israel as a single corporate person (Judith 9.1). In the Dead Sea Scrolls we see the opposite attitude towards Jerusalem: some Jews believed that the Jerusalem priesthood was corrupt, and a sign of their corruption was that they fasted, and performed other religious acts, following the ‘wrong calendar’ – so the people in Qumran down by the Dead Sea believed that they kept themselves pure by making sure their festivals did not coincide with those in Jerusalem (> Vermes, 1962, pp. 42–4). This attitude to time can also be seen in the Gospel of John. In his timing of the death of Jesus (different to Mark, Matthew and Luke) the crucifixion takes place at the same time before the Passover that the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple: his message, often lost on us, is that ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1.29 [RSV]), by being put to death at the same time, is replacing the other sacrifice.
By fasting together on fixed days, the community of the Didache is fasting as a group: it is the group who prays. They are forming a single body at prayer, and so as a ‘new Israel’ this single prayer is heard. The fasting regulations are, therefore, not to be understood as simply a matter of convenience, rules set out for good order in the community. It is important to have agreed days so that they can all fast together, and therefore the prayer of their fasting be heard as one prayer from one people. Moreover, while they as Jesus’ disciples wanted to pray as one, they no longer wanted to be united with the prayer of those Jews who were not following Jesus. The split between the groups that ended up evolving into two distinct religions was already present on the horizon.
It is also worth thinking about some of the practical strife this break in the pattern of fasting would have caused in the case of a single household where some became followers of Jesus and fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays, while others did not. We have no evidence that allows us to glimpse such a situation, but it may be one of the reasons why we hear of ‘households’ being baptized (e.g. Acts 16.34 and 18.8) while we hear the community being described as the ‘household of God’ (e.g. Eph. 2.19; and 1 Pet. 4.17). In effect, if one member of a household became a Christian, it affected everyone she/he lived with: such a situation might help us make sense of the strange prophecy about domestic turmoil we find in Matthew (10.34–39) and Luke’s (12.49–53, 14.26–27) preaching.
We said in Chapter 1 that there is good reason to believe that the Didache was learned off by heart so that every disciple could both know the basic ways of living and practising as a follower of Jesus and also be able to initiate new converts. But there is only one part that is still committed to memory by modern Christians: the Lord’s Prayer. It is one of the few elements in Christians’ worship today where one can get widespread agreement (more or less) about what to do or say: at the suggestion that a group recite the Lord’s Prayer, most will both agree to the suggestion and be able to say it. Ask them why it is the common prayer, however, and not only will certain modern divisions between them appear but also some interesting bits of confusion about its origins.
So why is the ‘Our Father’ still important? For some, it is because it is given by Jesus in the Bible – because it is in ‘the Bible’ it is acceptable and authentic. For others, it is because it is in the tradition of prayer by the community ever since the time of Jesus – and as such it was witnessed in the Gospels – that it is sacred. So we have to ask a basic question: did Jesus come to form a community (which then might use books such as our Gospels) or did he come to convey a body of information (the Gospels) and the community was the collection of those who accepted that information? For the historian, the second option is clearly ridiculous: Jesus is almost alone among religious leaders in not writing a book; all his work was focused on establishing a community of disciples, the ingathering of Israel that was the ‘kingdom’; and the books only came along afterwards as a consequence of trying to preserve memories intact within that community. So how did the community get this prayer?
Most people combine some of Matthew’s preaching with some of Luke’s preaching – stories that were not intended to be harmonized – to produce this: one day the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray and he taught them the prayer we now use: Our Father, who art in heaven… A first step is to unravel this confusion, and then look at the Didache.
In Luke 11.1–4 (RSV) we have a story that not only puts the prayer onto the lips of Jesus but also actually has him give it to his followers as an answer to their desire to be taught to pray:
He was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ And he said to them, ‘When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread; and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us; and lead us not into temptation.’
But the point to note is that this is not the prayer we say; but this is the scene we remember as the prayer’s ‘origin’.
In Matthew (6.9–13), in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, which has spoken about genuine fasting, almsgiving and prayer, we have this:
Pray then like this: Our Father who art in the heavens,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors;
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
And some of the manuscripts add: ‘For thine is the kingdom and the power and glory for ever. Amen’, at the end of the prayer.
This last phrase was not part of the original of Matthew’s Gospel because his next verse, 6.14, is a comment elaborating 6.12: ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors’ (NRSV). But we should note two points here. First, Matthew does not say ‘who art in heaven’ but ‘who art in the heavens’. Second, although the phrase ‘for thine is the kingdom…’ was not part of Matthew’s original text, that does not mean it was not part of the original prayer (remember that the prayer was being recited long before Matthew preached his Gospel, and when he included it in this great Sermon he assumed that all his audience already knew it. But note, as with Luke, the prayer as it is found in Matthew is not the prayer we recite, although it is very like it.
Our prayer is only known in Greek, and the phraseology of the prayer in Greek is beautifully balanced in its language. It has been smoothed out in such a way that it is easy to remember because there is a certain rhythm to it and so it trips off the tongue easily (> Henderson, 1992). This shows that between the time that Jesus introduced the new way of addressing God as ‘father’, along with his new way of expressing the covenant, ‘forgive us as we forgive’, and the time of the communities which used the Didache, the prayer had evolved in the usage of the disciples to produce in Greek a form that is ideal for recitation, and indeed for saying in a group (in any text recited by a group, if the phrases do not end smoothly, then the common recitation will become noise: and that does not happen to our prayer in Greek).
In the Didache we have the prayer as it is recited, but with a small variation in the last phrase: the word ‘kingdom’ is omitted, and there is no ‘original’ context: just pray as ‘the Lord commanded in his gospel’.
We can assemble these pieces so that they both all hang together and throw further light on the life of the early churches. The notion that Jesus wanted his followers to address God in a manner similar to what we say is common to all: indeed, the Didache is the most explicit. His prayer evolved among Greek-speaking disciples into the prayer we know: a prayer that began with ‘Our Father’ and ended with ‘and the glory. Amen’. This was committed to memory as a central plank of discipleship. As such it became part of the didache and hence its place here in our Didache. But why has one of the final words been missed out in the text as we have it? The last words of the prayer are unstable in several ancient translations, not just here. Because this prayer was so valued it was described as part of the ‘gospel’ (as the Didache says) and so preachers of the gospel included it in their Gospels (hence it is in both Matthew and Luke). Matthew took the standard wording of the prayer and incorporated it into a whole sermon on Christian spirituality. Luke saw it was part of the training of disciples and so located it after a request from the disciples that their teacher teach them to pray. Luke either knew a form of the prayer that dated from before the balanced version came into general use, or else he recognized that the prayer as it was being recited was in an evolved state and so made it look more ‘primitive’ in his preaching so as to make his audience think about what they were reciting by heart. Whereas in the Didache we have a text that has the recited form of the community, but at a point before the final phrase has its final form: to the Father belonged the power and the glory.
While everyone reading the Didache wonders about the variations between the prayer there and the form of the prayer in Matthew’s Gospel, all those details should not obscure the two key points about the prayer that the Didache brings before us.
First, the use of a short, formal prayer, said regularly, was held by all disciples to be a commandment of the Lord. As such it was a central aspect of their discipleship. Our first-century texts link it to being part of the path of discipleship, and link it with other aspects of discipleship such as fasting and alms. It was to be learned by heart and was to shape the disciples in the ways that they prayed. When any two Christians met, here was a prayer they could together make to the Father.
Second, while we are often struck by its use of ‘Father’ and the way it makes intercession and recalls the covenant – all of which point to it being the equivalent of the prayer offered in the Temple in Jerusalem – we often fail to note that it is written in the plural from our side. The prayer is to our Father… give us this day our daily bread… forgive us our trespasses as we forgive… against us and lead us… but deliver us… Amen. This was not the prayer of the individual but of the community (> Rordorf, 1980–2). Even when an individual recites it, she/he does so in union with the community into which she/he was baptized, and with whom he/she gathers to eat, and with whom he/she travels the road of life. The community as a whole offered the Temple’s sacrifice through the High Priest: now, this is also the prayer of the whole people. We saw this emphasis on joining an individual’s prayer virtually with that of the whole community in the story of Judith; now, by using the plural, this prayer meant that the individual was not to see herself/himself praying alone, but always, at least virtually, as part of the whole.
By the time of Jesus there were many groups within Judaism that considered regular prayer – quite apart from the formal liturgy of the Temple in Jerusalem – to be the mark of a good and true child of the covenant. So Daniel, that paragon of the faithful Jew, is presented as going ‘to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem; and he got down upon his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God’ (Dan. 6.10). But at what hour were these three times? Neither the book of Daniel (completed in the second century BC) nor the Didache says what those times were. But a moment’s thought suggests that anything that is done three times a day would point to doing it morning, noon and evening. Such a set of times are easy to establish in a culture without clocks, and we find support for this idea in Psalm 55.17, another work known as 2 Enoch 51.4, and some of the documents found in Qumran (> Bradshaw, 1979). So here is another religious practice with which the whole community was familiar and found easy to follow, and which was now given a new dimension by having the prayer of Jesus used at those times.
But why repeat a prayer three times every day? First, it is important to note that this is a modern question: most religions are deeply committed to patterns of time when prayers and rituals are repeated forming, as it were, the background ‘mood music’ to all that the people do. In many religions there is a pattern of repetition in each of time’s cycles: the day, the week, the month and the year. Hence, a repetition of our basic prayer morning, noon and evening, in time’s shortest natural cycle, the day, may answer a basic human need to acknowledge God (even if this is a need we do not feel within our industrialized time). Second, there is another aspect to Jewish prayer which became a central aspect of Christian prayer. The prophets looked forward to a time when Israel would offer a pure sacrifice in all places (> Mal. 1.11, quoted in Did. 14.3), and there would be a time when God would be offered mercy and steadfast love and not sacrifice (> Hos. 6.6; and Matt. 9.13 and 12.7). At the core of this vision was that of a holy, pure people offering prayer without ceasing: all the people would behave as if they were priests. This is, indeed, the standard by which the Pharisees sought to live. Jesus takes over this notion and his community of disciples are seen as a priestly people, who can call on God – as the Levitical priests did – and even call him ‘Father’. When this community prayed together it was offering its sacrifice as a priestly people. And with their communal prayer, recited as a group (physical or virtual) every day – at the beginning, middle and end – wherever they were, they were praying that the kingdom would grow, and were that new kingdom in their action.
Jesus was born within a pious Jewish family in a liturgy-rich environment – and the legacy of those surroundings can still be found, if sometimes in an obscured way, in Christian liturgy. There was the liturgy of the Jerusalem Temple with its great feasts (Jesus took part: Luke 2.41), there was the weekly synagogue liturgy (Jesus took part: Luke 4.16), and there were the domestic liturgies of the sabbath and other meals, daily prayers and days of fasting. This all took place within a cycle of feasts: such as Tabernacles, Atonement, Pentecost and the Passover. We know that this pattern formed the community around Jesus and that the first communities after the resurrection adapted these patterns for their own liturgical life. We know that Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem ‘continued to go day by day to the temple but broke the loaf in their own homes’ (Acts 2.46). But here in the Didache – and we shall look at this in more detail in the next chapter – we see that these early communities already had a liturgical day and a liturgical week, and this new pattern of time was something that newcomers to the community had to learn to appreciate.
The day was marked by communal prayer – it was understood as communal even when someone prayed on her/his own – at three key moments. The week was marked by having two distinct days for that very visceral form of prayer: fasting. And because they were willing to fast on the Day of Preparation (i.e. Friday) they were already moving towards a week when ‘the first day of the week’ was going to be ‘The First Day’.
In any book on the earliest Christians it is incumbent on the writer to point out the differences between the situation in the past and today. But now, at this book’s halfway mark, it is appropriate to note some continuities. We might find the demands of the Didache rather onerous and wonder if ever there was a community which took these seriously, so it is worth pointing out that many of these prescriptions became standard behaviour for Christians – and continued for centuries.
Obviously, the most striking continuity is that the Lord’s Prayer is still at the heart of the prayer, communal and individual, of Christians. Almost no liturgical act takes place without it. Moreover, the recitation of the prayer three times a day has continued in the formal Liturgy of the Hours which is celebrated by some Christians in many traditions.
Fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays from meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, oil, wine and sex is still the official teaching governing Christians in the Orthodox world. And even though not many people follow this rule in everyday life, quite a lot do! It also became the standard practice for Latin Christians. We have a curious piece of evidence that confirms this from the Latin Church’s most westerly region in the Middle Ages: Ireland. Most European languages (including Welsh which, like Irish, is a Celtic language) have the days of the week based on the Latin names linked to the seven planets. But the seven-day week arrived in Ireland with Christianity and three of the days are named from this practice of fasting. Wednesday is called Céadaoin which means ‘first fast day’, Friday is called Aoine which means ‘the fast day’, while Thursday is called Déadaoine which comes from ‘between the two fasts’. We find it difficult to think of fasting as an act of prayer, and so we fuss about looking for moral justifications (e.g. fast and collect money not spent on food to help someone) or rationalizations (e.g. doing something ‘positive’ rather than ‘giving something up’) – forgetting that these are not either/or choices. But fasting continues to intrigue us, and has been part of many religions because it takes prayer beyond the realm of words.
Last, the notion of time as the scene in which we seek to celebrate God’s presence in a distinctly Christian way, which we glimpse in the Didache’s instructions for the day and week, was to develop in the whole sequence of feasts and fasts that make the Christian year. Likewise, the notion of the followers of Jesus as a priestly people interceding before the Father continued in the practice of formal intercessory prayers. In many traditions this evolved to become a distinct part of the liturgy, sometimes called the ‘Prayer of the Faithful’, when the community calls on the Father to hear their prayer made in union with Christ.