Why the Didache? Why bother to write a book about such a text, and why bother to read such a book? Let me try to answer these questions by way of an introduction to this book.
One might expand the question and ask why should a Christian read any ancient text, be it a Gospel, a letter from an early Christian leader, or the Didache? My answer is in three overlapping parts. First, members of every religious community – big or small – are always engaged in a process of forgetting some aspects of their past while simultaneously remembering and giving new life to other aspects of their past. The forgetting is sometimes the necessary jettisoning of attitudes that they recognize as no longer appropriate. Take slavery as an example. Christianity emerged in a culture where slavery was an accepted part of the social structures and the only concern was that owners treat their slaves ‘as brothers in the Lord’. The very notion that one could be a ‘brother’ Christian and a slave seems ludicrous to us; yet Christians defended slavery as an institution until well into the nineteenth century!
But we also forget ‘by accident’ and usually this happens when we take a familiar form of any practice and imagine that either it was ‘always like this’ or that ‘it cannot be other than like this’. Take, for instance, the arguments that go on interminably between Christian denominations about the Eucharist – very often the most minor details of practice are considered ‘essentials’. Yet often, all sides in the dispute have forgotten that this gathering is a meal, and a meal in which Christ is present among the disciples gathering in his name. But this fundamental aspect has been forgotten because a real meal was socially awkward in the highly stratified society of the second century: they had forgotten that part of the message of the meal was that the Christian community was to cut through such social divisions. Recalling these forgotten aspects can teach us humility before the past, the dangers of just repeating practice, and that there are aspects of Christian practice that we need to recover. But remembering can also be dangerous: when we remember bits and pieces at random, we sometimes can get the wrong end of the stick! Take the notion, very common among some churches (mainly in north America) that suddenly, sometime soon, some Christians are going to be whisked away into the clouds to be with Jesus – this is referred to as ‘the rapture’ and presented as Paul’s teaching in 1 Thessalonians 4.14–18. But this bit of remembering also forgets that Paul later abandoned this notion; and so it just remained in the memory as a curiosity. Another piece of remembering is that which has rediscovered that sin is not just an individual’s personal crimes, but that there is a social dimension to sin as it is portrayed in the Scriptures and our early texts: Christians have to work to build just societies and their own society as ‘the Church’ must reflect this. But both forgetting and remembering – important keys for Christian tradition – need to be done with conscious interaction with the past and the best way to so interact with earlier Christians is through careful and critical examination of the texts of those Christians. The texts are windows allowing us to see their imaginations of faith.
A second reason for reading early texts is that we are all aware that history does not stand still. Even the most conservative person – who loves to imagine that nothing has changed until now and who hopes that nothing will change in the future – knows that they are getting older (inevitable change) and their younger disciples see things differently (yet more change)! Churches and communities change in their questions, their practices, their ways of presenting faith – and in what worries them. Sometimes change is swift, even dramatic, and then it is very easy to provide pictures of the situation ‘before’ and ‘after’ so that the change is clearly visible – although we should note that providing an explanation of why the change came about may be very complex and keep historians busy for centuries. Such moments as the legalization of Christianity by Constantine in AD 313 and the Reformation in the sixteenth century are examples of very clear, major developments – even though we may be unclear as to why they came about then and in that form. But most change in Christian practices and understanding is so gradual as to be invisible. Each generation tries to preserve the past, but makes tiny incremental changes, once here and another time there, so that the final state may have the same name as the first, but be different from its origins in every other respect! Explaining how this present state occurs is best done by looking at its past and seeing how practices have grown and changed over decades and centuries. This is explaining the present, and Christian belief in the present, as the outcome of generations of activity. This explanation is neither a justification of the present nor an approbation of the process: it simply explains and allows for a more informed judgement about the present and the past. Some evolution is wholly necessary and needs to be affirmed; some is corrosive and needs to be corrected, and some is just what happened and studying it can explain some of the strange nooks and crannies of practice that appeal to some, but make others want to go off ‘spring cleaning’. In such a study of the present as the outcome of its past, looking at a guide to practice that is as old as the Didache has very clear advantages.
The third reason for reading the Didache is that Christianity is an explicitly historical religion: it is based on a historical individual, Jesus, and what he did and taught. Christianity is also the community descended from the community that Jesus formed around himself: it treasures its past and its memories. Whenever Christians gather they almost invariably look backwards to that time by reading the stories (our four Gospels) produced by and for the second generation of Christians so that they could look back to Jesus. It was that second generation of Christians that used the Didache. So looking backwards as a valuable activity in discipleship is a mainstay of Christianity, and the Didache is a book about the details of discipleship in that generation. This historical dimension of Christianity, which lies at the heart of the attention given by Christians to the Scriptures in both liturgy and study, is all too often ignored in our intense quest to know what those scriptural books ‘mean’ as if they were books of wisdom written by philosophers rather than books produced in the churches to help us in the task of historical remembering. It is worth recalling these words by the great French historian Marc Bloch (1992, p. 4):
Christianity is a religion of historians. Other religious systems have been able to found their beliefs and their rites on a mythology nearly outside human time. For sacred books, the Christians have books of history, and their liturgies commemorate, together with episodes from the terrestrial life of a God, the annals of the church and the lives of the saints.
Because Christians are always recalling those first churches and their memories, this text, the Didache, is precious. It gives us insight into how those communities came into being, how they viewed themselves, and their practice as disciples. To study it is to look afresh at the very core of our Christian memory.
Two final notes. First, the Didache came to the attention of scholars almost a century and a half ago, and since then there has been no shortage of scholarly books upon it. This book does not seek to compete with them, but to introduce the text. Because of its introductory nature I have not put in footnotes and have kept references to a minimum. At the end of the book is a guide to further reading, and on particular points that readers might want to follow up I have placed references in brackets with this sign, >, followed by a name, which means: if you want to know more about this point, go to that book/article whose details are listed under ‘Further reading’. Second, the Greek word didache means ‘teaching’/‘training’ – an activity (often distinguished from ‘proclamation’: kerugma) – but it is also the title of this text: ‘The Teaching’ or ‘The Training’. When it is the activity that I am referring to, I spell it ‘didache’ (lower-case initial letter), and when I am referring to the ancient text, I spell it ‘Didache’.