It is now 25 years since I first used this little work, the Didache, as a core text in teaching. Over the years I have used it in almost every conceivable context where the teaching of theology takes place. I have used it with university undergraduates, in seminaries and convents, supervised dissertations devoted to it, used it at gatherings of ministers of various denominations and read it with groups of ordinary Christians in real communities. I have taken it into the pulpit, and most recently prepared a course upon it that will be delivered over the internet! Yet I am still fascinated by it and, more importantly, every group with whom I have worked through this text has found it fascinating. The Didache has an ability to change a leisurely class quietly studying Christian texts into a group eager to ask basic questions about Christianity and about its structures and practices, to spur them on to investigate what we know about early Christianity, and to empower them to look afresh at long-familiar texts and assumptions. I think this ability to make people sit up and start looking with a new energy at Christian origins comes from the text’s unique combination of familiarity – people recognize so much of its contents from reading the Gospels or just from the practices they see in their churches – and unfamiliarity – this teaching is not presented in the way that it is found in the New Testament’s texts nor do the practices conform with the deeply held assumptions of many churches. This mix of the well known with the startlingly different makes people sit up and look with new eyes both at the past and the present. It is this sense of the Didache as a text that can excite us that I have tried to convey in this book.
Over the years I have often been asked for a ‘guide book’ to the Didache that would be more than a summary introduction, yet not a full-blown academic commentary (and there are several excellent ones), that would allow its reader to reread the Didache and draw more out of its text. I told many of those groups that I would write such a book but kept delaying putting pen to paper. Now, at last, here it is. If any of those many people with whom I have read the Didache over the years picks up this book, that person will find much that is familiar, but may also find a question they remember someone raising in class, or a comment first heard in a seminar. I have learned more about the text each time I have gone through it with a group; and I am thankful for all the discussions, questions, comments but, especially, my students’ enthusiasm.
Thomas O’Loughlin
Nottingham