An early Christian handbook vanished for centuries, then turned up in 1873
Church writers quoted it, argued over whether it belonged in the Bible, and then lost it. In 1873 a Greek metropolitan found a complete copy of the Didache, made in 1056, in a monastery library in Constantinople. At about 2,300 words, it offers a rare view of how the first Christian communities actually ran.
The title simply means Teaching; its longer name presents it as the Lord's instruction to the nations, delivered by the twelve apostles. Written anonymously in everyday Greek, it is dated by most scholars to the first century AD, though some still prefer the early second, and it may have reached its final form as late as 150. It looks like a patchwork, combined from separate sources by a later editor, and parts of it make up the oldest surviving written catechism.
It opens with the Two Ways, contrasting a way of life with a way of death, a form of moral teaching probably borrowed from an earlier Jewish source. The closest parallel is in the Community Rule of the Dead Sea Scrolls sect at Qumran. Jesus is never named in that section, although it echoes the Sermon on the Mount and states the Golden Rule in its negative form. The next part covers practice: baptise by immersion, or by pouring water if immersion is impractical; fast on Wednesdays and Fridays; recite the Lord's Prayer, which appears in full. A third part deals with church leadership, showing wandering apostles and prophets still revered while local bishops and deacons gradually take over. It closes with a warning about the end of the world.
Ancient opinion split. Some church fathers treated it as scripture, but Eusebius, writing around 324, grouped it with works he called spurious, and Athanasius in 367 listed it among the apocrypha. It never entered the New Testament, yet later church orders built on it, and one of them sits in the wider canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Scholars such as Aaron Milavec value it for showing how Jewish Christians adapted their faith for Gentile converts, and a Syrian origin, with no sign of Paul's influence, is often suggested.
After Philotheos Bryennios found it, he published it in 1883. The first English and German translations followed in 1884. A Latin version of five chapters surfaced in Munich in 1900, and small Greek and Coptic fragments have since emerged from Egyptian papyri.
Source: Didache
