The Didache (The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles)
An anonymous manual of Christian conduct and church practice in sixteen short chapters. It gives early directions for baptism, fasting, the Lord’s Prayer, the eucharist, travelling prophets and local leaders.
The Didache is a short handbook for a Christian community. Its first six chapters set out moral teaching as a choice between a way of life and a way of death. The rest gives practical rules: how to baptize (7), when to fast and how to pray (8), what to say over the cup and the bread (9–10), how to receive and test travelling apostles and prophets (11–13), the assembly on the Lord’s day (14), and the appointing of bishops and deacons (15). It ends with a warning about the last days (16).
The work gives no author, place or date. Its title claims the authority of the twelve apostles, but nothing in the text says who compiled it. Scholars place it between the middle of the first century and the middle of the second, and many think that it draws on older material. The complete Greek text is known from a single manuscript, copied in 1056, which Philotheos Bryennios found at Constantinople in 1873 and published in 1883. It shows what one early community was told to do; it does not say how widely those practices were followed.
Cited in
- c. AD 28–29, estimated date
- AD 30 or 33, estimated date
- c. AD 50–120, estimated date