Didache

But what, it may be asked, was the nature of this teaching, supposed to have been handed down by tradition as having been delivered by the first Apostles?

**************

Excerpt:

AN addition was unexpectedly made to the scanty remains of the Apostolic period when, about the year 1873, Bryennius, now Bishop of Nicomedia, discovered in the library of the Holy Sepulchre at Constantinople a manuscript of the eleventh century, containing, besides other works, a complete text of the First and Second Epistles of St. Clement to the Corinthians, which had only existed previously in a mutilated state in the Codex Alexandrinus, and a lost work called "The Didache, or Teaching of the Apostles," which, though mentioned in Athanasius and Eusebius among the Apocryphal books of the New Testament, had not, since the time of Nicephorus in the ninth century, been known or quoted.

The publication of the text by Bryennius soon led to the discovery that, although new as a work with the title of "The Didache, or Teaching of the Apostles," it was already substantially known, nearly the whole of it being contained in three works that had already been published-"The Epistle of Barnabas," "The Apostolical Constitutions," and a recently discovered treatise called "The Epitome of the Holy Apostles."

This, though it does not affect the genuineness of the discovery, affects a good deal the importance that was supposed to attach to the publication of a new theological treatise of the Apostolic period. An examination of the text as published by Bryennius, printed at the end of the introduction, with the passages not previously known marked with brackets, will show that practically the whole of the treatise, with the exception of a few of the directions given for the reception of apostles and prophets, was already known, and had been in the hands of scholars for some time; so that the chief importance of the discovery would seem to be its enabling us to identify the passages in the "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Apostolic Constitutions," and to refer to their proper period and source what had hitherto been doubtful.

What, then, was the source from which the various writers, whose work we find in the "Epistle of Barnabas," "The Shepherd of Hermas," "The Apostolic Constitutions," and "The Epitome of the Holy Apostles," drew the doctrines and regulations which we find for the first time collected in the "Didache" of Bryennius? And the answer would seem to be this: There existed at a very remote period, most likely before the end of the first century, a work handed down by oral tradition which was supposed to embody the verbal teaching of the first Apostles.