Didache

The Didache (Διδαχὴ, Koine Greek for "Teaching") is the common name of a brief early Christian treatise (c. 70–160 CE), containing instructions for Christian communities. The text is possibly the first written catechism, with three main sections dealing with Christian lessons, rituals such as baptism and eucharist, and Church organization. It was considered by some of the Church Fathers as part of the New Testament but rejected as spurious by others, eventually not accepted into the New Testament canon with the exception of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church "broader canon". The Roman Catholic Church has accepted it as part of the collection of Apostolic Fathers. It is the only rediscovered Christian text during the last 150 years of discoveries in libraries or in papyri to receive wide acceptance by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Discovery

Considered lost, the Didache was rediscovered in 1883 by Philotheos Bryennios, a Greek Orthodox metropolitan bishop of Nicomedia, in the Greek Codex Hierosolymitanus written in 1053, from which he had already published the full text of the Epistles of Clement in 1875.

Shortly after Bryennios' initial publication, the scholar Otto von Gebhardt identified a Latin manuscript in the Abbey of Melk in Austria as containing a translation of the first part of the Didache.; later scholars now believe that to be an independent witness to the tradition of the Two Ways section.

Dr. J. Schlecht found in 1900 another Latin translation of chapters 1 through 5, with the longer title, omitting "twelve", and with the rubric De doctrina Apostolorum. Coptic and Ethiopian translations have also been discovered since Bryennios' original publication.

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