Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/955

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assigned to the Revelation of St. John. Calculations founded on stichometry are uncertain; so we cannot lay much stress on the fact that this appears to indicate a somewhat shorter work than Bryennius's διδαχή, which according to Harnack would make about 300 στίχοι. and on a rough estimate seems about a quarter the length of the Apocalypse. A list of 60 books of Scripture appended to a writing of Anastasius, patriarch of Antioch in the reign of Justinian, is in Westcott's N.T. Canon, p. 550. This gives as an appendix a list of apocryphal books; one being the Travels (περίοδοι) and Teachings (διδαχαί) of the Apostles. The absence of the Didaché from the list of the Codex Claromontanus agrees with other indications that this work possessed no authority in Africa. In one of the fragments, published by Pfaff, as from Irenaeus, we read: "Those who have followed the Second Ordinances of the Apostles (οἱ ταῖς δευτέραις τῶν ἀποστόλων διατάξεσι παρηκολουθηκότες) know that our Lord instituted a new offering in the New Covenant according to the saying of Malachi the prophet, 'From the rising of the sun to the going down, my name has been glorified in the Gentiles; and in every place incense is offered to my name and a pure offering.'" This passage is quoted in the Didaché with reference to the Eucharist; not, however, textually, as in the fragment, but very loosely. We can only say then that it is possible the Didaché may be the Second Ordinances of the Apostles referred to here. The fragment is probably ancient, but contains a citation of Hebrews as St. Paul's, which proves, as Zahn and others have remarked, that Irenaeus could not have been the author.

Western testimony to the Didaché is scanty, and rather indicates that any book which circulated in the West as the Teaching of the Apostles was not the same as Bryennius's Didaché. Rufinus (Comm. in Symb. Apost. 38) gives a list of canonical books which bears marks of derivation from that of Athanasius; but where the Didaché should come he has "qui appellatur Duae Viae vel Judicium Petri." This suggests that either the entire Didaché or at least the first half, the "Two Ways," had been translated into Latin and circulated under the name of the Judgment of Peter, to whom, and not to the apostles generally, the authorship would seem to have been ascribed. The existence of a Latin "Two Ways" is independently proved by the discovery of a fragment by von Gebhardt, reprinted in his Texte und Untersuchungen, ii. 277. It is so short as to leave it undetermined whether the Latin version contained anything corresponding to what follows the "Two Ways" in Bryennius. Lactantius (Div. Instit. vi. 3, etc., and Epit. c. 59) gives an unmistakable expansion of the teaching of the "Two Ways," who must have used our Latin version, thus proving it older than a.d. 310.

The treatise de Aleatoribus, falsely ascribed to Cyprian, contains a quotation from Doctrina Apostolorum (Hartel, ii. 96) not found in the Didaché, though there is one passage (xiv. 2) which might have suggested the idea to the framer of the Latin. If we may ever rely on the argument from silence, we should gather from Tertullian's discussion on the "Stations" (de Orat. 19, de Jejun. 2, 10, 14) that he was unacquainted with our document. Thus, scanty though the Western notices are, they seem to prove that the Didaché, in Bryennius's form, never circulated in the West; that the Latin Doctrina Apostolorum, even as regards the section on the "Two Ways," was not a translation of Bryennius's Didaché, but contained a different manipulation of a probably common original; and that beyond the "Two Ways" there is no evidence that the Latin form had anything in common with the Didaché.

We now come to coincidences with the Didaché in works which do not mention it by name. Far the most important of these are found in the Ep. of Barnabas, in which, after the conclusion of the doctrinal teaching, the writer proposes to pass to another doctrine and discipline (γνώσιν καὶ διδαχήν), and adds an appendix of moral instructions. This appendix agrees so completely in substance with the section on the Two Ways that a literary connexion between the two documents is indisputable. But there is great diversity of detail. The precepts in Barnabas are without any orderly arrangement, while the Didaché contains a systematic comment on the second table of the Decalogue. Bryennius differs from later critics and some earlier ones who consider it probable that Barnabas was the borrower. The whole character of the Didaché makes it unlikely that its author collected the precepts scattered in Barnabas's appendix, digested them into systematic order, and made a number of harmonious additions; while if in what Barnabas says about the "Two Ways" he is but reproducing an older document, his unsystematic way of quoting its precepts, just as they came to mind, is quite like his mode of dealing with O.T. We have still to inquire whether Barnabas borrowed from the Didaché or from a common source. Now a study of the Didaché, as compared with Jewish literature, shews very clearly its origin among men with Jewish training, and the work from which both borrowed may have been not only Jewish but pre-Christian. For Barnabas's letter is of so early a date that, if we suppose him to have copied an earlier Christian document, we bring that document into the apostolic age, which would give it all the authority that has been claimed for it. We must, then, in comparing Barnabas with the Didaché, distinguish carefully the specially Christian element from those parts which might have been written by a Jew unacquainted with Christianity. If Barnabas copied the Didaché, he would have naturally included the Christian element. If Barnabas and the Didaché independently copied an originally Jewish document, the Christian elements they might add would not be likely to be the same. In the section in Barnabas we are struck by the extreme meagreness of the Christian element. There is no mention of our Lord, scarcely any coincidence with N.T. language, very little that might not have been written by a Jew before our Lord's coming. In the Didaché coincidences with N.T. are extremely numerous, end it begins with a whole section embodying