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II

Didache.

character.

The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (Didaxǹ TŵV II. The δώδεκα ἀποστόλων) or, as it was perhaps originally called, the Teaching of the Apostles,1 is a document Its general which we may assume to belong probably to the first or the early part of the second century, and to have been composed by a Jewish Christian for a Christian community also Jewish in tone. There are reasons for attributing it to some remote district of Syria or Palestine, and in the fourth century it was taken as the basis of the seventh book of the Syrian Apostolic Constitutions: but it was also apparently exploited by two earlier documents in the third century, the Syrian Didascalia and the Egyptian Apostolic Church Order, and some scholars have looked to Egypt for its place of origin. The theology which it represents is of a very inadequate nature, when compared with the teaching of the New Testament, and suggests in fact nothing so much as the condition of belief of those Hebrew Christians to whom the Epistle to the Hebrews was directed, in order to lift them out of the stage of rudimentary knowledge in which they were into some more adequate conceptions of the person of Christ, of His priesthood and mediation in the Church. It will cause no surprise that there should have existed somewhere about the year 100 A.D. a community of

1 See Dr. Warfield Bibliotheca Sacra, Jan. 1886, p. 110.

Since its publication in 1883 the Didache has been, as Dr. Bigg calls it, 'the spoilt child of criticism,' and has been allowed to overshadow documents of much greater weight: Dr. Wotherspoon The Ministry in the Church in relation to prophecy and spiritual gifts (1916), chapters i. and ii., describes clearly and accounts for this tendency. From such overestimate of the document there has latterly been a reaction, which is represented by Dr. Bigg, Dr. Armitage Robinson, Dr. Wotherspoon, and Mr. Edmundson: see further App. note L, p. 367. For my own part I adhere to my former opinion of the early date of the Didache against these last-named scholars. But I have come to feel very strongly that both our ignorance of the circumstances of its origin and its own internal characteristics force us to make a very guarded use of it as an authority.

Its Church

organiza. tion;

with apostles, prophets, and teachers over them.

Jewish Christians with very imperfect doctrinal instruction, perhaps in a district remote from any centre of apostolic influence; and, though we shall not look to a writing emanating from amongst them for much light on Christian, theology, we shall look with great interest to their form of church organization.

In the Didache then we are presented with a form of Church ministry which ought not to perplex any one acquainted with the Acts of the Apostles. We local bishops have as local officers bishops and deacons, who are and deacons, elected specially with a view to the conduct of worship in the community.1 But, as in the apostolic church, these local officers are not the chief figures in the organization. Over them are 'apostles,' 'prophets,' and 'teachers,' who exercise a ministry not yet localized in any particular church.2 The apostles are not indeed the Twelve; they correspond to what we should suppose is meant by the 'evangelists' of the New Testament; they are 'ambulatory' messengers of the Gospel, and are almost identified with the prophets, who are better defined figures than either apostles or teachers. These representatives of the Church at large, when they visit a community of Christians, are first of all to be tested by the standard of right teaching and of moral character. The true apostle is to be distinguished

1 Ιν. Ι : χειροτονήσατε οὖν ἑαυτοῖς ἐπισκόπους καὶ διακόνους. This our connects the election of the officers with c. xiv about the Sunday celebration of the 'pure sacrifice.' It will be noticed that nothing is said about the bishop in the passage (xiii. 3, 4) about firstfruits. We should not, however, be right in assuming that the bishop had nothing to do with these, any more than in concluding from c. vii. that the bishop had nothing to do with baptizing. The community in fact is addressed as a whole. They are directed to baptize, to fast, to give alms, to pray, to come together on the Lord's Day and confess their sins and celebrate their thank-offering, and then, with a view to the due performance of all these functions, they are directed to elect for themselves bishops and deacons.

2 xi. 3, xiii. 2.

• They are perhaps like the apostles' of Rom. xvi. 7, Andronicus and Junias. • The apostle who stays in a church more than two days is called a 'false prophet'

(xi. 5); again (xi. 6) if he ask for money, he is a 'false prophet.'

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by the absence of any selfish motive; any sign of an inclination to fasten himself upon a church or to abandon the holy poverty of his vocation is to stamp him as a false prophet. The prophet too is to be tested by his character and conformity to the truth which he teaches, but when once he has been approved, his inspired utterances are not to be subjected to any criticism. This would be a sin which cannot be forgiven. He is to be listened to with reverent acceptance and allowed the freedom, which the old prophets had, to perform exceptional acts 'for a sign' or in a mystery. He has freedom also to give thanks in the eucharistic celebration without the restriction of any set form; 2 and receives the firstfruits of all the produce of the community, because the prophets are the Christian 'high-priests.' Clearly then these prophets, with the apostles and teachers, occupy the first rank in the church ministry: but, as we saw reason in the apostolic age to believe that the local clergy' shared fundamentally the same spiritual ministry as the apostles, only in a subordinate grade, so here we have it specified that the bishops and deacons exercise the same ministry as the prophets and teachers, and are therefore not to be 'overlooked.' 4

'3

So far then the indications of this document suggest a state of church government closely akin to what we should suppose would have existed in

1 xi. II. I do not wish to express any certainty about the meaning of these words; see Taylor Teaching of the Twelve Apostles pp. 82-92.*

2 x. 7 : τοῖς δὲ προφήταις ἐπιτρέπετε εὐχαριστεῖν ὅσα θέλουσιν.

3 xiii. 3. But ver. 4: if you have no prophet, give to the poor.' It is probably implied that the prophet will himself, when he is present, minister to the wants of the poor. He could not take the firstfruits for himself only without coming under the category of a 'false prophet.'

• Chapter XV, after providing for the election of fit persons as bishops and deacons, ἀξίους τοῦ Κυρίου, ἄνδρας πραεῖς καὶ ἀφιλαργύρους καὶ ἀληθεῖς καὶ δεδοκιμασμένους, continues: ὑμῖν γὰρ λειτουργοῦσι καὶ αὐτοὶ τὴν λειτουργίαν τῶν προφητῶν καὶ διδασκάλων· μὴ οὖν ὑπερίδητε αὐτούς· αὐτοὶ γάρ εἰσιν οἱ τετιμημένοι ὑμῶν μετὰ τῶν προφητῶν καὶ διδασκάλων. I shall remark further on this word τετιμημένοι in connexion with the Epistle of Clement, p. 277 n.

apostolic and subapostolic days in any community not under the direct supervision of the Twelve. There are bishops and deacons, and over them prophets and teachers and apostles in the sense of evangelists,―men belonging to a ministry as yet The prophet unlocalized, and, in the case of the prophets at least, inspired. But two points specially require notice.

(1) by 'settling' would become a diocesan bishop:

(2) must have before held the power of laying-on hands.

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(1) It is specified that the prophet has the right to 'settle' in any of the churches he visits.1 It is just in this context that he is declared to be the proper recipient of all firstfruits as the high-priest' of the community. Can we doubt then that, in the event of this prophetic teacher taking up his permanent residence in any church, with his authority as an inspired man, with his free power of eucharistic celebration, and with this 'high-priestly' dignity, he would have become, by whatever name he was called, the bishop of the community in the later sense? As then we have in St. James the first instance of a member of the apostolic ministry localized in a single church, so the Teaching seems to give us an indication that the settling of prophets would have been at least one way in which the transition was effected from the apostolic ministry to that of the later Church. What in fact was Polycarp of Smyrna, or Ignatius of Antioch, but a prophet who had become a bishop?2 Thus the Teaching gives no countenance to the idea that in the region which it represents the 'bishops' (i.e. presbyters) and deacons would ever have held the place of chief authority in the Church.

(2) The community in the Teaching are exhorted to elect their bishops and deacons, just as the

1 xiii. I: πᾶς δὲ προφήτης ἀληθινός, θέλων καθῆσθαι πρὸς ὑμᾶς, ἄξιός ἐστι τῆς τροφῆς αὐτοῦ, κ.τ.λ.

Ignatius claims the gift of prophecy: ad Philad. 7. For Polycarp, see Mart. Polyc. 16: 'having been an apostolic and prophetic teacher, bishop of the holy Church in Smyrna,' and cf. c. 5, where he foresees his own martyrdom by means of a vision. On 'teachers' becoming bishops, see Kühl Gemeindeord. p. 131.

community elected 'the seven' in the Acts, or as even the smallest communities elected their bishop according to the Apostolic Church Order, or as the community elected its bishop and its deacons according to the Church Order of Hippolytus. Election was in fact after the age of the Apostles the predominant, if not the universal, method of choice. It did not, in any of the parallels just cited, exclude an element of control over the choice or ordination from outside by the laying-on of hands. Are we then to suppose that, because ordination is not mentioned in the Teaching, it is not implied? Some modern critics do in fact show a tendency to exalt the Didache in this respect as a source of evidence over the Pastoral Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles; and undoubtedly, if we were to take this anonymous writing of very ambiguous doctrinal character and exalt it as a criterion of what early Christianity meant over writings whose genuineness and apostolic authority there is no good reason to doubt, we might see grounds for believing that the subapostolic Church rated not only church orders, but also baptism and the eucharist at a very low estimate. Believing, however, the Pastoral Epistles and the Acts to be genuine documents, we naturally prefer to look at the Didache in the light of our other evidence as to apostolic practice and injunction. The question we ask is this: Is the evidence of the Didache incompatible with the evidence about ordination which we derive from apostolic sources? The answer is certainly in the negative. The Didache is silent about ordination, but it is silent also about all 'laying-on of hands.' Yet we know that in the mind of the early Church, and especially of its Jewish members, there was closely associated with the doctrine of baptisms that of the laying-on of hands.1 The silence of the Didache

1 See esp. Heb. vi. 2.

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