For centuries, an important part of early Christian history had been basically lost. Today, most Christians haven’t heard of it.
It’s called the Didache, an ancient Christian document whose name means “teaching.” Although it never became part of the Bible, early Christians valued the Didache as a discipleship guide and as a resource for teaching church tradition. It addressed everything from baptism to communion, prayer, fasting, leadership, and the return of Jesus.
Then the Didache disappeared for hundreds of years before scholars rediscovered one of the manuscripts in the 1800s.
This rediscovery provides an amazing view into the first and second-century church. What did they believe? How did they worship? How did they preserve the apostolic teaching after the first generation of believers?
The Didache helps us answer those questions. And although we shouldn’t treat it as Scripture, this ancient document still challenges and encourages us today.
What Is the Didache?
The name of the document comes from the Greek didache, which means “instruction.” The more extended title can also be translated, “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” However, the twelve apostles didn’t write this document themselves.
We don’t know who wrote the Didache. Most scholars presume an anonymous Christian author or several authors and editors. They likely compiled it from earlier traditions and writings from Christian communities. We also don’t have a firm date, but many scholars place portions or the whole of it in the late first or early second century, making it one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament. Some of the Didache material might predate New Testament books.
The Didache functions like an early Christian church manual for ministry and teaching. Rather than telling a story or developing theology like many New Testament books, it gives practical instructions for living the Christian life, especially when believers gathered.
The manuscript starts with a section many call “The Two Ways": the way of life and the way of death. It teaches Christians how to live morally and consistently. The Didache then gives teachings around baptism, fasting, prayer, the Lord’s Supper, traveling apostles and prophets, church leaders, and the gathering of the local church. Finally, the Didache explains the return of Jesus and urges disciples to stay watchful and expectant.
For the first couple centuries, the wider Church periodically suffered persecution, first from the Jews and then later from Rome. This drove Christianity into hiding in some respects, at least until more wider acceptance of the faith during the fourth century. The Didache helps us bridge the gap between the New Testament writings and the historical information we have of later Christian communities.
What Does the Didache Teach Us about Early Christianity?
While the New Testament tells us how the apostles established churches and spread the Gospel shortly after Jesus’ resurrection, the Didache shows how early Christians began to incorporate the apostolic teaching into regular patterns of worship, discipleship, and community life.
Worship became a foundation of church community. The Didache gives instructions for baptism, prayer, fasting, and communion. Christians gathered regularly, confessed their sin, gave thanks, and ate and prayed together. The Didache encouraged believers to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day. The document shows us how early Christianity quickly started to develop rhythms that helped them follow Jesus.
Initially, the Didache reveals how important apostolic doctrine was to the early church. The first and second-century church believed the proper doctrine and teaching came from the original eleven apostles, and later, Paul. Since Jesus told the eleven to teach others to obey what Christ taught, the early church prioritized that teaching over everything else as divinely inspired. They called it apostolic doctrine. The longer title of the Didache includes this idea: The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.
The Didache also teaches a focus on holy living, the famous “Two Ways” section. These ways differentiate between the ways leading to life and the way of death or hell. Apostolic doctrine, passed to them from Christ himself, didn’t approach faith as a complicated intellectual exercise. They expected faith and grace to completely set believers on a radically new way of life. This impacted every aspect of life.
Importantly, the Didache demonstrates the growing importance of writing down Christian teaching. The apostles and eyewitnesses wouldn’t last forever, and in the Roman world, having a central manuscript became a huge advantage, helping to resist false teaching and bad actors trying to manipulate this new movement for their own agendas.
The early church depended not only on preaching and personal connections but also on preserving the teaching of the apostles and Jesus in written form.
What are Notable Teachings within the Didache?
The Didache gives practical instructions for how early Christians should live, worship, and lead the church.
- The Two Ways: The “Way of Life” begins with loving God and loving your neighbor, echoing Jesus’ teaching about the greatest commandments. It also warns against sins such as murder, adultery, greed, pride, and lying, while encouraging generosity and care for others. The message is clear: Christians should live differently because they belong to Christ.
- Baptism: The Didache instructs believers to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Running or “living” water was preferred, but other water could be used. If there was not enough water for immersion, water could be poured over the person’s head three times.
- The Lord’s Supper: The Didache includes prayers for Communion, showing that the Lord’s Supper was already an important part of early Christian worship.
- Church Leadership: The document gives guidance for choosing church leaders such as bishops and deacons. It also warns Christians to test traveling apostles, prophets, and teachers rather than automatically trust anyone who claimed spiritual authority. Their teaching and conduct both mattered.
- The Return of Jesus: The final chapter urges Christians to stay spiritually prepared for Christ’s return. It warns about deception, persecution, people falling away from the faith, and coming judgment.
As we may notice, many of these teachings reflect similar or exact teachings in the New Testament writings.
Why Isn’t the Didache Considered Part of the Bible Canon?
While the Didache was useful to the early church, Christians didn’t recognize it as part of the New Testament canon. This distinction matters. An ancient document can contain helpful and true, orthodox teaching without being considered divinely inspired Scripture.
Again, many modern Christians may not know this, but the early church didn’t choose the New Testament books in one simple meeting or vote, and it definitely didn’t happen at the council of Nicaea.
Instead, Christians used the following criteria to filter writings for inclusion as canonical, or useful and inspired for the whole church:
- an apostle or someone connected to one was affirmed as the author
- universal use among all churches
- widespread agreement on divine inspiration across Christianity
- consistency with apostolic doctrine
The Didache faced obstacles in almost every area. Although the title associated it with teaching apostolic doctrine, it doesn’t appear that any apostle had a hand in writing it. We don’t know the author (a big challenge to canonicity in the first century). Further, the document doesn’t even present itself as a letter from an apostle or a Gospel account.
In addition, some early Christians highly respected the Didache and leaders referenced it. However, not all Christians used it to the same degree or at all. No one seems to tell the universal church they needed to read it. The purpose was simple, to function as a manual for Christian living and church practice.
This distinction between helpful or useful Christian writing and divinely inspired Scripture existed very early. Other respected and widely spread works like 1 Clement were circulated among Christians and no one considered making them canon, or treated them as divinely inspired.
The Didache gives us amazing information regarding Christian history and orthodox teaching, but it doesn’t have a place in the Bible. We can study it as an ancient testimony to early church life while understanding the church didn’t receive it as apostolic Scripture.
And the Didache likely “disappeared,” or dropped out of use, since it existed before an agreed upon canon. Once the universal church decided upon divinely inspired and apostolic books, the New Testament became widely copied and circulated, lessening the need for the Didache.
What Can the Didache Teach Us Today?
The Didache comes from a different world, like a foreign country, but it can still teach us important lessons.
First, it clearly demonstrates how seriously early believers took apostolic doctrine and teaching. Christianity didn’t start as a strange and disjointed collection of spiritual ideas that somehow evolved into some organized religion. The core truths and beliefs have a clear path—Jesus taught the twelve apostles and commissioned them to teach what he had taught (Matthew 28:19-20). As Acts shows us, the apostles then passed those teachings on to others through evangelism, discipleship, and church planting.
After the apostles, the generation that learned from them gave witness to the cohesive message of faith and the Good News. While some doctrine was debated and clarified, church leaders from the second century were incredibly consistent regarding apostolic teaching.
The Didache reflects this process. The title, “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” shows us how strongly the early Christians valued apostolic teaching and went through great effort to preserve and defend it.
The manuscript points to a shared rule of faith among early Christians. Believers lived across an empire, people of different languages and regions, but they shared similar practices and moral principles, from loving God and our neighbor to baptism and communion. Christianity almost immediately had theological and moral boundaries.
This challenges the idea that early Christianity lacked clarity or organization until the later development of the Roman Catholic Church. Long before then, Christians established organized communities with traditions that unified them across a dozen cultures. They appointed bishops, resisted false teachers, established rules for traveling ministers, and gathered on Sunday.
The traditions weren’t overly complicated, however. The simple structure became easily reproduced, which is part of the beauty of the Didache. Early Christians held the person of the Lord Jesus Christ as the foundation and center of the community. As such, they gathered to hear apostolic teaching and learn holy living.
Today, we should recognize the wisdom of this simplicity as we continue to send missionaries to unreached people groups. The faith isn’t about a complicated religious system we can manipulate. We rest upon Jesus alone and what the apostles said about him, recorded in the divinely inspired New Testament. We can be confident that our New Testament gives witness to a cohesive faith and belief in the work of Christ and how it changes all who believe.
Peace.
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