Source: The Huffington Post

By James D. Tabor, Author, ‘Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity’

Imagine discovering a lost and forgotten ancient Jewish/Christian writing, one not included in the New Testament, that dates to the earliest days of the emergence of Christianity. For historians of early Christianity or ancient Judaism, there is nothing more exciting — think of the amazing significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Nag Hammadi “Gnostic” gospels.

That is precisely what we have in the case of the Didache (pronounced “did-a-kay”), an ancient Greek manuscript discovered in 1873 in a library at Constantinople by a Greek priest, Father Philoteus Bryennios. “Didache” means “teaching,” and its full title is “The Teachings of the 12 Apostles.” This precious copy of the ancient text, dating to the late first or early second century CE, is mentioned by early Christian writers but had disappeared. Few Christians today have even heard of it, but you can read it online, in several translations with commentary, here. This text allows us a glimpse into a largely forgotten form of early Christianity, one that stands in rather stark contrast to the Christianity developed by the Apostle Paul some decades after the death of Jesus.

The Didache is divided into 16 chapters and was intended to be a “handbook” for Christian converts. The first six chapters give a summary of Christian ethics based on the teachings of Jesus, divided into two parts: the way of life and the way of death. Much of the content is similar to what we have in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain — that is, the basic ethical teachings of Jesus drawn from the “teaching” source now found in Matthew and Luke. It begins with the two “great commandments,” to love God and to love ­one’s neighbor as oneself, as well as an alternative version of the Golden Rule: “And whatever you do not want to happen to you, do not do to another.”

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