When Was the Didache Written: The Case for a First-Century Church Manual

When was the Didache written is the question that matters most about this text, and the answers span a century. Put it in the fifties and it is the oldest Christian document outside the letters of Paul. That makes it older than any gospel in the form we now read them.

Put it around 150 and it becomes something else entirely, a nostalgic reconstruction of a church that had already vanished.

The stakes are unusually high for what looks like a technical quarrel about dates. What the Didache describes is a Christian community with no bishop in charge and with travelling prophets still turning up. Its eucharist prayers never once mention the body and blood of Christ.

The Manuscript Was Found in 1873

For most of Christian history the book existed only as a name in ancient lists.

Philotheos Bryennios, then Metropolitan of Nicomedia, was working through a monastery library in Constantinople. There he opened a codex a scribe had finished in the year 1056. Bound in with Barnabas, Clement and Ignatius, he found a complete Greek text of the Didache.

He published it ten years later, in 1883, and the effect was immediate. Scholars who had argued about the shape of the earliest churches suddenly had a manual written by one of them.

That single codex remains the only complete copy, and a fourth-century Greek fragment from Oxyrhynchus supplies part of the rest. A Coptic leaf and an Ethiopic version make up the remainder of the manuscript evidence.

What the Text Contains

The book is short, practical, and arranged like something for use rather than for reading.

It opens with the Two Ways, a moral catechism setting the way of life against the way of death. Instructions on baptism, fasting and prayer follow, then the eucharistic prayers, then rules for visiting apostles and prophets.

It closes with a chapter on the last days, and the whole thing runs to about two thousand words.

Nothing in the book sets out to argue a case. It offers no theology of the incarnation, no defence against heretics, and no explanation of the death of Jesus. It tells a community what to do on Wednesday.

When Was the Didache Written: The Range of Answers

Scholarly opinion has moved considerably, and it has moved in one direction.

The nineteenth-century consensus put the book in the second century, on an assumption that has not survived. Anything outside the New Testament, it was thought, had to be later than everything inside it.

Jean-Paul Audet argued in 1958 for a date between 50 and 70. Aaron Milavec and Jonathan Draper have defended similar dates since, reading the text as a first-generation document.

Most working scholars now settle between 70 and 120 for the finished text. Most scholars allow the opening section to be older still. The early end of that range overlaps with the gospels.

The Church With No Bishop

Clearest of all is the evidence in the instructions for appointing leaders.

The Didache tells its readers to appoint for themselves bishops and deacons, in the plural, chosen locally and without ceremony. Nobody presides over them, and the text mentions no line of succession.

Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 110, insists in letter after letter that a single bishop must have obedience. Nobody, he says, may do anything whatever without him. The contrast is stark, and it runs in only one direction.

A community that had known the arrangement Ignatius demands would not describe leadership like this. The simplest reading is that the Didache comes from before that arrangement existed.

The Prophets Who Still Turned Up

Three chapters deal with a problem that later churches no longer had.

Wandering apostles and prophets arrive, expect hospitality, and speak in the Spirit. The text sets out how long they may stay and forbids them to ask for money. One who orders a meal in the Spirit and then eats it himself is a false prophet.

These rules are practical and slightly weary, in the tone of a community imposed upon more than once. They regulate a living phenomenon rather than remembering a dead one.

By the middle of the second century that world had gone. Writers who mention prophets then treat them as a difficulty of the past. Somebody writing then would have had no reason to invent this material.

The Eucharist Prayers That Say Nothing About the Body

The strangest feature of the text is also the hardest to explain as a late invention.

The book gives two eucharistic prayers in full, and they give thanks for the holy vine of David. They thank God for life and knowledge made known through Jesus, and for scattered grain gathered into one loaf.

Neither prayer mentions the body and blood of Christ, and neither refers to the Last Supper or the cross. The words spoken over the bread in Paul and in the gospels are simply absent.

Explaining that away is difficult in either direction, and it is much easier if the prayers are very early. A second-century forger with the gospels in front of him would not have produced them.

The Baptism Rule That Bends

One instruction shows the text solving a real problem rather than describing an ideal.

Baptise in living water, the Didache says, meaning a running stream. Where there is no running water, other water will do, and cold water comes before warm.

Warm will serve where cold is impossible. Failing all of that, pour water three times on the head in the threefold name.

That is a descending ladder of concessions, and the earliest evidence that congregations accepted pouring where immersion proved impossible. It is also the earliest instruction to use the threefold name outside the gospels.

What dates the passage is the chain of concessions itself. A community writing for an established institution does not state the ideal and then allow three fallbacks in one paragraph.

Fasting Against the Hypocrites

One small instruction carries an unusual amount of dating information.

Do not fast with the hypocrites, the text says, who fast on the second and fifth days of the week. Fast instead on the fourth day and on the day of preparation.

Mondays and Thursdays were the customary Jewish fast days at the time. The community is not rejecting fasting but deliberately moving its own days off theirs. That is the behaviour of a group separating from a parent body, not of one long separated.

The tone here matters quite as much as the content does. The split is recent enough to require a rule, and raw enough to require an insult.

The Argument for a Later Date

A case for the second century does exist, and it rests on one strong observation.

The Didache quotes the Lord’s Prayer in a form very close to Matthew’s. It introduces the quotation by saying pray as the Lord commanded in his gospel. That phrasing appears to treat a gospel as a written document.

If the author knew Matthew, the text cannot be earlier than about 80. Some scholars go further and read several passages as dependent on Matthew throughout.

The counter-argument is that both writers may draw on the same body of sayings circulating in the same region. Nobody can prove either position, and the dispute has run for over a century without resolution.

The Layers Underneath

Part of the difficulty is that the Didache is probably not the work of one moment.

The Two Ways section has close parallels in the Epistle of Barnabas and in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. A related teaching appears among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which places the pattern firmly in Jewish soil.

Most scholars therefore treat the opening chapters as a Jewish catechism, older than the Christian material and taken over whole. A later hand added the church order, and the closing apocalypse may be later again.

Dating the Didache therefore means dating a compilation rather than a book. Its parts do not all belong to the same year, and asking for one date asks slightly the wrong question.

How the Early Church Treated It

Ancient testimony puts the book on the boundary, which is itself informative.

Eusebius lists the Teaching of the Apostles among the writings he rejects. He places it with the disputed books rather than with the heretical ones. That is the treatment given to something familiar and widely read.

Athanasius went further in the year 367, in the letter that fixed the New Testament canon. It excludes the Didache, then names it among the books appointed by the fathers for those newly joining the church.

Neither man calls the book false, and both of them call it useful. A catechism for beginners set out to be exactly that, and much of the wider apocrypha sits on the same border.

When Was the Didache Written, and Why the Answer Decides Everything

Returning to the question of when was the Didache written, the answer changes what the book is evidence for.

An early date makes the book a photograph of something that existed. It shows a Christian community organising itself before bishops, before creeds, and before anyone had written a passion narrative. It shows that community keeping Jewish habits while defining itself against the synagogue.

A late date turns the book into an argument rather than a record. It becomes a writer’s picture of how things once were, shaped to say how they ought to be again.

The evidence favours the photograph, though not by an overwhelming margin. That is a weaker conclusion than either side would like, and it is the one the manuscripts support.

How to Read It Now

The text is short enough to read in a sitting, and the disputed passages are easy to find.

The Didache in English runs to a few pages, and chapters nine, ten and fifteen carry the dating argument. Athanasius on which books may be read supplies the other half of the picture.

What the community actually did with these rules gets its own account in the account of Didache community life.

One habit is worth keeping while you read the text. Every translation reflects a dating decision somewhere, and the introduction usually says which one before the text begins.

Check out the author’s book here: The Complete Apocrypha.