* As the Didache is not among pbpoeryphe, it may have been one of the Opuseula atque tractatus ort odoxorum patrum not specified, to which perhaps the Epistle of Barnabas also belonged.
+ Possibly the early prevalence of the use of Wednesday and Friday as fast-days, and of the three Jewish stated hours of prayer, also implies the influence of Did. viii. Again, Justin’s ton divewus aru, touching the president’s Eucharistic prayer, may echo Did. x. jin. toa Derovcwy.
cents. show various adaptations of phrases occur- ring in Did. xi.-xiii. Similar phenomena also crop up later in the West, possibly through use of such secondary sources. (4) In any case the Avdax) T&v droorékwy meant to Athanasius, if not already to Clement, the shorter work, which was adapted to the instruction of catechumens. It was a book for general Christian edification, like Wisdom or the Shepherd ; whereas the fuller work was known only to scholars, and by them used in an historical sense and as largely out of date. In the West, at least in Italy, to judge from Rufinus’ words (compared with his Athanasian model), we gather that even the Two Ways had been given a local or Petrine setting. (5) All this tells against the view (¢.g. of Funk) that the Two Ways as a distinct work was secondary, having been separated from the larger Didache for catechetical purposes. But it favours the theory that the full Didache reached Alexandria, from Palestine, only after the primitive Didache had become firmly established there. (6) Finally, there is no proof that the full Didache ever ex- isted in Latin.
iii. GENESIS OF THE DIDACHE.—(a) Genesis of the ‘Two Ways.’—Setting aside the theory that the full Didache (with or without i. 3°-ii. 1) was prior to the Zwo Ways as a separate work,—which seems as little supported by internal* as by external evidence,—we must start from a closer considera- tion of the Zwo Ways as the nucleus of the whole. In substance it is clearly of Jewish origin. This is proved both by its structure and by its constant parallels. with purely Jewish literature, and par- ticularly with Rabbinic sources. This was first demonstrated by Dr. C. Taylor, and is reaffirmed, even to excess, by a Jewish scholar like Dr. Kohler.
Kohler’s collection of Jewish parallels (The Jewish Encycto- poedid, vol. iv., art. ‘Didache’) to the idea of ‘two ways,’ etc., is full and valuable. But he outruns the evidence when he assumes that the ‘ Jewish manual’ (which he hastily infers to have existed) had matter bearing on love to God which the Christian redactor omitted. His obiter dicta, that ‘ the whole book has fallen into disorder,’ and that ‘the whole first part of the ‘‘Didache,” dealing with monotheism, was tampered with by the Christian editor,’ are baseless conjectures.
Specially Jewish is the section in which the path to the graver sins is fenced by warnings against the lighter ones (iii. 1 ff.), each such warning being prefaced with ‘My son.’ Probably this section was borrowed from a self-contained unit of Jewish teaching for Gentile proselytes (including iv. 1). Of such instruction, which was sure to take more or less fixed shape on the lines of the Decalogue,t we have a good deal of indirect evidence (cf. Ro givf-), And it is obvious that the first efforts of Jewish Christians, like the Hellenist missionaries of Acts, to instruct their Gentile converts, would naturally proceed on the existing lines, Hence we can well conceive the genesis of the Jewish- Christian Two Ways out of the oral catechesis of missionary Judaism. But there is no evidence that there was ever a purely Jewish Zo Ways in writing, or even that all the elements in our Two Ways ever before existed as a unity. Indeed, some of its precepts were probably the creation of the new and gentler Christian spirit—a spirit well represented by the positive form of the ‘Golden
* Unless the Two Ways had lain before the compiler of the Didache, he would hardly have written ‘my child’ in iii. 1-iv. 1, his own tendency being shown in the ‘children’ at the end of the Way of Death, and the plurals throughout chs. vii.-xvi. Nor can we imagine i. 3>-ii. 1, vi. 2-3, being omitted by any one compiling a manual for catechumens subsequent to the date of the full Didache.
+ Kohler (/.c.) points out that such emphasis on the Decalogue, especially in the Diaspora, was probably greater before Chris: tian disparagement of the other Mosaic laws, as temporary usages, made Judaism more guarded in the matter.
444 DIDACHE DIDACHE
Rule,’ in contrast to the negative. In the original framework of the Two Ways, this negative form, ‘according to the traditional Jewish * interpreta- tion’ (Kohler), practically cancels the larger spirit of the words of Ly 198; so that on it the exegesis or ‘teaching’ proceeds. This defect was soon felt by the Christian consciousness, and was rectified in the fuller Didache.
Of course it is impossible to assign an upper limit to the date in the history of Christianity, when something like the Zwo Ways began to be used in the preparation of raw Gentile converts for baptism. But, in the endeavour to trace its earliest written form and to assign a rough date to it, the Hpistle of Barnabas is our primary authority.
(6) The witness of ‘ Barnabas.’—Its witness, in- ‘deed, is ambiguous, and has been read in opposite ways by different scholars. One thing is certain, namely, that Barnabas did not know Did. i. 3>- ii, 2; else it would not have failed to echo these more Evangelical precepts. But the evidence, as we shall see, is rather against the fuller Didache ever having existed without them, and to this extent against Barnabas’ use of it in any form. The affinity of thought between iv. 9f. and Did. xvi. 2 does not prove the opposite;+ both may be independent expressions of sentiments current in the same region and period (cf. He 102-2), But, confining the issue at present to the most primitive Didache, does Barnabas presuppose a written or only an oral Two Ways? Probably the former.