14 Facts About Didache

Didache is considered the first example of the genre of Church Orders.

The Didache reveals how Jewish Christians saw themselves and how they adapted their practice for Gentile Christians.

The Didache is similar in several ways to the Gospel of Matthew, perhaps because both texts originated in similar communities.

Didache is considered part of the group of second-generation Christian writings known as the Apostolic Fathers.

However, works which draw directly or indirectly from the Didache include the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Apostolic Constitutions and the Ethiopic Didascalia, the latter of which is included in the "broader canon" of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

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Apart from these fragments, the Greek text of the Didache has only survived in a single manuscript, the Codex Hierosolymitanus.

The community that produced the Didache could have been based in Syria, as it addressed the Gentiles but from a Judaic perspective, at some remove from Jerusalem, and shows no evidence of Pauline influence.

Comparable to the Didache is the "let him eat herbs" of Paul of Tarsus as a hyperbolical expression like 1 Cor 8:13: "I will never eat flesh, lest I should scandalize my brother", thus giving no support to the notion of vegetarianism in the Early Church.

Whereas Paul uses the compound word arsenokoitai, a hapax legomenon literally meaning male-bedder, based on the Greek words for "male" and "lie with" found in the Septuagint translation of Leviticus 18:22, the Didache uses a word translated as child corrupter which is likewise used in the Epistle of Barnabas.

The Didache is the oldest extra-biblical source for information about baptism, but it, too lacks these details.

The "Two Ways" section of the Didache is presumably the sort of ethical instruction that catechumens received in preparation for baptism.

Didache provides one of the few clues historians have in reconstructing the daily prayer practice among Christians before the 300s.

Didache includes two primitive and unusual prayers for the Eucharist, which is the central act of Christian worship.

Didache basically describes the same ritual as the one that took place in Corinth.