Background
Background
The modern era has been fortunate to see the rediscovery of numerous forgotten collections of ancient texts. Few today realize that Napoleon’s expeditionary forces in Egypt made the first truly notable find in 1799. That discovery was the Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to unlocking ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics because it conveniently included a Greek translation.
That discovery—together with the gradual deciphering of the cuneiform languages of Mesopotamia and the unearthing of Canaanite language texts at Ugarit in Syria—recreated for us the broad stage upon which the action of the Hebrew Bible occurred.
Later, in the 1940s, there were critical discoveries made at the Dead Sea (the Dead Sea Scrolls) in Israel and at Nag Hammadi (a Gnostic Christian library) in Egypt. All these finds captured popular Western imagination and were duly sensationalized in the contemporary press. In the intervening 150 years or so between the Rosetta Stone and the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were many other important discoveries that were lesser known to the common public, but fascinating to scholars, and of vital importance for reconstructing the world-that-was. One of these newly revealed texts was the Didache.
The Didache was rediscovered in the Monastery of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey) in 1873 by the Metropolitan Philotheos Byrennios, who would later become the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Nicomedia (Izmit, Turkey). This manuscript is the sole extant copy of the complete work in Greek and was written in 1056 by a scribe named Leon. Because the document was the property of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, it is usually known as the Jerusalem Codex (Codex Hierosolymitanus, or simply “H”), but has sometimes also been referred to as the Constantinople Codex.
A codex is the earliest book form. It differs from a scroll in that the individual leaves are bound together. This particular codex was comprised of 120 vellum (calf-skin parchment) sheets and was approximately 7.5 by 6 inches in size. The Didache took up only five leaves. The codex also contained a related document known as The Epistle of Barnabus and several other early Christian texts. Byrennios initially was attracted by two letters of Clement of Rome and published them first, but he eventually recognized that the Didache was an important lost document that had been venerated in an earlier time. He published it ten years after his initial discovery. The manuscript was removed from Istanbul in 1887 and is today housed as Hierosolymitanus 54 in the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem.
Today, parts of the Didache still exist in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Georgian, Syriac, and Arabic. Most of these represent the languages of important early Churches. In some cases, the surviving manuscripts or manuscript fragments are direct translations, while in others, the rules of the Didache were incorporated into later books as source material.
Today, the text is included among a group of early Church documents collectively known as The Apostolic Fathers.