Didacha

 Didache[FC1] 

Greek“Teaching”)

also called Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, the oldest surviving Christian church order, probably written in Egypt or Syria in the 2nd century. It presents a general program for instruction and initiation into the primitive church. Chapters 1–6 give ethical instruction concerning the two ways, of life and of death, and reflect an early Christian adaptation of a Jewish pattern of teaching in order to prepare catechumens (candidates for Christian baptism). Chapters 7–15 discuss baptism, fasting, prayer, the Eucharist, how to receive and test traveling apostles and prophets, and the appointment of bishops and deacons. Chapter 16 considers the signs of the Second Coming of the Lord.

Some early Christian writers considered the Didacha  to be canonical. It formed the basis of chapter 7 of the 4th-century Apostolic Constitutions, a collection of early Christian ecclesiastical law. It was known only through such references in early Christian works until a Greek manuscript of it, written in 1056, was discovered in Istanbul in 1873 by Philotheos Bryennios (1833–1914), an Eastern Church theologian and metropolitan. From these discoveries, Bryennios published The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (1883), with valuable notes of his own.

 [FC1]Teaching(of the twelve Apostles