Didascalia Apostolorum

Didascalia Apostolorum, or just Didascalia, is a Christian legal treatise which belongs to the genre of the Church Orders. It presents itself as being written by the Twelve Apostles at the time of the Council of Jerusalem; however, scholars agree that it was actually a composition of the 3rd century, perhaps around 230 AD. The Didascalia was clearly modeled on the earlier Didache. The author is unknown, but he was probably a bishop. The provenance is usually regarded as Northern Syria, possibly near Antioch. The Didascalia was probably composed in the 3rd century in Syria. The earliest mention of the work is by Epiphanius of Salamis, who believed it to be truly Apostolic. He found it in use among the Audiani, Syrian heretics. The few extracts Epiphanius gives do not quite tally with our present text, but he is notoriously inexact in his quotations. At the end of the fourth century the Didascalia was used as the basis of the first six books of the Apostolic Constitutions. At the end of the 4th century it is quoted in the Pseudo-Chrysostom's Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum. The Didascalia underwent a number of translations, including into Latin and Syriac. The date of the Syriac translation is usually placed between the fourth and sixth centuries and played some role in forming a legal culture which influenced various other texts from the third through seventh centuries and thereafter, including the Quran. The Didascalia Apostolorum, whose lost original was in Greek, was first published in 1854 in Syriac by Paul de Lagarde. In 1900 Edmund Hauler published the Verona Palimpsest which includes a Latin translation of the Didascalia, perhaps of the fourth century, more than half of which has perished. In 1906 Franz Xaver von Funk published the texts, printed side by side, of both the Didascalia and the Apostolic Constitutions, in order to show the similarities. A short fragment of chapter 15 has been found in Greek, and in 1996 another probable fragment in Coptic.