Apostles, TEACHING OF THE TWELVE

Apostles, TEACHING OF THE TWELVE, is the title of a treatise discovered in 1883 by Bryennius, the metropolitan of Nicomedia, and published by him with a Greek commentary (Constantinople, 1883). In sixteen short chapters it describes the two ways of life and of death, the method of divine service, baptism, fasting, prayer, the eucharist, and the ministry in the early church. The ministers are distinguished as permanent or itinerant, bishops and deacons belonging to the former, and prophets and teachers to the latter class. It had previously been suggested that some such document must underlie the seventh book of the Apostolic Constitutions (q.v.); and there is certainly a very close connection between this and the eighth book and the treatise. The work is moral rather than dogmatical in tone, and is of great interest for the history of the early Christian Church; but it throws no fresh light on the New Testament canon, and does nothing to settle the Johannine origin of the fourth gospel. The writer borrows extensively from the Epistle of Barnabas, 119 A.D.; and Harnack accepts Taylor's view that the book, or at least the first part of it, is based on a Jewish manual called The Two Ways, introduced at a very early date into the Christian Church for the use of catechumens. The date of the treatise is uncertain; some scholars fix it at 80-100 A.D.; Harnack contends for 120-165; and one hostile critic places it after the Constitutions. English translations include those by Farrar, Spence, and Schaff; within five years of the publication of the original, as many as 200 treatises, books, and articles on it had appeared. Very valuable notes will be found in Harnack's Lehre der Zwölf Apostel (1885); see also his Apostellehre (1887). The work is frequently referred to as the Didachē (Gr., 'teaching'). In 1887 the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore produced a fac-simile of the original.