The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part 15

It may perhaps date from the fourth century rather than the fifth. The hand is a medium-sized informal uncial, at its best somewhat similar to that e. g. of 1618 and the Cairo Menander; on Fol. 1 recto it is markedly larger and more irregular than on the other three pages. That the writer was a person of no great culture is clear also from his spelling and division of words (e. g. epithymeōn desires, hy-meis you). n at the end of a line is commonly represented by a horizontal stroke above the preceding vowel, and the usual abbreviation of pneuma spirit occurs. There is no punctuation, but the end of a chapter is marked by a row of wedge-shaped signs followed by horizontal dashes. The apparent absence of pagination may be due to the poor state of preservation of the upper margins.

The Didache Teaching has been preserved in a single MS. (M) of the middle of the eleventh century, discovered at Constantinople by Bryennios and edited by him in 1883. It is supposed by Harnack to have taken its present shape about the middle of the second century, but to have an older text, based ultimately on Jewish elements, behind it; and he finds indications of an earlier recension in the Kanones ekklesiastikoi tōn hagiōn apostolōn Ecclesiastical Canons of the Holy Apostles, a treatise called by Bickell, its first editor, the 'Apostolische Kirchenordnung' Apostolic Church Order and by Hilgenfeld 'Duae Viae vel Iudicium Petri' Two Ways or Judgment of Peter, as well as in an old Latin translation of Didache i-vi (the 'Two Ways') edited in 1900 by J. Schlecht, in both of which Did. i. 3-ii. 1 is omitted, though that omission may be otherwise explained. But that in the fourth century at any rate the Didache stood practically as found in M was sufficiently indicated by the Apostolic Constitutions, a compilation generally supposed to have originated in Syria or Palestine between about A. D. 340 and 380, in the seventh book of which the Didache has been largely drawn upon.

In the existing paucity of evidence for the text, any addition is welcome, and a comparison of these early Oxyrhynchus fragments with M and with the corresponding passages of the Apostolic Constitutions is an interesting study. Separated as they are in date by some eight centuries, it is hardly surprising to find several variations between M and 1782, which offers one or two remarkable new readings. Of these the most striking is the insertion between the third and fourth verses of chap. i of the words "hear what you must do to save your spirit. First of all," which form a transition to the abrupt "abstain" of the accepted text. Other noteworthy variants are the omission of "and bodily" ("and worldly" Const. Apost.) in i. 4, and of "from every" in iii. 1, the insertion of "matter" in iii. 1, and the substitution of "since it guides" for "for it guides" in iii. 2. How should these novelties be appraised? The two last are not very convincing, and "abstain" for "abstain" in i. 4 certainly does not inspire confidence.