Didache

The Didache expects new believers to be taught in an organized manner before they are baptized, a process in some Christian traditions called catechesis. The term comes from the Greek verb katēcheō, which in the New Testament can mean simply to inform someone (Acts 21:21, 24) but usually means to instruct, as in Paul's command that whoever receives teaching should share good things with the teacher (Galatians 6:6) or in Luke's aim of letting Theophilus know the truth of the things he has been taught (Luke 1:4). Its New Testament uses lean toward basic instruction in the content of the faith, the kind of teaching suited to candidates for baptism. The learner came to be called a catechumen. The New Testament never describes a formal course of catechesis, and catechisms of a more structured kind, like the one in the Didache, belong to the generations after it.¹

In the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a man who wanted to become a member passed through more than two years of stages, each of which raised him a step in purity relative to the full members. After he had repented and been examined, he received instruction in the community's rules, and only after a full year could he touch its “pure food,” while the community held his belongings in trust apart from its common property. Only at the end of a second year, after a further examination of his understanding of the Torah and his observance of it, could he share the community's “pure drink” and be enrolled by rank among its members (1QS 6:13–23). Ritual baths had a part in this process, but the two years were spent on instruction and examination. The candidate learned the community's own interpretation of the Torah and its rules of purity until he could be trusted to keep them, and the Community Rule describes his knowledge of God's precepts as itself being purified (1QS 1:12).²

The Didache gives its own candidates a similar, but shorter, version of the same sequence, with instruction first and a ritual bath after it. Its first six chapters contain the instruction on the two ways of life and death, and its rule for baptism opens with the command "After explaining all these things, baptize" (Didache 7:1). That phrase turns what was very likely an older Jewish purity rule requiring running water for a ritual bath into the rite that admits a new member at the end of the teaching. Throughout the two ways the Didache addresses the reader in the second person singular and as "my child," the voice of a teacher speaking to a single catechumen, while the rules for the gathered community use the plural. It tells the catechumen to remember their teacher day and night and to "honor him as you would the Lord" (Didache 4:1). The Dead Sea Scrolls have no rule telling a candidate to honor a teacher, but the community's usual teacher, the Instructor or Maskil, has the task of teaching all the sons of light about the two spirits (1QS 3:13), and in a community ranked as strictly as this one his authority over those under instruction was presumably great. Josephus describes the same kind of probation among the Essenes, who kept a candidate from their purifying waters until he had completed a year of it. The Didache differs in that its baptism is a single act of initiation, never repeated, while the Qumran community bathed at least twice a day, before each of its meals.³

The Didache went on serving as catechesis long after the communities it was written for. In his Easter letter of 367, Athanasius of Alexandria says that the fathers appointed the Didache to be read by new converts who "desire to be instructed in the word of godliness." Didymus the Blind, whom Athanasius put in charge of the catechetical school at Alexandria, calls the Didache "the catechetical book" and, in another passage, the teaching of the apostolic catechesis, giving it the same title he gives the Shepherd of Hermas. The copy that fourth-century catechumens read was perhaps a shorter form limited to the two ways. By then its rules for traveling prophets, for bishops and deacons, and its simple prayers over the meal no longer described how Christians in Alexandria worshiped or were led.⁴

The order the Didache follows, with moral teaching first and baptism after it, is similar to the way later Christian communities prepared their converts. The two ways contain many of Jesus' sayings about conduct but nothing about his life, death or resurrection, and the core of early catechesis before baptism seems to have been practical and moral rather than doctrinal in the same way. The Apostolic Constitutions, a collection of community rules from the late fourth century that incorporates the Didache, begins its catechesis with the biblical stories of creation, the patriarchs and the Exodus. It leaves the teaching on Jesus' incarnation, passion, resurrection and ascension for the end of the preparation. The Apostolic Tradition, a collection of perhaps around 300 that tradition assigns to Hippolytus, has the community examine the candidates' lives before they may hear the gospel, asking whether they honored widows, visited the sick and did every good work.⁵

The Apostolic Tradition also sets the length of catechesis at three years, though a candidate who is earnest and perseveres may be admitted sooner, since it is conduct and not time that is judged (Apostolic Tradition 17). A three-year catechumenate may have been modeled on the practice of the Essenes, whose three-year trial before admission to the common meals Josephus describes (The Jewish War Book 2 8:7), and Hippolytus quotes that description at length in his own account of the Essenes. The parallel is possible, but not definitive, and no undisputed evidence for a three-year catechumenate comes from before the fourth century. In that century the Council of Elvira required two years, and the Council of Nicaea also called for adequate preparation before baptism. In Rome, Jerusalem and Syria, catechesis seems instead to have lasted about three weeks, although it is unclear whether that was the whole of the preparation or only its last part.⁶