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The Didache's Quotations and the Synoptic Gospels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Richard Glover
Affiliation:
Manitoba, Canada

Extract

Ever since its publication by Bryennios in 1883 the Didache has been welcomed as a witness to our gospels. ‘We are surprised at the amount of testimony…. that it bears to the Canon’, wrote Bishop Lightfoot in 1885. Forty years later B. H. Streeter hesitated to claim it as a witness to Luke, but insisted that its author seemed ‘not only to have read Matthew, but also, like Ignatius, to refer to it under the title of “The Gospel”’. More positively still in 1957 Philip Carrington described it as ‘an appendix to Matthew, to which [its] readers…are explicitly referred no less than four times’.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1958

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References

page 12 note 1 The Expositor, January 1885.Google Scholar

page 12 note 2 The Four Gospels (New York, 1925), p. 507.Google Scholar

page 12 note 3 The Early Christian Church (Cambridge, 1957), 1, 500.Google Scholar

page 12 note 4 J.T.S. (1937), p. 369 and 1940, p. 381.Google Scholar

page 13 note 1 Four Gospels, p. 320.Google Scholar

page 13 note 2 They are perhaps made the more striking by the fact that in Trypho XCIII he cites this teaching in a form very close to Luke x. 27.Google Scholar

page 14 note 1 Apart from, this passage it occurs again in Matt. xviii. 17 where again it is associated with Τελωνέζ.Google Scholar

page 15 note 1 The Sayings of Jesus (London, 1954), p. 50.Google Scholar

page 15 note 2 J. T. S. (1937), p. 379.Google Scholar

page 16 note 1 And in the N.T. it has this meaning in John xiv. 15, x. 10; in I John ii. 4 and iii. 24 and in II John 6. It is used in a similar sense in I Cor. xiv. 37.Google Scholar

page 16 note 2 Robertson, A. T., A Grammar of the Greek New Testament, 3rd ed. (New York, 1919), pp. 645 and 643. υέξρις and the genitive appears in the N.T. only fifteen times as against έώς and the genitive's eighty-six occurrences.Google Scholar

page 17 note 1 Manson, T. W., The Sayings of Jesus, p. 47.Google Scholar

page 17 note 2 Luke vi. 36. ρíνεσθε οικτιρυονες καθώς ò πατέρ ύαν ολκτλρυών έστι J.M. I Apol. xv, 13. γινεσθε δέ χρηστολ καλ ολκτίρμονες ώς καì ò πατέρμν χρηστóς έστι καλ ολκτιρυχυ.Google Scholar

page 18 note 1 Op. cit p. 508.Google Scholar

page 18 note 2 Op. cit. p. 508.Google Scholar

page 19 note 1 When I first read Streeter's argument I was also engaged in reading Sir Robertson's, F. M. WilliamFrom Private to Field Marshal (London, 1921); and I was struck by the clash between Streeter's view here and the soldier's considered opinion (p. 116) that the Boer War would have been shortened by two years if only, on one critical occasion, Lord Roberts had given French a written, instead of a verbal, order. And because they have a much higher price to pay for their errors than theologians, soldiers have much more reason to study the cause and cure of misunderstandings.Google Scholar

page 19 note 2 Four Gospels, p. 508.Google Scholar

page 19 note 3 Ibid. p. 139.

page 20 note 1 Four Gospels, p. 509.Google Scholar

page 20 note 2 Sayings of Jesus, p. 109.Google Scholar

page 20 note 3 Op. cit. P. 247.Google Scholar

page 21 note 1 Four Gospels, p. 493.Google Scholar

page 21 note 2 Sayings of Jesus, p. 325.Google Scholar

page 22 note 1 Why has so much stress been laid on the idea that Jesus' teaching was long preserved in none but oral form? If Jewish scholars made a fetish of burdening their memories in preference to using paper and ink, Gentiles did not. Besides, we have Papias' assurance that one of Jesus' own immediate followers committed his teaching to paper; Luke's assurance that ‘many’ undertook to write down what eyewitnesses told of Jesus; also Paul's urgent and significant demand for ‘the books, especially the parchments’ which he had left in the house of Carpus at Troas. Surely the oral tradition idea is overdone.Google Scholar

page 23 note 1 The texts Justin uses are: Luke vi. 46 = Matt. xxi. 7; a variant of Luke vi. 16= Matt. X. 40; Luke xiii. 26–8= Matt. vii. 22–3; a variant on Matt. xiii. 42–3; the saying on wolves quoted here; and Luke vi. 44=Matt. vii. 17–19.Google Scholar

page 26 note 1 ibid. p. 99) because I find no antithesis between and in Smyrn. viii, where Ignatius is supposed to distinguish between them. To me, as to Kirsopp Lake, ‘the context suggests that is a synonym for the Eucharist’ (Apostolic Fathers, Loeb ed. I, p. 261 n). That suggestion has also the merit of making Ignatius' use of in Smyrn. viii conform to his use of it in Rom. vii. 3. Nor can I follow Dix when he argues, in effect (op. cid. p.91), that the single verb means ‘hold one kind of sacramental meal-an Agape’ in Did. ix–x, and ‘hold another kind of sacramental meal-a Eucharist’ in Did. xiv. An author who, without any fuller description, used identical language for different things in this fashion would write for the confusion, not the instruction, of his readers. But the Didachist is rather good at giving instruction. In Did. vii and viii his directions on Baptism and Prayer are clear and lucid enough. In Did. ix his teaching on how to hold a Eucharist follows these in a perfectly logical order up to x. 7 where the mention of prophets sends him off on a digression. But, after finishing the prophets at xiii. 7, he then returns to the Eucharist in xiv with instructions on when to hold this service. The interrupted earlier teaching is thus completed without any real antithesis or any more serious break in the writer's thinking than commonly occurs in sermons.

page 27 note 1 A similar reasoning would pounce on the word ‘Maranatha’ in I Cor. xvi. 22 as evidence that this epistle was written in Palestine, on the ground that Aramaic was not spoken in Ephesus. But no one who has heard the Psalm ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’ said or sung in the East Anglian fens or on the Canadian prairie can regard the language of worship as necessarily a description of the local scenery.Google Scholar

page 29 note 1 Sayings of Jesus, pp. 20–1.Google Scholar

page 29 note 2 Ibid. pp. 18–19.

page 29 note 3 Ibid. p. 20.

page 29 note 4 The Gospels in the Second Century (London, 1876), p. 136.Google Scholar

page 29 note 5 Manson, , The Teaching of Jesus (Cambridge, 1955), p. 28, citing The Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus, p. 44.Google Scholar

page 29 note 6 Ibid. p. 8.

page 29 note 7 ibid. LXIII,.

page 29 note 8 [Dr Clover's article was written before the publication of Audet's, J.-P.La Didache: Instruaions des Apôres (Paris, 1958), where similar conclusions are reached; cf. especially pp. 166ff.Google Scholar Cf. also Köster, H., Synoptische Überliiferung bei den apostolischen Vätern (T.U. LXV Berlin, 1957), pp. 239 ff. Ed.]Google Scholar