teaching of the twelve

Didache Blog Tour – Day Four, Chapter Five

December 5, 2009 By Tony Jones 1 Comment

A wonderful post yesterday on The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing and Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community, by Mike Todd at Waving or Drowning. They’re tackling Chapter Five, “Sex, Money, and Other Means of Getting Along.”

The Didache speaks often of sex, and of money, and I spend some effort in this chapter of the book laying out the context of both in the ancient world. In order to understand any ancient document, be it the Illiad, the Bible, or the Didache, we’ve got to attempt to understand the world in which it was written. And the Didache was written in a world very unlike our own.

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Filed Under: books, church Tagged With: didache, mike todd, money, paraclete press, sex, teaching of the twelve 1 Comment

Didache Blog Tour – Day Three, Chapter Four

December 4, 2009 By Tony Jones 7 Comments

Didache Copyright Page - 1886 Yesterday, Holly Rankin Zaher and Tripp Fuller both weighed in on The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing and Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community. Their assignment was to reflect on Chapter Four, “There Are Two Ways.”

Holly is a committed youth pastor, and has been for years. It’s from that perspective that she writes,

In my context of a youth ministry trying to live out the way of Jesus, I can’t help but wonder what our confirmation process look like if we used the Didache to shape at least part of the process. Might that help reshape the notion of confirmation and discipleship from ritual-driven to apprenticeship? Would a frank discussion on ethics and living life in a certain “way” help people understand a relational understanding of faith? Could it be that in discussing a way to life we might discover a deep vat a grace that Tony highlights?

Indeed, that’s exactly what what the Didache’s original purpose seems to be: as a catechetical manual. It’d be interesting to know if any youth workers out there have used the Didache in confirmation classes. If I were teaching confirmation today, I would use it.

Didache Blog Tour – Day Two, Chapter Three

December 2, 2009 By Tony Jones 7 Comments

Philotheos Bryennios who discovered the Didache in 1873

Today, Amy Moffit and Ted Gossard tackle chapter three of my new book, The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing and Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community. (The blog tour skipped chapter two of the book, because that is the complete text of the Didache, which you can also find here.)

Amy writes that at first, the Didache seemed to her like a cut-and-paste job from Matthew’s Gospel, in which the authors simply took the parts of Matthew they liked and slapped them together. It’s true that I think the Didache authors had access to Quelle, which was also the primary source of Matthew. So she’s right to find parallels.

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Filed Under: books, church Tagged With: didache, teaching of the twelve, ted gossard, trucker frank 7 Comments

Teaching of the Twelve Drops Tomorrow

November 30, 2009 By Tony Jones 18 Comments

Teaching of the Twelve by Tony Jones

My latest book, The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing & Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community officially releases tomorrow (it should ship from Amazon tomorrow, but it may already be available at some retailers; starting tomorrow, Paraclete Press will be offering a special deal: Buy three or more and get 40% off).

It’s a short, breezy read — on Amazon, David P. Robinson says that he read it in two hours, and he recommends it to youth pastors. Chad Estes’s review reads, “I found the writing to be encouraging and thought provoking and certainly worth discussing in communities of faith today.”

If you don’t know what the Didache is, it is an early Christian document, only rediscovered in 1873 in a dusty library in Nicomedia. At first, many considered it a forgery, but it was quickly determined to be authentic and attested in other ancient documents. Some scholars date it early 2nd century, but there’s a growing consensus that it’s earlier than that. I date it between 50 and 70 CE, contemporaneous with Paul’s letters and before the Gospels.

The Didache is not a particularly theological book. It’s actually a manual for Christian communal life, and if I had to sum up its message, I’d say it it, Do your best. The Didache lays out a very pragmatic approach to Christian living. The line that sums that up is Didache 6:2:

For if you are able to bear the entire yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but if you are not able, then at least do what you can.

The raw, simple, primitive Christianity described in the Didache is a great model for those of us attempting to free the church from its Western cultural captivity, so I hope this book will be a small step in that process.

In celebration of the release of The Teaching of the Twelve, I’ll be tweeting my favorite lines from the Didache all week, and Paraclete has arranged a blog tour. Every day, I’ll respond here to the bloggers as they post about the book.