Didache: First Century Discipleship
Didache is the Greek word for 'training' or 'teaching' and is the name given to a document that was recently discovered and verified to be an authentic first century document written by the believers in Yeshua as a training manual for converts coming into the faith from a Gentile background. Written somewhere between 50AD-100AD puts this document being written around the same time that the Gospels were put on paper and is the oldest known "Christian" document. While it was initially ignored after its discovery in the late 1800s due to it being too "Jewish", it has recently come back into the spotlight of scholarship and is giving us a unique look into the training method that Gentile converts to the faith went through in order to be able to function within the community. Hebrews 5:11-14 mentions the concept of such a training program when it talks about needing again someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God and those who are mature because of practice in discerning good from evil. In this 5 hour teaching, we will go chapter by chapter through this document and discuss the implications to understanding the faith originally taught by the Apostles as well as learning about the challenges that the early communities faced in the hostile Greco-Roman world.
For although you ought to be teachers by this time, again you need someone to teach you the basics of God’s sayings. You have come to need milk, not solid food. For anyone living on milk is inexperienced with the teaching about righteousness—he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who through practice have their senses trained to discern both good and evil.
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Part 4 has static around the 23-27 minute mark. Not sure you can do anything about it. I couldn’t understand what you were saying because of the noise and just skipped through till it was no longer there.
Also, don’t you think the blessings said in Chapter 9 have a lot to do with the barucha said over the bread and the wine at meals? That’s what I associated it with – even though it wasn’t the actual Jewish prayers.
Thanks Ryan! Good stuff.
Wow, I completely missed that when looking over the file. Unfortunately I was using a new program to record it and don’t have any back up audio files to fix. I’ll see what I can do about maybe doing a voice over, lol.
I believe that the the blessings originated from the same tradition of a pre-meal and post meal blessing. Here we see it in its purest form where later the Catholics morphed it into a religious ritual that is completely different from the original.
Shalom!