The Didache

Within this series of posts I am investigating some of the contextual factors that influenced the early church’s decision for Sunday gathering. In previous posts, I have highlighted several contextual factors important to the Sabbath/Lord’s Day discussion in the early church. In this post, I will examine what the Didache has to say about the topic in order to demonstrate a very early Christian prescription for Sunday worship.[1]

Didache and The Lord’s Day

Didache 14:1 begins, “And on the Lord’s Day [κατὰ κυριακὴν δὲ κυρίου] gather to break bread and to give thanks, after having confessed your offenses so that your sacrifice may be pure.”[2]

Contrary to the traditional interpretation, Bacchiocchi believes that the author implies the noun διδαχή, rather than ἡμεραν, so that the phrase should read “according to the sovereign doctrine of the Lord.”[3] Bacchiocchi makes several arguments supporting this interpretation, the most compelling of which include: (1) the context of chapter 14 deals not with time, but with prerequisites to the Lord’s table; (2) the quotation from Mal 1:10 further emphasizes not the specific time, bur rather the manner of the sacrifice (14:3); (3) the Didache contains six other instructions using the “according to – Κατὰ ” construction (1:5; 2:1; 4:13; 6:1; 11; 13:6); and (4) 14:1 is linked to the previous sentence by an “and – δὲ” conjunction which allows for the omission of the word “commandment” or “doctrine”.[4]

However, Bauckham argues, “It is doubtful whether readers would have been able to supply διδαχή, since the only other attested usage of κυριακὴν (“Lord’s”) with a noun implied is with ἡμεραν (“day”) implied.”[5] Further adding doubt to Bacchiocchi’s proposal is a similar tradition in the Apostolic Constitutions, which reads the phrase to mean “Lord’s day.” Moreover, the presence of the κυρίου is both redundant and unexplained by this proposal. According to Bauckham, other, less convincing, proposals have also been made.[6]

A more plausible interpretation is that the context of the κυριακὴν, “Strongly suggests the regular weekly worship of the church.”[7] In light of the context of the passage, as well as the usage of κυριακὴν in other works of the time period,[8] this interpretation of weekly corporate worship held on Sunday can be reasonably assumed.

Significance

This reference to the Lord’s Day worship in the Didache gives evidence of very early second-century convictions regarding the day of worship. Significantly, the (probably) Jewish-Christian author is advising a gentile believer to worship on the Lord’s Day. Unlike Paul’s and Ignatius’s judaizing opponents, who would presumably advocate keeping a weekly Sabbath, the Jewish-Christian author of the Didache neither speaks of following Jewish Sabbath laws, nor of the 4th commandment, nor of God’s rest after creation, nor of the exodus. The theological underpinning is not given for this Lord’s Day observance. However, the presence of such a command does demonstrate early patterns of weekly Lord’s Day worship.

Thus, the Didache is an early example of ecclesial patterns. In the next post I plan to examine Ignatius’s Letter to the Magnesians to see what he thought about Sabbath/Lord’s Day observance.

About the Author:
Jon English Lee

Jon English Lee (M.Div.) is a Ph.D. student in Systematic and Historical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His research interests include ecclesiology, particularly liturgy and sacraments, and the development of doctrine.

Twitter:
@jonenglishlee

  1. This post is adapted from Jon English Lee, “Second Century Witnesses to the Sabbath and Lord’s Day Debate,” The Churchman, forthcoming 2014.  ↩

  2. Didache 14:1, translated from La Doctrine des Douze Apôtres. Didache, ed. and trans. W. Rordorf and A. Tuilier, Sources chrétiennes 248 (Paris: 1978), 129–135. See also, Johnson, Worship in the Early Church, 1:40. For a full discussion of the Did. 14:1 textual variants, see: Francis N. Lee, The Covenantal Sabbath (London: The Lord’s Day Observance Society, 1974), 298.  ↩

  3. Samuele Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday : A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 114n73.  ↩

  4. Samuele Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday : A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 114n73.  ↩

  5. Apostolic Constitutions, 7:30:1, as noted in Richard Bauckham, “Lord’s Day,” in Carson, ed., From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999), 228. Interestingly, Bacchiocchi himself points this out in his, From Sabbath to Sunday : A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity, (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977) (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977), 120.  ↩

  6. Bauckham lists and judges several other proposals in his, “Lord’s Day,” in Carson, ed., From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999),228. For example, Rordorf argues that this neoplasm emphasizes the solemnity of the day. Dugmore proposes that KURIOU designates Easter Sunday; however this proposal is “Self-defeating in the context of his argument for a reference to Easter in Rev 1:10, because it too requires that KURIAKEN alone already meant Sunday in common usage.” Audet interprets the text as having KURIAKEN as an “explanatory marginal gloss” that eventually replaced HEMERAN in the text (Audet, La didache: Instructions des Apotres, 210n4). However, Bauckham shows that this interpretation is doubtful because elsewhere HEMERA KURIOU “always means the eschatological Day of the Lord, never a day of worship.”  ↩

  7. Richard Bauckham, “Lord’s Day,” in Carson, ed., From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999), 228.  ↩

  8. Ign.Mag. 9:1.  ↩