The Doctrina Apostolorum: Origin and Rediscovery

A Long Lost Work

The Doctrina Apostolorum (DA), sometimes rendered in English as “The Teaching of the Apostles,” has aroused compelling scholarly debate for more than a century. Lost for centuries, the DA was discovered in two medieval manuscripts: the Monacensis lat. 6264 (11th century—discovered at St. Mary’s Abbey of Freising, Bavaria) and Mellicensis 597 (possibly 9th/10th century—discovered in 19th century in the Abbey of Melk, Austria). Though the first manuscript offers the only complete text of the DA in existence, the extant portions of the DA found in the second confirms both were made from an earlier source text. Moreover, as noted in a previous article, the manuscripts containing the DA also included homiletic material for the liturgical year, including St. Boniface’s 15th sermon, otherwise known as the Renunciation (discussed further below). 

Following several published editions of these manuscripts dating back to the 19th century, a full Latin edition of the DA, with a scholarly introduction, was published in 1978 as an appendix to La Doctrine des Douze Apôtres by Willy Rordorf and Andre Tuilier. (This text serves as the basis for this and the following article on the DA.) The DA is significantly shorter than the Didache, which perhaps prompted some researchers to hypothesize that the latter text was derived from the former. The more recent view, however, is that while both texts are part of the so-called “two ways tradition” (whereby one path leads to death and the other to eternal life), they derive independently from an earlier source (or sources).

Whatever the DA’s textual provenance, the current consensus appears to be that text, like the Didache, dates to the second century and was likely composed originally in Greek. Some believe the DA may have originated in Palestine before making its way westward where it was translated into Latin. This view is bound to the contentious position that the DA, lacking as it does robust “Christianizing” elements, is literarily tied to the Jewish “two ways tradition” found in the Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered between 1946-56 in the Qumran Caves in Israel’s West Bank). Even if the text has pre-Christian affinities, none of its contents—as will be discussed in the next article—are antithetical to Christian belief. Moreover, the DA’s “eschatological ending” (as it has been dubbed) closes with the following benediction: “Per dominum Iesum Christum regnantem et dominantem cum Deo Patre et Spiritu Sancto in saecula saeculorum. Amen.”

The Work’s Role in the West

Because of the many centuries that passed from the (re-)discovery of the manuscripts containing the DA from their composition (not to mention the equally long period between the text’s origin and said manuscripts), it is difficult to say how widely read or utilized the DA was up until the 11th century. Because of the absence of manuscripts containing the DA after this time, it is generally believed the document fell out of use.

Contemporary inquiries into the “two ways tradition,” have detected its influence on such seminal Western monastic rules as the Regula Magistri (“Rule of the Master”) from the early 6th century and the slightly later—and far more well-known—Rule of St. Benedict, composed around 530 AD. Considerable disagreement exists, however, whether these rules drew directly from the DA or rather were dependent in part on the Didache itself. 

The aforementioned Renunciation of St. Boniface is also thought to derive from the “two ways tradition,” though again there is disagreement whether the Didache or the DA was the saint’s source text. The fact that the manuscripts containing the DA also contain St. Boniface’s sermon suggests that, at least in the minds of the manuscripts’ composers, the two documents are linked. Moreover, textual analysis of both documents reveals, in the opinion of some, a closer affinity between DA and the Renunciation than the latter with the Didache. Similarly, the catechetical text known as the Ratio de cathecizandis Rudibus, which likely dates from the 9th century, also contains hints that it was influenced by the DA or some other connected strand of the “two ways tradition.”

While the DA’s specific contents will be explored further in the next article, it is necessary to keep in mind that compact catechetical material, be it a homily, a monastic rule, or the DA itself, was vital for the spread of Christianity in the first millennium. Long before the advent of the printing press or widespread literacy, oral instruction that was pithy and memorable was one of the primary means by which the Faith was transmitted. Even if the DA was not preached directly to Western European Christians, it appears that it served as the basis for homilies and other writings, some (perhaps many) of which have been lost to history.