The Didache—A Window on Gentile Christianity before the Written Gospels An Interview of Aaron Milavec by the Editor of The Fourth R The Fourth R 18/3 (May/June, 2005) 7-11, 15-16. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 2 Introduction to the Interview Ten years ago, John Dominic Crossan acknowledged that “the works of Aaron Milavec have revolutionized my own understanding of the Didache and I recommend them as the best introduction to a new and more profitable way of studying that document.”1 Five years later [1998], Crossan published The Birth of Christianity. Therein he told his readers that he changed his position on the independence of the Didache from any known Gospel due to Milavec's studies.2 Crossan characterized Milavec's “work on the text” as “extremely sensitive”3 and used his analytical translation throughout. A year ago, Milavec came out with two studies of the Didache. Paulist Press produced his thousand-page commentary that he has affectionately dubbed “the elephant.” A week later, Liturgical Press released “the mouse,” a 132-page “study edition.” Both volumes take a pioneering approach to the Didache. Ever since its discovery in 1873, the Didache (the Greek word for “training”) has been classified as a “church order” compiled from pre-existing documents during the early second century. Milavec, who has been working on the Didache for the last sixteen years, confesses that he began with this premise as well but that, upon patiently reexamining the text, he gradually discovered that the Didache had been misclassified and misunderstood. For Milavec, the Didache is not a collage of pre-existing texts; rather, it is a transcript of an oral training program that reveals a marvelous unity from beginning to end. The long title, The Training of the Lord Through the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles, thus appears to be close to the mark after all. Pushing the clues of the Didache to discover the faith, hope, and life of the community that stands behind it, Milavec reveals a very early form of Christianity that existed prior to the written Gospels and entirely outside the orbit of Pauline theology. 1 Crossan (1993), 44 n. 26. 2 Crossan (1998), 387. 3 Crossan (1998), 365. Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 3 The Interview Q1. Dr. Milavec, let me invite you to start us off with an overall description of this long-lost document. A1. The Didache is a first century pastoral manual that was lost for hundreds of years and then surprisingly discovered in 1873 in Istanbul. The only surviving complete manuscript of the Didache is about one-third the length of Mark’s Gospel and is neatly hand-written in Greek. The term “Didache” [δ δαχἠ] refers to the systematic training given by a skilled practitioner to his/her understudy. The long title of the text is “The Training of the Lord Through the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles.” The “Lord” referred to in this long title is not Jesus (as most early scholars had supposed) but the Father of Jesus who sent his servant Jesus to reveal “the Way of Life.” Accordingly, the Didache outlines a comprehensive, step-by-step program of formation that was used by the early Jewish followers of Jesus to initiate non-Jewish candidates into their way of life as they awaited the unfolding of the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus. Q2. Is the kind of Christianity that is reflected in the Didache different in any significant way from the kinds of Christianity familiar to us from the books of the New Testament? A2. Decidedly. What the Didache makes abundantly clear is that practical holiness4 is the bedrock for embracing the faith and the hope of Jesus. The training of the Didache, accordingly, had little room for proclaiming the exalted titles and miraculous deeds of Jesus--aspects that come to the fore in the letters of Paul and in the Gospel narratives. In fact, the document is entirely silent (much like the early layers of the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas) about Jesus dying for our sins. Nor does the Didache say anything about Jesus' vindication and exaltation through his resurrection and ascension. According to the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul, Jesus sits at the right hand of God awaiting his return in glory. By way of contrast to these familiar Christological themes, the Didache focused on training Gentiles in the nitty-gritty aspects of mastering the Way of Life revealed by the Father through his servant Jesus. As for the future, those trained in the Way of Life expected that they would be included with Israel in the Kingdom of God that their Almighty Father was preparing to bring to earth. 4 The Didache focuses upon orthopraxis in much the same way as does the Manual of Discipline and the Mishnah. Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 4 The framers of the Didache offered Gentiles detailed expectations and practical descriptions of what was to be done. Nowhere in the New Testament, not even in the Sermon on the Mount, does one find a comparable training program for transmitting, in measured and gradual steps, the operative practices and theological underpinnings that knit together the individual and collective lives of the earliest Christians. Undoubtedly the framers of the Didache were well aware that any community that did not effectively pass on its values, its rites, its way of life would flounder and eventually perish from the face of the earth. Thus, while the Didache focused upon the transformation of an outsider into an insider, at every point one learns much more of the insiders themselves--what they cherished, what they expected of themselves, and what they expected of God. Q3. Now wait a minute. The Didache has traditionally been classified as the oldest of the “church orders,” post-New Testament writings that aim to regulate the rituals and authority structure of the growing church. You seem to be saying something very different: that the Didache is a training manual for Gentiles wishing to join in the promises God made to Israel. A3. Precisely. When I first began my study the Didache sixteen years ago, needless to say, I also regarded the Didache as a second-century manual for ordering church life at a time when the apostles and prophets were a thing of the past and bishops and deacons were stepping forward to provide a stable church structure. I am especially indebted to Jacob Neusner and Willy Rordorf for opening me up to a whole new way of testing my presuppositions by having them rub up against the text itself. With time, my sustained immersion in the text itself gradually changed my thinking and feeling about the text many times. In the end, what emerged is the genius of the Didache in establishing a comprehensive, step-by-step program of formation bent upon empowering Gentile candidates seeking perfection in a religious movement that is decidedly Jewish in its conception. Throughout, the framers of the Didache gave detailed norms and practical descriptions of what was to be done. The focus was upon “what God would have us do” (orthopraxis) and only incidentally upon “what God would have us believe” (orthodoxy). The Jewish framers of the Didache were well aware that any community that did not effectively pass on its values, its rites, and its way of life would flounder and eventually perish. The Didache, consequently, was the insurance policy that this was not going to happen. Q4. What does the Didache tell us about early Christianity that we didn’t already know from other sources? A4. Nowhere in the New Testament, not even in the Sermon on the Mount, does one find a training program for transmitting, in measured and gradual steps, the operative practices and Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 5 theological underpinnings that knit together the individual and collective lives of the earliest Christians. In the New Testament, one finds many references to baptism and fasting; yet, only in the Didache does one find fasting as a necessary preparation for baptism and as a semi-weekly practice following baptism. Likewise, in the New Testament, one finds Christians gathered in prayer and celebrating the Eucharist. Only in the Didache, however, does one discover that variations on the Lord’s Prayer being used three times each day as a replacement for the traditional prayers of synagogue Judaism. As for the Eucharist, only the Didache offers us a complete synopsis of the prayers used during and after the meal. For the first time, one hears that this Eucharist was celebrated weekly on the “day of the Lord” (Did. 14:1) and that an individual confession of failings preceded the Eucharist by way of insuring “that your sacrifice may be pure” (Did. 14:1). Following the Eucharist, one finds prophets offering spontaneous prayers originating from the Spirit and bearing upon the end times. Only in the Didache do we hear of Christians habitually offering first fruits and presenting them to the prophets in their midst instead of to the temple priests as was the Jewish custom. Prophets, to be sure, were not a thing of the past for the Didache communities. While the Didache communities did not originate prophets, it welcomed them “as the Lord” (Did. 11:4) yet limited their stay to two or three days and prohibited them from asking for money. In fact, the practical rules given in the Didache illustrate just how and where prophets had abused the hospitality and eroded the Way of Life of the communities. And there is much more. I have only scratched the surface. In brief, the Didache offers us unparalleled details of what transpired in some of the earliest Christian communities—something that has no counterpart in the whole of the New Testament. Q5. A number of commentaries on the Didache have appeared in the last thirty years. What is different about yours? A5. First, a unified reading of the Didache has been impossible up to this point because the prevailing assumption has been that the Didache was created in stages with the compiler splicing together pre-existing documents with only a minimum of editing. The end result, therefore, was that scholars were occupied with defining the stages by which the document was composed and, since every scholar had his/her own schema for doing that, it was impossible to give any concerted energy to describing the community or communities that stood behind the Didache. My commentaries,5 in contrast, put forward an origination hypothesis that identifies the oral unity of 5 Milavec (2003c) and (2003d). Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 6 the Didache and delineates the fine structure guiding the progression of topics from beginning to end. Second, the Didache has been almost universally understood as citing either Matthew's Gospel or some combination of the Matthean and Lukan traditions. From this vantage point, it followed that the date of composition had to be set beyond the 80s and that the synoptic material could be used to interpret the Didache. My research led me to the conclusion that the Didache was created independently of any known gospel. Working with this hypothesis enabled me to show that the internal logic, theological orientation, and pastoral practice of the Didache run decisively counter to what one finds in the received gospels.6 The repercussions of this conclusion are enormous: (a) I am able to entertain a mid-first century dating for the Didache, and (b) I am prohibited from using any of the later gospels to clarify the meaning of the Didache (even in those areas where textual parallels are evident). Q6. So your discovery of an internal unity within the Didache freed you to hear the unique voice of the Didache speaking for itself, independent of the context of the known gospels. A6. That's it exactly. Q7. Your discovery that the Didache is not dependent on the gospels does not by itself mean that it was written before them. It’s possible that the Didache could be both independent of the gospels and from the second century. What led you to conclude that it dates from the mid-first century? A7. For this, there were many lines of evidence that converged. To begin with, I noticed that Didache focuses on the “God of David” (Did. 10:6) as the expected savior coming to gather his elect into his kingdom.7 In Paul's letters and in the sermons of Acts, this focus gets decidedly altered. The one who heralded the kingdom is now being celebrated as the savior who has been raised from the dead, taken up into heaven, and is sitting at the right hand of God awaiting his 6 Milavec (2003d), 693-740 and (2003a), 443-480. The Didache makes use of ύ ο ("lord") twenty-four times. In each instance, the context can be explored in order to discern whether the "Lord-God" or the "Lord-Jesus" is meant. References to "Lord" ( ύ ο ) in the Didache have been assumed to refer to Jesus due to Pauline and Synoptic usage. See my analysis in (2003d), 563-564, 660-666 & (2014) where I show that all twenty-four instances can uniformly be shown to refer to the Lord-God. 7 Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 7 triumphant return when he will raise the dead to life, judge the nations, and establish God's kingdom. The Didache, interestingly enough, is conspicuously silent about such things. In their view, the expected “Lord” (Did 16:8) is none other than the “God of David” (Did. 10:6) who will come to gather his beloved Israel and those righteous Gentiles who are attached to Israel into his kingdom on earth. Such a soteriology and eschatology could fit comfortably only in the early stage of the Jesus movement when the “faith of Jesus” was still at the center of things and, as yet, “faith in Jesus” had not transposed salvation from the future to the present and from the Father to the Son. Q8. How about the Eucharist (Lord’s Supper) in the Didache? Is it also inspired by the faith of Jesus? Or is it oriented around a faith in Jesus? A8. In the prayers of the weekly Eucharist the Father alone is addressed. He is the unseen host whose presence is felt. The wine shared evokes rejoicing in the “holy vine of David.” The broken loaf shared evokes “the life and knowledge” of the Father that has been “scattered over the hills” and will someday soon be reassembled by the Father into his kingdom. Those drinking and eating, to be sure, honor Jesus as “the servant” who has revealed these things (Did. 9:2, 3; 10:3) but the things revealed are from the Father and anticipate his future presence in this world. According to Paul’s tradition, the eucharistic bread and wine evoke the body and blood of Jesus and those eating/drinking “proclaim the Lord's death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). Here it is the felt presence of Jesus and the anticipation of his return that shape the experience of those assembled. The synoptic gospels, as is well known, embraced this orientation and projected it onto the Last Supper and, in so doing, distracted us from Jesus' passionate expectation that the kingdom might break in on the first night of Passover and that, accordingly, he vows “that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes” (Luke 22:18). Q9. So, in effect, you can trace a shift in eucharistic theology from Jesus' anticipation of God's coming to bring his kingdom to the Pauline expectation that Jesus is coming. A9. Keep in mind that the Didache retains the original orientation of Jesus in his practice of having meals with outcasts to anticipate their inclusion in the Kingdom of God. Bruce Chilton formulates it as follows: Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 8 Meals in Jesus' fellowship became practical parables. . . . To join in his meals was, in effect, to anticipate the kingdom as it had been delineated by Jesus' teaching. Each meal was a proleptic celebration of God's kingdom. . . .8 The Didache even gives an approving nod toward those Jews visiting the community and being identified as “Christians” (Did. 12:4) as having already made up their minds that Jesus has been appointed by God as his future Messiah. It does this, however, with the understanding that the “power and the glory” of the Father will be manifest “through Jesus Christ” (Did. 9:4). This does not mean that the Messiah comes from heaven in place of God; rather, it means that when God has come to raise the righteous from the dead and to gather the chosen into his kingdom, then and only then would the Father appoint Jesus to guide and rule his people in the Way of Life. This transition from God's coming to Jesus' return has been widely studied. Even the Didache testifies to this trajectory. After the meal, those present enter into an eschatological expectation in which either the congregation and/or the prophets chant, “Hosanna to the God of David” (Did. 10:6). The Apostolic Constitutions, a fourth-century revision of the Didache, alters and expands this chant to read, “Hosanna to the Son of David, blessed be the one coming in the name of the Lord” (7.26.5)--a clear indication that now the community expected to greet the royal Messiah “who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21). Q10. Let’s step back for a moment and try to take in the big picture. Are you saying that the Didache’s low Christology, its primitive Eucharist, and its eschatology of God's coming (without any mention of Jesus) all point to a community that pre-dates Pauline and synoptic perspectives? A10. It's risky to use a term like “low Christology” because it often is used to imply an inferior early position on its way toward becoming a proper “high Christology.” I would prefer to say that the framers of the Didache took their position from the historical Jesus who centered his own Jewish preaching and his kingdom meals on what God was preparing to do for Israel. Besides, it is no small matter to honor Jesus as “the servant” of God who revealed the Way of Life and the knowledge of the Father to the Gentiles. 8 Chilton (1996), 86. Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 9 Q11. This brings us back to the Way of Life where we started, doesn't it? What have you discovered about this Way of Life? A11. Many things. I'll mention just a few. The first five chapters, 40% of the Didache, trace a progressive program of formation in the Way of Life. Initially novices are instructed how to prepare themselves for conflict with family and friends who will bitterly oppose their new religious orientation. Then novices are trained to regard everything they own as belonging to the Father who shares “his own free gifts” (Did. 1:5) with everyone who asks. Imitating God, the novice responds (without examining the reasons) to anyone in need. This training in responsive giving, in turn, prepares the novice for the future sharing of resources that will eventually be required among community members by way of providing an economic safety net for the artisans and merchants that might otherwise be driven into debt-slavery. Next, a modified decalogue, in effect a new version of the Ten Commandments, is given that is suited to insure a measure of holiness without withdrawing from business and family responsibilities. Then the novice is taught how to place a protective fence around his/her actions such that minor infractions would never lead to committing major infractions against the Decalogue. At this point in the training, the mentor begins to address his/her novice as “my child,” terminology which signals that those who have come this far should regard their mentors as “parents” who convey to them the wisdom for living that their biological parents were incapable of imparting. Q12. Are you suggesting that every novice had a single mentor? A12. Yes. The principal clue for the one-on-one training is that the training program addresses a single novice using the second-person singular.9 Furthermore, at this point in the training program, the novice is instructed to remember and mull over the life and the training of “the one speaking to you the word of God” (Did. 4:1). This double use of the singular pronouns suggests that each novice has a single mentor. So, too, when regulations are put forward for choosing the water for baptism (Did. 7:2-3) and for ordering “the one being baptized to fast beforehand” (Did. 7:4), the singular is also used--again confirming the expectation that each candidate was baptized by a single individual--presumably the one who was his or her mentor and parent. Furthermore, since women in the ancient world were accustomed to be trained by other women, and since it could be a source of scandal for a man to be alone for prolonged periods with a woman unrelated to him, we must 9 Greek, unlike English, always clearly distinguishes between singular and plural pronouns and verbs. Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 10 presume that women were appointed to train female candidates and men were appointed to train male candidates. Q13. Do you see any special significance in the fact that women were being trained? A13. Absolutely. When women are not trained in Torah, it follows that they must rely on what their fathers, their brothers, and their husbands tell them about it. In effect, they must then be admonished to “be obedient” to their men since they have no skill in discernment within themselves. In the Didache communities, the textual evidence shows that the Way of Life addressed both the issues of women and the issues of men and that a gender-inclusive language was used throughout. In such a community, as in the case of many elective Gentile associations, women were called on not only to train other women but also to correct backsliders (no matter what their sex or rank), to lead daily prayers, to offer first fruits, to prophesy, and even to officiate at the eucharistic meals. Female novices, accordingly, came to honor their spiritual mothers “as the Lord” (Did. 4:1) for, as the Didache points out, novices were to “remember night and day the one speaking to you the word of God” (Did. 4:1) and to “tremble at all times at the words that you have received” (Did. 3:8). This was the way that Israel originally experienced the word of the Lord from Mt. Sinai (Ex 19:16) and the way that the prophets came to discover the transforming presence of the Lord in their own callings (e.g., Ezra 9:4, Is 66:2, Hab 3:16). Q14. More controversial, however, is your insistence that the step-by-step progression found in the training program does not stop once one gets to the liturgical section of the document. A14. Scholars looking for clues of earlier written sources have argued that certain stylistic repetitions in chapters 7-10 of the Didache signal a transition to what has been dubbed the “liturgical section.” Most scholars believe that this “liturgical section” existed prior to the Didache. This section opens with an absolute prohibition against eating “the food sacrificed to idols” (Did. 6:3) and then goes on to give practical norms for baptism, fasting, daily prayers, and Eucharist. How or why food prohibitions would be the initial topic here never made good sense to me. Why, for example, wasn't the food prohibition included in the training in the Way of Life or pushed back and attached to the rules for semi-weekly fasting? Why is this prohibition formulated in the singular while the second-person plural dominates what follows? Then as I came to see the masterful and progressive orientation taken within the Way of Life itself, it occurred to me that there was a very practical reason for this absolute injunction being precisely where it is. As long as candidates were in training, they were obliged to refrain from attending the sacred community meals (Did. 9:5). During the training period, consequently, candidates would have been constrained to take part in family meals wherein offerings were made to household gods Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 11 or some portion of the meats served had been previously offered at a public altar. Only with baptism a few days away, therefore, could the candidate be bound by this absolute rule. The mentor, meanwhile, had to decide what sort of water to use and to make preparations accordingly (Did. 7:2-3). Then attention passes naturally to the one or two days of complete fasting prior to baptism (Did. 7:4). This fasting purged the body of all food offered to idols in anticipation of partaking in the spiritual food that their first Eucharist would offer them. Once meal fellowship within the community was opened up following baptism, then and only then would continued safe eating without any contamination or entanglements with idols be necessary. This explains why the rule against food offered to idols could not be given either earlier or later. Once this satisfying explanation occurred to me, I had the courage to imagine that the rest of the Didache might also be constructed to follow the progress of the initiate to the very end. Q15. And did it turn out just as you suspected? A15. Not all at once. I continued to push the evidence in that direction, however, and eventually everything fell into place. The most troublesome obstacle to my hypothesis was the peculiar placement of the confession of failings. Did. 9-10 presents what the text calls “the Eucharist” (9:1) and, four chapters later, the confession of failings is mandated as taking place prior to the Eucharist (14:1). Every scholar has, at one time or another, puzzled over why the framers did not place the confession of failing before Did. 9-10 thereby preserving a topical and chronological unity. Jean-Paul Audet, the famous French Canadian commentator on the text, takes this problem up as follows: The author returns to the subject [in Did. 14] not because he is a bad writer, or because he had, oddly enough, forgotten something, or because he is compiling his materials at random, or because someone else had created a subsequent interpolation of 14:1-3, but simply because experience has demonstrated, in the meantime, the inadequacy of the instructions in [chapters] 9-10.10 10 Audet (1958), 460. My translation from the French. Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 12 Audet's assumption here is that the Didache was composed in writing. When the author comes up with a fresh idea, the confession of failings, he finds he has no blank space prior to the eucharistic section in which to write it in. Hence, according to Audet, he was forced to put it where he left off writing the last time (i.e., after Did 13). Q16. Doesn't this whole line of reasoning become irrelevant if we take the position that the Didache developed as an oral production, which would have allowed innovations to be inserted in their proper chronological place whenever necessary? A16. Exactly. That's why Audet and those who take his starting point were unconvincing. Any method that assumes that the Didache originated as a written text and that therefore fails to consider the flexibility of oral tradition cannot explain the internal structures and the use of the Didache. Q17. What did you come up with then? A17. I decided to give weight to my origination hypothesis and push for an explanation. Here is what I finally discovered: Under ordinary circumstances, the Didache informs us that a confession of failings would have taken place by way of preparing the members of offer “a pure sacrifice” (14:1). The candidate preparing for baptism is informed of this confession near the end of his/her training (3:14). When one encounters the eucharistic prayers (9f), however, this confession of failings is curiously omitted. So I am puzzled. I strain at the seeming “misplacement” of things. But I am urged on by the discovery that every part of the Way of Life follows an orderly progression. I am also urged on by the discovery that the abstention from food sacrificed to idols was not included in the Way of Life because it would have been chronologically out of place there. Could it be then that there is a reason why the confession of failings does not show up prior to the eucharistic prayers? My surmise, due to my origination hypothesis, is that this omission of the confession of failings is deliberate and signals what everyone knew--namely that the order of events within the Didache follows the order whereby a candidate comes to experience these events. Thus, if my surmise is correct, the Eucharist in the Didache must represent the “the first Eucharist” and the omission of the confession of failings hints at the fact that this public confession was suppressed whenever new candidates were baptized just prior to the Eucharist. Many practical and pastoral reasons could be put forward to sustain suppressing a public confession of failings at “the first Eucharist.” Foremost among them would be the fittingness of joyfully welcoming the new “brothers” and “sisters” who had Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 13 just been baptized without confronting them with a recital of the failings of permanent members. . . .11 What is important to notice here is how my hypothesis forced me to probe the text more deeply in order to find out just how far the evidence supplied by the text can be understood to support the explanatory matrix being tested. Audet, for his part, presumed that the confession of failings was held prior to every Eucharist but that the absence of blank space prevented the writer from putting it in its rightful place. Satisfied with his explanation, Audet had no reason to look deeper. Unsatisfied as I was, I had no choice but to push the evidence further, convinced that there was a hidden logic that guided the narrator from topic to topic from beginning to end. Q18. In the end, how can you be certain that you finally got it right? . . . that the Didache was written before the gospels? . . . that the Didache was originally an oral production? . . . that it was used to guide mentors through the systematic and progressive initiation of candidates designed to outfit them for active participation in all aspects of community life? A18. From one vantage point, I can't ever be certain. What I do know, however, is that I embraced the questions that emerged out of the text and allowed them to guide me toward an unexpected shore that showed up only because I stayed the course. Michael Polanyi, a famous philosopher of science, was fond of saying that superior theories are “fraught with further intimations of an indeterminate range” that reveal themselves, from time to time, in “as yet undisclosed, perhaps as yet unthinkable, consequences.”12 Such theories provide greater intellectual satisfaction--they say more about what is the hidden depth of meaning within the text. And, in the end, it is the superior explanatory matrix and superior fruitfulness of a new theory that enables scholars to abandon alternative theories as inferior.13 11 Milavec (2003d), 237-238. 12 Polanyi (1966), 23. 13 For an extended discussion of the creation and verification of a novel origination hypothesis, see Milavec (2003d), xvii-xxv. Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed. An Interview of Aaron Milavec, p. 14 Q19. You’ve been studying the Didache for over fifteen years and have written over one thousand pages of commentary on this document, one that can be read out loud in twenty minutes. What is it about the Didache that fascinates you so? Q19. The unexpected discovery of the Didache. At first, the Didache was hidden from our eyes for hundreds of years since the manuscript existed in remote libraries without anyone noticing it. Even the experts who catalogued the contents of the library in Istanbul repeatedly overlooked it. Then, when Archbishop Bryennios first published the manuscript in 1875, the Didache was misclassified as a second-century church order. Thus, its true character remained hidden for yet another hundred years. Finally, my own experience of gradually discovering the original purpose and unity of the text has been a source of continuous surprise and puzzlement to me. Q20. Out time is nearly run out. What concluding thoughts would you like to leave with us? A20. I recently heard the story of how Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985), a Russian-born emigrant to the United States, became a key player in unravelling Maya hieroglyphics. Proskouriakoff had only an undergraduate degree in architecture when she was hired in 1936 to work with seasoned professional archaeologists at their site in Piedras Negras. In 1960, nonetheless, she was the one who provided the experts the key ingredient for deciphering the glyphs that baffled them. The evidence was there all the time right under their noses, but she was the first one able to see the clues for what they revealed. I feel very much like Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Believe me, I have no superior intelligence and no extraordinary achievements in deciphering manuscripts. Nonetheless, over a period of sixteen years, I have been able to discover a unifying thread within the Didache that others more capable than me consistently overlooked. What Bryennios found was not a second-century church order but a transcription of a much older orally-transmitted program of formation based upon the faith of Jesus. The Didache, consequently, represents a hitherto lost form of earliest Christianity and, as such, one should be able to hear the echo of the Master between its lines. Should my discovery become a corner stone rather than a stumbling block, the future might well include editions of the New Testament wherein the Didache is included as an appendix. It might also include Christian communities who identify themselves as seeking perfection in the Way of Life disclosed in the Didache. Going beyond this, I’m certain that the Didache is poised to reveal itself in as yet unexpected ways. I, for my part, will be fascinated by how future scholars and believers will unravel and put into practice the pastoral wisdom found in this ancient text. +++end of text+++ Copyright (c) 2005 by Aaron Milavec Document not to be further duplicated or distributed.