When thinking about documents that influenced the spread of the Christianity in its first few centuries, the immediate go-to works are the Gospels and Paul’s letters. However, as this module has covered, other documents were also widely influential.
The Didache and The Letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, for instance, are two crucial documents in the own right: Both explain the importance of Christians being committed to their faith and each other (Ignatius Ch. VI; Didache Ch. I, II); both advise Christian communities to appoint and obey church leadership (Ignatius Ch. III, XIII; Didache Ch. XV); and both warn of outside groups and “false teachers” trying to corrupt Christian belief, with Ignatius pointing directly to Judaism as a culprit (Ignatius Ch. VII, X; Didache Ch. XI).
Yet these two documents have important differences as well. One glaring difference is that Ignatius mentions nothing of the liturgy in his letter, while the Didache is practically a mini-handbook to celebrating the liturgy and the Eucharist (Didache Ch. IX, X). But as the old saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It could very well be that the church was developing its traditions all along, and readers can see the relationship between the Ignatius’ letter and the Didache as more of a progression in Christian practice.
What’s more, when we factor Paul’s letters – such as Ephesians, 1 Timothy, and Titus — as a grass roots understanding of church hierarchy and the liturgy, the story of church history becomes contiguous, despite not having exact dates for all above documents. It’s as if the circumstances surrounding all above documents spawned a sort of harmony among Christian communities (minus the heresies that would spread during much of the second century). This harmony, of course, was still in its infancy, yet abundantly apparent.
Overall, when looking at the Didache and Ignatius’ letter as part of a centuries long chain of church history, some of the finer points are still a mystery. And although Irvin and Sunquist point out that a bulk of early church growth is largely in Ignatius’ letters (66), later documents, such as Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, not only reinforce the continual development of a unified church, but also bolster the need to have one.
Works Cited
Ignatius. Letter to the Magnesians. Coakley, John W., and Andrea Sterk. Readings in World Christian History, Volume 1: Earliest Christianity to 1453. New York: Orbis Books, 2004.
Didache. Coakley, John W., and Andrea Sterk. Readings in World Christian History, Volume 1: Earliest Christianity to 1453. New York: Orbis Books, 2004.
Irvin, Dale T., and Scott W. Sunquist. History of the World Christian Movement: Earliest Christianity to 1453. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001.