Chapter VI
EARLY BOOK-MAKING
§1. The “Didachê”
Evidently the Teaching (Didachê) of the Twelve Apostles was humbly used by some of the early Jesuists as an authoritative Jewish manual which supplied them with their rule of conduct, they only later supplying (c. ix) their special rite of the “Eucharist” of wine and broken[1] bread, and vaguely mentioning “the life and knowledge which thou hast made known to us by Jesus thy Servant.” There is no mention of crucifixion, no naming of Jesus as Messiah. We are confronted with a primary Judaic Jesuism which is not that of the gospels, nor that of the Paulines, nor that of the Acts, though it agrees with the latter in calling Jesus the Servant of the Lord. It is even of older type than Ebionism; for the Ebionites carried their cult of poverty and asceticism to the point of using water instead of wine in the Eucharist;[2] whereas the Didachê specifies wine, the older practice. The cup of the Eucharist is “the holy wine of David thy servant, which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant”; and the thanks which follow (c. 10) are to the holy Father “for thy holy name, which thou hast caused to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant.”
It is quite clear that in this form of Jesuism, visibly early as compared with that set forth in the gospels and the Acts, we have something different from that in its derivation. The Eucharist, here so called ostensibly for the first time, is only inferribly derived from a sacrament of the body and blood of the sacrificed Jesus. Eucharistia means thanksgiving or thank-offering, and this ritual-meal is intelligibly so named. Applied, as by Justin Martyr and later Fathers, to the sacrificial sacrament of the gospels and the epistles, the name is a false description: yet the false description becomes canonical. The licit inference appears to be that the cult of a Jesus who outside of Judaism was a Sacrificed Saviour-God had here, under Judaic control, been presented as that of a Hero-Jesus, connected like Dionysos with the gift of the vine, and associated with a ritual meal of thanksgiving to Yahweh, whose “servant” he is.
Taking the Didachê as a stage in the Christian evolution, we further infer that the conception and name of a “Eucharist” was thence imposed on another and older species of ritual-meal, in which the Jesus is slain as a sacrifice and commemorated in a sacrificial sacrament. The more Judaic form of the cult absorbs an older and non-Judaic form, forced to the front by a death-story which gives to its sacrament a higher virtue for the devotee. It is a case of competition of cult forms for survival, the weaker being superseded. And as the sacrament, so the Jesus, is developed on other lines. He of the Didachê is neither Son of God nor Saviour, as he is not the Messiah, though he has somehow conveyed “knowledge and faith and immortality.” What the Didachê does is to begin the process of a doctrinal and ethical teaching which coalesces with that of evolving the God.
In the eighth section, the “Lord’s Prayer” is introduced with the formula “Nor pray ye like the hypocrites, but as the Lord commanded in his gospel.” Now “the Lord” has in every previous mention clearly meant, not Jesus, who is mentioned solely in the “servant” passages, but “God,” “the Father,” the Jewish deity. Either, then, “the Lord ... in his gospel” refers to some “gospel” of Yahweh or, as is highly probable, the whole clause is a late interpolation. This is the more likely because the seventh section, prescribing baptism in the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” is flagrantly interpolated. That being so, the provision at the end of c. 9, that no one shall partake of the Eucharist except those baptized in the name of the Lord, must be held to be also a late interpolation. Thus the document has been manipulated to some extent even in its early portions. The only other mentions of the gospel are in chapters 11 and 15, which follow after the “Amen” of the tenth, and represent the progressive provisions for the apostles and prophets of the growing church. The introduction of Jesuism in chapters 9 and 10 is pre-gospel.