Bible
The Didache Discoveries Recovering the Apostolic Decree and the Missing Epistle of John Alan Garrow This groundbreaking study digs beneath the surface of one of early Christianity’s most enigmatic documents, the Didache, and finds there two texts hidden side by side for nearly two millennia. The first, compiled by James the brother of Jesus and the twelve apostles in 48 CE, is the Apostolic Decree. This document, par - tially described in Acts 15, was treated as foundational Christian Scripture by the writers of the New Testament. In that role it provides the starting point for interactions across Paul’s letters, the Synoptic Gospels, and the Johannine literature—enabling solutions to previously unanswerable questions about Paul’s theology, the in - famous synoptic problem, and the origins of Johannine theological creativity. Crucial to the story of the latter is the discovery of the Didache’s second hidden document: the Missing Epistle of John. This text, referenced in 3 John 9, reworks the sometimes eccentric instructions of the Apostolic Decree and makes them more gener - ally applicable—a move that provides an insight into the ways the writers of the New Testament handled their own sacred text. The Didache Discoveries promises to have an impact on every major aspect of the study of the New Testament and early Christianity. FROM THE BOOK Here, then, is a tale of two texts that might have been expected to survive but did not and of another that might have been expected to disappear but survived. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is the tale of two texts that did after all survive but whose original identities became unrecognizable because of the way they had become merged within a third, larger text. This, in essence, is the thesis of this book: that the complete Apostolic Decree did after all survive, but the intersplicing of the Missing Epistle of John (and further ad - ditions) obscured its true identity, creating instead the text we now know as the Didache, or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.
JUNE 2026 • 264 pp. • $34.99p • 9781540970138
Alan Garrow (DPhil, University of Oxford) is vicar of St. Peter’s Church, Harrogate, United Kingdom, and is a member of the Shef - field Centre for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. He is the author of The Gospel of Matthew’s Dependence on the “Didache” and numerous scholarly articles.
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