Lost for Centuries, Then Rediscovered in a Library

For most of Christian history the Didache was known only by title and a handful of brief quotations preserved in other early Christian writers, until the Greek Orthodox metropolitan Philotheos Bryennios discovered a complete copy in 1873 in the library of the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople, bound into a manuscript called the Codex Hierosolymitanus dated 1056 CE, and published it a decade later in 1883, a rediscovery that ranks among the most significant textual finds in the study of earliest Christianity, since it offered scholars a direct window into church practice and organization from a period the New Testament itself only partially describes. Its canonical fortunes in antiquity were genuinely unsettled: Eusebius, writing his history of the church in the early 4th century, placed it among texts some communities read as scripture and others firmly rejected, and it was ultimately excluded from the New Testament that took final shape in the following centuries, even though some Eastern canon lists continued to reference material close to it much later.

The text's picture of church order, itinerant apostles and prophets still moving between communities, no fixed episcopal hierarchy yet firmly established, and baptism and Eucharist practiced with more local flexibility than later, more standardized liturgy allowed, has made it an important and much debated source for historians reconstructing how the earliest Christian communities were actually organized before more centralized church structures took hold.