The Way

The Didache

We’re used to thinking of the earliest Christian writings as the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, mainly because they show up first in the New Testament order. When we arrange the New Testament books in their production order, things shift considerably: we end up with either Paul’s epistle to the Galatians or his first epistle to the Thessalonikans as the earliest book. (It’s unclear whether Galatians was addressed to northern or southern portions of Galatia; if south, then other epistles place Paul’s letter before 1 Thessalonians; if north, then after.) The order, with a little bit of wiggle room, would go something like this (with their circa dates in parentheses):

• 1 Thessalonians (ca. 51)
• 2 Thessalonians (ca. 51)
• Jude (ca. 51–110)
• Galatians (ca. 48 or 55)
• 1 Corinthians (ca. 53–57)
• Philippians (ca. 54–55)
• Philemon (ca. 54–55)
• 2 Corinthians (ca. 55–58)
• Romans (ca. 57–58)
• Colossians (ca. 62–71)
• Mark (ca. 65–71)
• James (ca. 65–85)
• 1 Peter (ca. 75–90)
• Matthew (ca. 80–90)
• Luke-Acts (ca. 80–100)
• Ephesians (ca. 80–100)
• Hebrews (ca. 80–100)
• John (ca. 90–120)
• 1 John (ca. 90–110)
• 2 John (ca. 90–110)
• 3 John (ca. 90–110)
• Revelation (ca. 95–100)
• 1 Timothy (ca. 100–110)
• 2 Timothy (ca. 100–110)
• Titus (ca. 100–110)
• 2 Peter (ca. 110–120)

The Gospel of Mark might date earlier than the year 65, since fragments of it show up in pieces from Qumran Cave 7 (Dead Sea Scrolls) that physically date to before the year 50. However, some scholars debate whether Cave 7 fragments may stretch as late as the 70s CE. If they’re correct, then Mark might still be limited to a production range between 65 and 71 or so.

I mention this to point out a very important extracanonical Christian text produced right smack in the middle of these other New Testament works: what’s known as “The Didache” (pronounced “DID-ah-kay).

The Didache is a short (~2,000 words) text written in Greek that dates to the second half of the first century, somewhere between the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Revelation. Why it didn’t make it into the New Testament is owed more to accident than early bishops rejecting it from their canonical collection of New Testament items—had Eusebius in the 300s not placed the Didache alongside other books considered by later bishops to have been “non-canonical,” we might be reading the Didache in our New Testament today.

The word “didache” means “teaching,” and this work gets such a title because it presents itself as a new convert’s manual for joining an ekklesia and adopting “the Way of Jesus.” “There are two ways,” the Didache begins, “one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between these two ways.” Across the board, in early Christian epistles and in the Didache, this verbiage about “the Way” is used extensively—when adjusted for translation accuracy (and not medieval, Renaissance, or early modern dogma), the New Testament refers far more to “the way” than to “the church,” evidence that most of the first generation of Jesus’s followers saw themselves as still Jewish but adopting Jesus as Messiah/Christ and his teachings as their religious way of life.

The Way in the Sermon on the Mount

The gospels of Matthew and Luke adopt similar language, which we see highlighted in the Sermon on the Mount/Plain. Jesus describes a pathway beyond “the Law (Torah) and the Prophets (Nevi’im),” a way of moral living that envelops the prior social order and moves their society from a Mosaic one into a divine one. In this respect, we can see resonance between works like the Didache and the Sermon—and Matthew treats this sermon in particular as deeply important, foundational even, to the whole project of bringing to earth the kingdom of the heavens.

After speaking to our true identity as the salt of the earth and the light of the world and then listing six antitheses to certain commandments in the Torah, Jesus then discusses true righteousness, righteous judgment, and the way of righteousness. In other words, he reformats the cultural setting that surrounded practices of purity and obedience to commandments—the operative word in his Jewish milieu was “righteous,” the destination of so much Jewish striving. Whereas Israelites and their descendants insisted upon a social ethic of being right with God, of practicing righteousness and being a righteous people, Jesus steered his audience toward a new definition of righteousness, one predicated upon loving one another, seeing the humanity in each other, and then basing integrity and judgment on goodness. Put another way, Jesus moved his audience away from a rules-based order and toward an integrity-based order.

“The Way” of Jesus looked strikingly different, even offensive: Matthew tells us that when Jesus ended the sermon, the people were ekplesso (“astonished” in the King James), for Jesus taught them of his own authority and not as the scribes. The word ekplesso in ancient Greek was entirely negative in connotation; it could mean “flustered,” “unsettled,” “stricken with fear/panic,” “disconcerted,” “alarmed,” “knocked over,” and even “terrified.” In some texts, ekplesso appears next to descriptions of people’s mouths being open, as though they were “agape” at something, dumbfounded. Our King James Version in using “astonished” allows for a positive connotation that none of the early texts described, as though the audience could have been amazed by the force and eloquence of the sermon. But no, Jesus’s audience that day could hear in things like the antitheses or the several other “But I say unto you” sayings a refutation of their society and their interpretations and applications of Torah. Some of them probably thought quoting the Torah to introduce Jesus’s own amplified ethic amounted to impugning Moses or God, a colossal no-no in ancient Jewish society.

The Rest of the Antitheses

Among the antithesis I haven’t covered yet includes the commandments not to bear false witness, to reciprocate violence and theft (“eye for an eye”), and to love neighbor and hate enemies. Jesus famously declared not to swear at all, to turn the other cheek, and to love our enemies and pray for them who despitefully use us and persecute us.

On that latter teaching, Jesus interestingly used this action as a defining characteristic of God’s children. In loving and praying for our enemies, we “may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.” God in Heaven answers both good and evil with good and answers both justice and injustice with good, and it’s this that Jesus associates with being “born” or “summoned” as God’s children. The original word here, ginomai, often refers to being born, being begotten, or arising as something new or something else, and in this context, sounds like Jesus alluding to a future condition of being reborn in God or being brought to God or arising as the children of God. Some English translations use “that you may be called the children of your Father” to get at this, but there’s no mistaking the direct connection of the father/child relationship to this practice of loving our enemies and bringing goodness to good and evil, to justice and injustice.

As a sidenote: I’m reminded of Jesus’s teaching and emphasis that we will be identified as his disciples by whether we love one another as Jesus has loved us. And here, we see Jesus describing our identity as the children of Heavenly Father in terms of loving our enemies and practicing justice in terms of returning goodness for good and evil. It’s as if taking upon ourselves the name of Jesus will mean loving as Jesus loves, and taking upon ourselves the status as God’s children will mean loving everyone and bringing goodness to all situations. Jesus, as the Son of God, certainly modeled this way of loving and altruism.

Be Ye Therefore Perfect

One of the unfortunate renditions in the King James Version is the use of the word “perfect” in the saying that follows: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” We all know people who have taken up a strident perfectionism based on this saying. Only, the word isn’t “perfect,” the word is telos, something that doesn’t really refer to “perfect” unless we really stick with the Latin origin of our English word. In Latin, perfectus means “finished” or “completed,” which is why it was used in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible in place of the Greek teleioi. Then, Catholic and then later Anglican readers of the Vulgate insisted teleioi meant perfectus, but the problem in the 1500s was that the English word “perfect” had come to mean “flawless.”

Is Jesus commanding us to become flawless even as our Father in Heaven is flawless? It seems very unlikely, especially since the immediate context for the saying isn’t about flawlessness or flaws at all, but rather about loving enemies and making the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

Again, the Greek is clear enough—telos has to do with being a maturated person, one who isn’t pushed around by whims or by circumstances, but is steady and reasoned. That’s how the Greeks used the term when describing people. A teleios judge is one who is neutral, wise, mature; a teleios athlete is one who has steady form; but both absolutely can have flaws as people. Even the Latin perfectus maintained this notion anciently. Boys became men, and men became perfectus, in other words, mature men, or elders in society. In this context, Julius Caesar was held up as perfect—an ideally mature, solid, steady leader. I think a correct translation won’t perpetuate the notion of flawlessness but rather that of maturity, integrity, and wisdom.

There’s also something important about how Jesus wraps the series of antitheses: he appears to be redirecting the rationale of righteous living (or of the moral order of society) away from law-abiding and toward God’s version of justice. God isn’t balancing the scales with reciprocity (eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth), but rather with constant, steady, integrated goodness and sustenance. The sun rises on the evil and on the good, the rain falls on the just and on the unjust. Just make a quick read of Deuteronomy and Numbers, and you’ll notice how reciprocity is everywhere. Jesus really is offering something revolutionary relative to the Galilean Jewish social order.

Performative Righteousness and Hypocrisy

We’re familiar with Jesus’s teachings about almsgiving, prayer, and fasting: when giving alms, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing; when praying, enter your closet and pray in secret; and when fasting, anoint your head and wash your face so not to appear as famished. These three practices (giving alms, praying, and fasting) constitute opportunities for hypocrisy according to Jesus. People, apparently, did them as performances of righteousness, “to be seen” rather than to do each for its own value.

The word “hypocrite” in our King James English is itself a word that entered English rather directly from Greek. Hypocritēs means “below” (hypo) “criticism” (crites), and this was used to describe stage actors. In fact, hypocrite was the Greek term for actor. Critics weren’t supposed to criticize the actor but rather the character, at least in ancient Greek literate society, so the actor was beneath critique, a hypo-critique, if you will.

Jesus references ways that people used almsgiving, prayer, and fasting for playacting. By “sounding a trumpet” while giving alms, the almsgiver becomes a performer, and all they get from their trumpeted giving is some attention, not the “freely given reward” of Heavenly Father. By standing in the synagogues and on street corners to pray, the person praying only gets attention, not the freely given reward of Heavenly Father. By disfiguring their face, the person fasting again only gets the attention of others and the gratification of being called “righteous,” not the freely given reward of Heavenly Father. It’s so vivid here how Jesus juxtaposes peformativity and sincerity: the sincere person gives alms, prays, and fasts to give alms, to pray, and to fast, and doesn’t seek to be seen, going so far even that their own self doesn’t take notice—let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.

“But when ye pray,” Jesus says, “use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do.” Our original text in Matthew says, actually, not to “babble on as the Romans do,” a direct reference to a style of praying that was visible within the cultuses of the Roman deities and seen by Jewish people near the public temples built for figures like Jupiter and Minerva. Here’s the text of a prayer in the Precatio Terrae that dates to the time of Jesus. Notice how the person saying this prayer doesn’t even get to the purpose of the prayer: to ask Mother Earth for a blessing of some kind.

Goddess revered, O Earth, of all nature Mother, engendering all things and re-engendering them from the same womb, because thou only dost supply each species with living force, thou divine controller of sky and sea and of all things, through thee is nature hushed and lays hold on sleep, and thou likewise renewest the day and dost banish night. Thou coverest Pluto’s shades and chaos immeasurable: winds, rains and tempests thou dost detain, and, at thy will, let loose, and so convulse the sea, banishing sunshine, stirring gales to fury, and likewise, when thou wilt, thou speedest forth the joyous day. Thou dost bestow life’s nourishment with never-failing faithfulness, and, when our breath has gone, in thee we find our refuge: so, whatsoever thou bestowest, all falls back to thee. Deservedly art thou called Mighty Mother of Gods, since in duteous service thou hast surpassed the divinities of heaven, and thou art that true parent of living species and of gods, without which nothing is ripened or can be born. Thou art the Mighty Being and thou art queen of divinities, O Goddess. Thee, divine one, I adore and thy godhead I invoke: graciously vouchsafe me this which I ask of thee: and with due fealty, Goddess, I will repay thee thanks…

You can really get the sense of playacting and performance in this prayer’s preamble—the person appears to address the deity with ornamented language and ingratiating grandiloquence. And if we can imagine this being done in public, it carries that layer of performing for an audience: “look at my eloquence in praying, look at my righteousness in describing Mother Goddess’s magnificence.”

The Lord’s Prayer

Jesus modeled for us how we might pray. What can get lost sometimes is just how radical his posture and tone were in his immediate environment. For one thing, the Torah and Nevi’im did not address God as “father” or parent. The association of “father” with God in the Old Testament occurs only a few times, and then, denoting a paternalistic overseer, much like how many in our country speak of “the Founding Fathers.” No one (except a relative few who are actual descendants of such men) says “Founding Fathers” and means that people like George Washington and James Madison are their actual, literal fathers. Similarly, God-as-Father in the Old Testament places God as an originator of Israel. But one wasn’t permitted to address God even by God’s name; one was supposed to cover their face and shield oneself from the glory of God when praying; one was supposed to face Jerusalem and abase oneself while in the attitude of prayer.

Jesus addresses God in prayer as “Our Father which art in heaven,” and elsewhere simply as “Abba” (Aramaic for “Dad” or “Papa”). That alone was among the most revolutionary things Jesus did within his Jewish setting and certainly something that angered people around him.

Actual recorded prayers1 given by Jesus appear only a few times in the Four Gospels:

• Thanking God—Matt. 11:25 / Luke 10:21
• Before raising Lazarus—John 11:41–42
• In the temple while speaking with Greeks—John 12:28
• In the “intercessory prayer”—John 17
• Three times at Gethsemane—Mark 14:32–42 / Matt. 26:36–46 / Luke 22:39–46 / John 18:1
• Three times on the Cross—Luke 23:34; Mark 15:34 / Matt. 27:46; Luke 23:46

Where the gospels note Jesus’s posture, we have only two modes: in Gethsemane, he “fell on the ground/on his face/on his knees”; everywhere else, he “lifted up his eyes” and said “Abba/Dad.” He lifted up his eyes—looked at God, as it were. And he told us to pray like he did. Imagine Jesus’s followers being seen praying like this: it absolutely could have infuriated those accustomed to abasing themselves and diverting their eyes during prayer. (Consider our own culture today… What do we think would be the reaction if we stood at the pulpit in sacrament meeting and lifted up our eyes to pray?)

On Judging

I wish I had more bandwidth to write about the Sermon on the Mount. Here, I’ll just highlight a passage on judging. You’ll remember this one, I’m sure:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye. … Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

There’s an ancient Greek saying, dokon therein, which means literally “carry a plank.” People who were dull speakers, stiff, and self-absorbed were said to be “carrying a plank.” You can imagine someone with a plank up their back while they walk, looking all self-important and turning their nose at others. That’s what Jesus says in this passage—why scrutinize the speck that is in your neighbor’s eye but ignore the plank you are carrying? This makes better sense than the “beam in the eye” metaphor the English supplies. We have our own stiff, self-important spines to fix before we even treat with the speck in someone else’s eye.

Luke’s version of this teaching amplifies what Matthew’s version describes: “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give, and it shall be given unto you.” What a different mode of rendering judgment and discerning others’ behavior and intentions. Free yourself of your self-importance, examine yourself before you examine someone else, and when you do, examine your major faults before treating their minor ones. Give and forgive freely.

Social vs. Personal

In English, we have a bit of a conjugation issue: we don’t (necessarily) distinguish between the singular “you” and the plural “you.” Unless we say “you all,” it can be lost whether we’re speaking in the second-person singular or the second-person plural. What’s more—we don’t decline our nouns, in other words, we figure out meanings based on the order of words, not by changing nouns with different suffixes. Ancient Greek plays differently, making second-person nuances very explicit. In the original Greek, the whole Sermon on the Mount/Plain uses grammar that presents the teachings to people as a group in terms of society, not individual persons. It’s clear to Jesus’s audience but often lost on us that he’s speaking of social vices and societal flaws rather than personal sins. It’s our society that isn’t yet the kingdom of the heavens—and to make it the heavenly kingdom, we’ll have to follow Jesus’s pathway. After all, the Torah and the Nevi’im passages concerned themselves explicitly with Israelite society, Israel as a nation. And, indeed, Torah was the law of their nation, like our Constitution and laws are for the United States today.

So we might ask ourselves how we, as a nation, judge others and condemn others; how we, as a nation, retaliate and bear false witness; how we engage in performative righteousness, in fake almsgiving, in hypocrisy/playacting; whether our devotions are sincere and private or public and attention-seeking. Will we, as a people, ask God in sincerity for good things? Or do we, like the Zoramites in the Book of Mormon, ascend the rameumptom and pray in gratitude for how righteous we are and despise our poorly dressed and underclass neighbors? Do we, as a nation, love and pray for our enemies?