The Didache: Faith, Hope, & Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50-70 C.E.

by Aaron Milavec

Aaron Milavec has written a monumental study of the Didache, a long-lost document that provides more details on the way of life lived within mid-first-century Christian communities than any other book in the New Testament. A "pastoral manual" of sorts, the Didache enumerates the step-by-step training of gentile converts for full, active participation in the church communities of the mid-first century.

Milavec offers here a fresh translation, side by side Greek and English, of the work, along with extensive commentary. Of considerable length, this work is noteworthy because it places the text with the context of how the earliest Christians saw themselves in relation to the surrounding Roman, pagan society.

1024 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

Aaron Milavec, Professor Emeritus, served as a seminary and university professor for twenty-five years. In the last five years, he has worked closely with a group of Catholic academics in the UK to start up and run an innovative online program of international gender studies — Catherine of Siena Virtual College. In 2003-2005, he chaired a new program unit of the national Society of Biblical Literature, “The Didache in Context.” His thousand-page commentary, The Didache: Faith, Hope, and Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50-70 C.E., received a 2004 Catholic Press Club award recognizing the best books in theology. For further details, see http://www.didache.info/AaMainDownloa...

Milavec earned his S.T.B. from the University of Fribourg in 1968 and a Th.D. from the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley) in 1973.

Milavec has published twelve eBooks [https://payhip.com/milavec], eight books, five chapters in collected works, and fifty journal articles. His most recent book, Salvation Is from the Jews , is a soul-searching exploration of how Christians need to rethink their theology in order to be faithful to the Jewish heritage received from Jesus two thousand years ago.

Prior to this, Milavec devoted sixteen years to unlocking the hidden life of those mid-first-century Christians who lived the "Way of Life" as described in the Didache. He affectionately nicknamed his thousand-page volume as "the elephant" and his hundred-page volume as "the mouse." The elephant is entitled The Didache: Faith Hope and Life of the Earliest Christian Communities 5070 CE (Paulist Press); the mouse is entitled The Didache: Text Translation Analysis and Commentary (Liturgical Press).

In his youth, Milavec was fascinated with science. After beginning graduate studies in physics, however, Milavec gravitated toward the philosophy of science and ended up with an abiding passion for religious inquiry and spiritual development. While a Research Fellow at the University of Victoria, he completed an essay, "How Acts of Discovery Transform our Tacit Knowing Powers in both Scientific and Religious Inquiry," Zygon 42/2 (2006) 465-486.

For seven years, 2007-2014, he was engaged with others in creating Catherine of Siena Virtual College--a center promoting international, interactive learning for women in community online. In his free time, he gravitates towards the arts: painting with water colors, glass blowing, throwing pots.

Following his retirement, he has produced a half-dozen autobiographical novels. His latest is The Red String Chronicles: Volume #1: True Love Found Online. For a free copy, go to https://payhip.com/b/3H1p

Reviews

[Aaron Milavec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviews:

A groundbreaking study of the use of the Didache in the earliest of Jewish-Christian communities, and for today's Church. Among recent scholars studying the Didache, only Milavec succeeds in combining philological and literary criticism with insightful theological analysis of the Didache's message.

-- Dennis D. McManus, Georgetown University, Managing Editor, Ancient Christian Writers

This work has revolutionized the understanding of the Didache. The best introduction to a new way of studying the text.

-- John Dominic Crossan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, DePaul University, Chicago

Building on, but also fundamentally correcting more than a hundred years of research and interpretation, Milavec's basic thesis, convincingly demonstrated in magnificent detail, is that the Didache is neither a church order in the ordinary sense of the word, nor a text sometimes awkwardly patched together by several hands from several sources, nor a document that is dependent on any of the gospels (it's actually prior to them) or on other Christian texts, but an orally transmitted guide for mentors given the responsibility of progressively introducing adult pagans into this new Christian way of life.

-- Robert J. Daly, professor emeritus of patristic studies at Boston College

Click here to explore free Didache texts & lectures.