Didache

One of the earliest Christian handbook of instructions in morals and church order, purporting to be Teaching of the Apostles.

Scholars are not able to pin down its date of composition with certainty though most are of the opinion that it is a 1st Cent document. The document is divided into four parts; the first presents a Christian moral code, the second dealing with matters such as baptism, fasting, the Lord's Supper, etc, the third part with ministry, especially of bishops, deacons and prophets, and the final section on the Second Coming and the last days.

The document first surfaced in 1875 when Bryennios (later to become Patriarch of Nicomedia) was working in the Constantinople library of the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem when he came across a manuscript dated 1056 that contained copies of the Epistles of Clement, Barnabas, and Ignatius, and the document that has since come to be called—from the first word of its Greek title—Didache (from didaskein, "to teach)." It was published in 1883 and caused "no small stir; for it seemed likely to turn upside-down the received ideas of the early history of the ministry" (Henry Bettenson).