There are seven chief MSS. of the _De mensura_ (Dicuil's tract on grammar is lost); of these the earliest and best are (1) Paris, National Library, Lat. 4806; (2) Dresden, Regius D. 182; both are of the 10th century. Three editions exist: (1) C. A. Walckenaer's, Paris, 1807; (2) A. Letronne's, Paris, 1814, best as to commentary; (3) G. Parthey's, Berlin, 1870, best as to text. See also C. R. Beazley, _Dawn of Modern Geography_ (London, 1897), i. 317-327, 522-523, 529; T. Wright, _Biographia Britannica literaria, Anglo-Saxon Period_ (London, 1842), pp. 372-376. (C. R. B.)
DIDACHE, THE, or _Teaching of the (twelve) Apostles_,--the most important of the recent recoveries in the region of early Christian literature (see APOCRYPHAL LITERATURE). It was previously known by name from lists of canonical and extra-canonical books compiled by Eusebius and other writers. Moreover, it had come to be suspected by several scholars that a lost book, variously entitled _The Two Ways_ or _The Judgment of Peter_, had been freely used in a number of works, of which mention must presently be made. In 1882 a critical reconstruction of this book was made by Adam Krawutzcky with marvellous accuracy, as was shown when in the very next year the Greek bishop and metropolitan, Philotheus Bryennius, published _The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles_ from the same manuscript from which he had previously published the complete form of the Epistle of Clement.[1]
_The Didach[=e]_, as we now have it in the Greek, falls into two marked divisions: (a) a book of moral precepts, opening with the words, "There are two ways"; (b) a manual of church ordinances, linked on to the foregoing by the words, "Having first said all these things, baptize, &c." Each of these must be considered separately before we approach the question of the locality and date of the whole book in its present form.
1. _The Two Ways._--The author of the complete work, as we now have it, has modified the original _Two Ways_ by inserting near the beginning a considerable section containing, among other matter, passages from the Sermon on the Mount, in which the language of St Matthew's Gospel is blended with that of St Luke's. He has also added at the close a few sentences, beginning, "If thou canst not bear (the whole yoke of the Lord), bear what thou canst" (vi. 2); and among minor changes he has introduced, in dealing with confession, reference to "the church" (iv. 14). No part of this matter is to be found in the following documents, which present us in varying degrees of accuracy with _The Two Ways_: (i.) the Epistle of Barnabas, chaps. xix., xx. (in which the order of the book has been much broken up, and a good deal has been omitted); (ii.) the _Ecclesiastical Canons of the Holy Apostles_, usually called the _Apostolic Church Order_, a book which presents a parallel to the _Teaching_, in so far as it consists first of a form of _The Two Ways_, and secondly of a number of church ordinances (here, however, as in the Syriac _Didascalia_, which gives about the same amount of _The Two Ways_, various sections are ascribed to individual apostles, e.g. "John said, There are two ways," &c.); (iii.) a discourse of the Egyptian monk Schnudi (d. 451), preserved in Arabic (see Iselin, _Texte u. Unters._, 1895); (iv.) a Latin version, of which a fragment was published by O. von Gebhardt in 1884, and the whole by J. Schlecht in 1900. When by the aid of this evidence _The Two Ways_ is restored to us free of glosses, it has the appearance of being a Jewish manual which has been carried over into the use of the Christian church. This is of course only a probable inference; there is no prototype extant in Jewish literature, and, comparing the moral (non-doctrinal) instruction for Christian catechumens in Hermas, _Shepherd_ (_Mand._ i.-ix.), no real need to assume one. There was a danger of admitting Gentile converts to the church on too easy moral terms; hence the need of such insistence on the ideal as in The Two Ways and the _Mandates_. The recent recovery of the Latin version is of singular interest, as showing that, even without the distinctively Christian additions and interpolations which our full form of the _Teaching_ presents, it was circulating under the title _Doctrina apostolorum_.[2]