DIDASKALIA

DIDASKALIA. The Greek word means, literally, “teaching.” The influential book, the Teaching of the Apostles (Didaskalia Apostolorum), was originally written in Greek ca. the late 3rd c. It is a church order, later incorporated into the Apostolic Constitutions (q.v.), that survives only in a 4th-c. Syriac and later Arabic, Ethiopic, and Latin translations. Its present shape is that of a rather mixed and even confused amalgam, but its original core appears to have been built around an essay on the duties of the three major orders, bishops, priests, and deacons. (See Apostolic Constitutions.)