Questions & Answers

Didascalia

Faith Q&A › Metropolitan Youssef › Holy Scripture › Didascalia

The question

We are doing some research on the Diskolia. I found the following references: a book called Didascalia Apostolorum, the full name being: Didascalia, that is, the Catholic doctrine of the twelve Apostles and the holy disciples of our Lord; a book called Patrology on the Apostolic Constitutions (Author Quasten, Johannes); Patrology: The Beginnings of Patristic Literature http://www.piney.com/DocAposConstitu.html and two Arabic versions which are totally different from what I have gotten from the website. One of the Arabic books has a section called "Canons of the Apostles" in English and French. That English did not compare with the Arabic in the same book! Scanning through one of those books, I learned that the Diskolia is one of the texts that have so many sources. We need to figure out which version is the correct one? Which version does our Church accept? Also, I thought that the Diskolia was the one text that all traditional churches agree on, so how could there be so many different versions?

The answer

Didascalia originally written in Greek was lost. What we have today are several manuscripts varying in length, the shortest being the Latin version and the longest the 'Apostolical constitutions' and in between, manuscripts in Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopian.

In "The Apostolic Constitutions, The Didascalia" published in Arabic Dr. William Selim Kelada wrote a lengthy introduction of the origin of the book. He mentions two Arabic versions of the Didascalia. The first (A) is translated from the Coptic, which in turn was translated from the Greek and is the origin of the present Ethiopic version. The second (B) is an Arabic version translated from the Syriac. In his book, Dr. Kelada compiled the text of the first version (A) plus an Appendix containing the parts of the second version (B) not present in the first.

Ebn Kabr also referred to two versions of Didascalia without reservation. Since we do not have the original Greek, I think this book would be good to translate since it combines all the manuscripts.

Answered by His Eminence Metropolitan Youssef (opens in a new tab)

Questions answered by His Eminence Metropolitan Youssef (opens in a new tab) of the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States. Question 487 on the Diocese’s Q&A site. Questions and answers © Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States. All rights reserved.