"The works by Milavec have revolutionized my own understanding of the Didache and I recommend them as the best introduction to a new and more profitable way of studying the document." -- John Dominic Crossan
“Aaron Milavec’s new work is a groundbreaking study of the origins, the meaning, and the use of the Didache, not only in the earliest Jewish-Christian communities, but even for today’s Church. Milavec’s application of the lessons of the Didache—its ecclesiology, political theology, and spirituality—to our own day is completely original.” -- Dennis D. McManus (Georgetown University & Managing Editor, Ancient Christian Writers)
The object of this commentary is to reconstruct the pastoral genius of the
framers of the Didache. This pastoral genius consisted in establishing a comprehensive,
step-by-step program of formation that would transform the settled habits of
perceiving and of judging of non-Jewish candidates seeking perfection in their
new religious movement. Throughout, the framers of the Didache gave detailed
norms and practical descriptions of what was to be done. Behind these particulars,
however, lie the concerns and the anxieties, the experience and the successes
of senior mentors who, over a period of time, worked with candidates and fashioned
a training program which transmitted, in measured and gradual steps, the operative
values and theological underpinnings which knit together their individual and
collective lives. Undoubtedly the framers of the Didache were well aware that
any community that did not effectively pass on its values, its rites, its way
of life would flounder and eventually perish from the face of the earth. Thus,
while the Didache focuses upon the transformation of an outsider into an insider,
at every point one learns much more of the insiders themselves‑-what they
cherished, what they expected of themselves, and what they expected of God.