Thank-you for posting this. The Didache has been part of Orthodox libraries for nearly two thousand years. Much of what it says about fasting and preparation for reception of the Eucharist are practiced to this day among Orthodox Christians. While it has never been considered canonical, Athanasius, for example, held it to be deutero-canonical and it tells us a lot about very early Christian practice and belief.
Read Eusubius, Joesphus, Philo and other ancient texts. I have read the didache over several times and I find more in it of valuable each time.
It is said that there are references in the Didache from the Shepard of Hermes the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Barnabas. After having been lost for over 1500 years the Didache was discovered in monastery in Constantinople in 1883. Another copy was found in the remains of a Coptic Church monastery in 1923
Probably the only reason that copies of the Didache ware still found in these places is that the Roman Catholic Church had a split with the eastern orthodox church, and long before the crusades Islam had destroyed the Coptic church across the middle east and Northern Africa and was not able to purge these monasteries of such incriminating documents.
To some the words in this document may sound somewhat foreign, but we must take into account their words above the words of our great protestant teachers and leaders of the last 500 years. How can I suggest such a thing because the people who wrote this were a lot closer to Christ and the Apostles than we are this document is estimated to have been written between 23 years after Christ’s death to 50 years after the death of the Apostle John. What I’m getting at is that either way, as this document was circulated in the various churches there was a number of people still living that had personally been taught by the Apostles themselves.
What was common knowledge about the teachings of Christ the Apostles between 50 AD and 150 AD has all been but lost to us as there are very few letters or historical accounts with which to gauge the words of Paul so show us how early church services were conducted what was the early churches doctrines, what did the early church view as the commandments of Christ, in this document we can catch an ever so brief unfiltered glimpse of what these early followers of Christ believed.
I am not saying that this is equal with scripture but I am saying that their words based on the day this was written should hold a lot more weight than the scholars and linguists who have written so much of our doctrine over the last 500 years.