Reviewed by: The Didache Clayton N. Jefford Kurt Niederwimmer. The Didache. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Edited by Harold W. Attridge. Hermeneia Series. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998. Pp. xxvii + 288. $52.00. The Hermeneia commentary series has gained a reputation for quality scholarship in the field of early Jewish and Christian literature. Many of its first volumes offered translations of older German works to an English-speaking audience. This task has certainly been of value. At the same time, however, the effort has sometimes been criticized for its circumvention of more contemporary scholarship. The present volume, Kurt Niederwimmer’s Die Didache, is also a translated text but, unlike previous efforts, offers more recent research and fresh views from European scholarship. The first German edition of Niederwimmer’s commentary on the text of the Didache was published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 1989. A second edition appeared with limited revision shortly thereafter in 1993. The present volume is an English translation of the 1993 edition, offered with some slight revision, primarily with respect to notes and bibliography. The publication of Niederwimmer’s work in 1989 brought a series of reviews that praised the author’s approach and the solid scholarship that lay behind his research. These reviews are easily found among the academic journals and require little further comment upon the value of the study itself. Any student of early Christian literature who has encountered Niederwimmer’s work, whether in articles or monographs, is familiar with his meticulous research and his prudent decisions about the movements and perspectives within nascent Christianity. This latest volume is further testimony to his scholarship and will undoubtedly stand as a monument to his career for years to come. As has been [End Page 480] observed elsewhere, this study has in many respects come to replace that of Jean-Paul Audet’s La Didachè (1958), a pillar of Didache research that has demanded the respect of students in the field for decades. I offer here some overview of the volume and some assurance as to its value for the English-speaking student. As with other volumes in the series, the reader will find an extensive introduction, followed by a detailed commentary on the Didache itself. Within his introduction, Niederwimmer offers answers to questions of structure and genre, gives an exhaustive treatment of manuscript traditions (both direct and indirect witnesses), explores the hypothesis of an ancient “Two Ways” tractate, and reconstructs the origins of the Didache tradition. It is this last element that has come to define his approach to the text, since he proposes some fresh considerations for the modern student. Unlike the trend initiated by Audet, Niederwimmer does not see the Didache as the product of an extensive tradition of editing, but the limited revision of several sources. There are four of these sources: a Christianized “Two Ways” document, a liturgical tradition on baptism and Eucharist, a tradition on charismatic itinerants, and a final brief apocalyptic section. These sources (both written and oral) have been compiled, edited, and briefly appended by the so-called Didachist for use by local church communities around the beginning of the second century. Niederwimmer’s observations throughout the commentary proper are lengthy and instructive. He is careful to examine the probable tradition and editorial work behind each literary segment. Included here is a consideration of both Jewish and Hellenistic elements as they have come to influence the text. In the closing “Afterword” section, he concurs with the view of those scholars who envision the Didache to be an early “rule book” for churches in Syria-Palestine, though he dismisses Antioch from this consideration. He observes that the text knows no monoepiscopacy, offers precious little of the author’s apparently conservative theology, and must be read within the developing traditions of its own period. The reader will find Linda Maloney’s translation from the German to be flowing and clear. It is a consistently accurate reading of the original. The final bibliography has been revised to include studies on the Didache that have appeared since 1989, though the commentary itself unfortunately pays little attention to research from this period (with some few exceptions that have been appended to the conclusion of...
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