Barnabas, Hermas, and the Didache

The ultimate aim of these lectures is to reach a point of view from which the literary character and the historical value of the Didache, or teaching of the apostles, can be justly estimated. J. Armitage Robinson considers a route, which makes the theory of a Jewish manual disappear altogether, and the ground is cleared for a new consideration of the whole problem. Through the course of the four lectures contained in Barnabas, Hermas, and the Didache, Armitage aims to show that the writer of the Didache was trying to represent the moral instruction and the ecclesiastical ordinances which the apostles might reasonably be supposed to have sanctioned for their Gentile converts; and that accordingly we may not assume that the whole of the picture which he has drawn corresponded to the actual conditions of his own time, whatever that time may have been.