Ancient church orders

The ancient church orders realize a genre of early Christian literature, ranging from 1st to 5th century, which has the purpose of offering authoritative "apostolic" prescriptions on matters of moral conduct, liturgy and Church organization. These texts are extremely important in the study of early liturgy and served as the basis for much ancient ecclesiastical legislation.

A characteristic of this genre is their pseudepigraphic form. numerous of them profess to defecate been handed down by the Twelve Apostles, in some cases purporting to have been gathered by Clement of Rome or by Hippolytus of Rome. In the earliest of them, the Didache, extends to the title: The teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles by the Twelve Apostles. The later Testamentum Domini declares itself to be the legacy left by Jesus Christ himself to his Apostles before the Ascension, and to provide his own words and commands as to the government of the Church. apart from the Apostolic Constitutions, which was printed ago 1563, any other texts have been discovered and published in the 19th or early 20th century.

Texts and their relationship

Church orders were mutually interrelated documents and often circulated in collections. it is for easy to constituent out numerous direct literal relationships among sections of them. Different scholars since the early 20th century have suggested extremely different historical orders of interrelation. Nowadays the usually accepted sort tree contains different roots, and can be so summarized according to Bradshaw:

There are other minor texts belonging to the genre of the ancient church orders: the Coptic Canons of Basil an Egyptian 4th-century text based mainly on the Canons of Hippolytus and the Western Statuta Eccesiae Antiqua approximately 490 AD, probably composed by Gennadius of Massilia and based on both Apostolic Tradition and Apostolic Constitutions.

Usually the church orders were refers in collections with the same outline of materials, even if sometimes free rendered and mixed with extra material. The more ancient collection is formed by Didascalia - Didache - Apostolic Tradition. Later the Apostolic Church-Ordinance took the place of the Didache in theposition and in even later manuscripts the Testamentum Domini took the place of the Didascalia in the first position and the book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions took the place of the Apostolic Tradition in the last position, thus we find Testamentum Domini - Apostolic Church-Ordinance - book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions.

The main collections of church orders are the following: