In a prior post I wrote that:
The Didache is dated by one source between 65 and 80 AD. By another 60 to 90 AD and others believe that additions and modifications to it were made as late as the 3rd century.
That the Fellows of the Jesus seminar found that the text of Matthew 7:12 was probably not actually spoken by Jesus but represented an idea that the author of Matthew saw as consistent with Jesus’ thought or teaching.
We saw in that earlier post that the text of the Didache is quite clear in its inclusion of the “Do not do…” language that many now call the “negative form” of the Golden Rule.
Given that the Didache is understood to have been a manual of instruction for members and communities of the early church, how can we reconcile the inclusion of the “Do not do…” admonition and the absence of the “Do unto others…” language.
The most straightforward answers are:
Those who compiled the Didache were not in possession of the Matthew Gospel.
If they did have the Matthew Gospel it did not in its form at that time include the current language of 7:12.
If they did have it and it included the current text of 7:12 it was understood that that text was not a literal report of the words of Jesus.
There is disagreement among Biblical scholars about the dating of the Matthew Gospel. Many of the sources I’ve consulted believe that Matthew was written at roughly the same time as the Didache. Some see it at the earlier end of the range: in the 60 to 66 CE time frame.
The scholarly consensus dates the text at sometime in the 80’s or 90’s. Outlier opinions are as early as the 50’s and as late as about 110 CE.
We do have one hard date to use as a benchmark. The Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE. Many who date Matthew toward the later end of the consensus range find references in Matthew to the Temple’s destruction. That would establish an earliest date at 70 CE and a more probable date at least some years after that time. There are some who believe that those references are not accurately interpreted, but they are in the minority.
I can’t comment on the possibility that an early text of Matthew might have excluded the text of the current 7:12 or how that might have been understood contemporaneously.
Given the likely dating of both the current version of Matthew and of the Didache, though, it certainly seems plausible that those who compiled the Didache were not in possession of the Matthew Gospel.
It is hard to believe that, if they did have the text of Matthew before them, they would not have included the 7:12 language in their manual of instruction.
Recall that the Didache included not only the material regarding ethics and morals but very important instructions about how to perform sacraments, how to conduct worship services, how to pray, how to deal with prophets and teachers, and so forth. These were issues critical to establishing strong Christian communities and to cultivating the Christian faith in the early church. We have to believe that great care would have been taken in its preparation and teaching.
I suspect that those who wrote the Didache and those who used it to instruct converts and early groups of Christians were unaware of the “Do unto others…” admonition. Whether that was because Matthew’s text was unknown to them or it was not included in an early version or it was understood to be an insertion not directly attributable to Jesus, I cannot say.
But what does appear to be true is that the manual of instruction in the early church had as one of its first and most fundamental teachings:
“Do not do anything to another person that you do not want to happen to you.”
This statement of the Ethic of Restraint was critical to the moral teaching of the early Christian community.
©Charles R. Lightner