I have been reading through the Didache slowly while taking notes. Last week I mentioned how itinerant Apostles and Prophets were rejected as impostors if they stayed for more than a few days and asked for anything more than food and water (see “Notes on the Didache”, Part 2″). Also, if someone teaches something, but doesn’t live it, then this person is to be rejected as an imposture. These are the words from 11:1-12 regarding itinerate Apostles and Prophets (taken from here):
Welcome the teacher when he comes to instruct you in all that has been said.
But if he turns and trains you in another tradition to the destruction of this teaching, do not listen. If he teaches so as to increase righteousness and the knowledge of the Lord, receive him as the Lord.
Act according to the precepts of the gospel concerning all apostles and prophets:
Let every apostle who comes to you be received as the Lord.
But he must not remain more than one day, or two, if there’s a need. If he stays three days, he is a false prophet.
And when the apostle goes away, let him take nothing but bread to last him until his next night of lodging. If he asks for money, he is a false prophet.
In addition, if any prophet speaks in the Spirit, you shall not try or judge him; for every sin will be forgiven, but this sin cannot be forgiven.
But not everyone who speaks in the Spirit is a prophet; only he is a prophet who has the ways of the Lord about him. By their ways will the false prophet and the prophet be known.
Any prophet who orders a meal in the Spirit does not eat it; if he does, he is indeed a false prophet.
And any prophet who teaches the truth, but does not do what he teaches, is a false prophet.
When a prophet, proved true, works for the mystery of the church in the world but does not teach others to do what he himself does, he will not be judged among you, for his judgment is already before God. The ancient prophets acted in this way, also.
But whoever says in the Spirit, “Give me money,”or something else like this, you must not listen to him. But if he tells you to give for the sake of others who are in need, let no one judge him.
Some of the restrictions seemed a bit harsh. Paul may have been willing to earn his own wages, but he supported the idea that those who preach the Gospel should be supported in doing that as their work. The Didache seems to be a reaction against those who are abusing the “right”. In other words, it was apparent that Christians were generous, and if one could pretend to be a traveling Apostle or Prophet one could make good money.
Then I was reading Irenaeus of Lyons’ Against Heresies and I was provided with the example of a gnostic “prophet” in the tradition of the Valentinians who Irenaeus accuses of gross immortality. He says this in 1.13.1-7 that this Marcus was very charismatic and he seduced women into having sex with him as part of his religious teachings. He deceived the wife of a deacon who traveled with him for some time before being brought to her senses and Irenaeus writes, “At last, when, with no small difficulty, the brethren had converted her, she spent her whole time in the exercise of public confession, weeping over and lamenting the defilement which she had received from this magician.” Many other women faced the scorn of their mistakes with Marcus and similar teachers in the region where he was a Bishop. Irenaeus writes of their current state-of-being:
“…they have deluded many women, who have their consciences seared as with a hot iron. Some of them, indeed, make a public confession of their sins; but others of them are ashamed to do this, and in a tacit kind of way, despairing of [attaining to] the life of God, have, some of them, apostatized altogether; while others hesitate between the two courses, and incur that which is implied in the proverb, “neither without nor within;” possessing this as the fruit from the seed of the children of knowledge.”
From Irenaeus’ writings it is evident that not all itinerate religious leaders were able to be put into a place of accountability and it wreaked havoc on the lives of many. I wonder if this is something foreseen by the author(s) of the Didache?
the archives near Emmaus 
Have you been able to figure out just what they meant by “in the Spirit”? From your excerpts it’s hard to tell if it is just a claim by the speaker or may have some behavioral or other indicators (style, context of a “charismatic” meeting, or ??). It doesn’t seem to be either “negative” or “positive”… other criteria determine if the “in the Spirit” speech and attendant acts (e.g., not eating an ordered meal, whatever THAT may have meant) were genuine and godly.
Brian in the case of the struggle the early Christians engaged against Gnosticism – the struggle is ‘typically’ categorized by both the Church fathers and later theologians as a ‘struggle for truth’ (perhaps a struggle to preserve orthodoxy).
Yet in the Roman Catholic struggle against Protestantism, Catholic contemporaries categorized the struggle exactly the same way (and some still do). If one is a Protestant however, one sees the apostolic struggle as legitimate, and the counter-Reformation as not.
3 Questions then:
1. What criteria do we have to gauge whether some struggle for/against orthodoxy is legitimate?
2. What ‘orthodoxy’ ultimately is worth struggling for (given ecclesiastical influences)?
3. What role does logic, reason and rhetoric play in the determination of truth?
Andrew T.:
Good questions, and important ones. Another might be how to set up criteria and methods to best test a given orthodoxy against the “orthopraxy” (per its majority membership) of its own stated beliefs. This is one way of flushing out what is actually believed at a deeper than mental assent level.
As to orthodoxy or proto-orthodoxy within the first 2 centuries or so, what appears to have had a key absence of “orthodox” consensus is soteriology (among other things). Lots of claims for Jesus’ deity as Savior, some for personal salvation by “faith alone” (in exactly what?), some for faith AND works, and (largely overshadowed) some still in the Jewish framework of national/global salvation via the coming Kingdom of God, through an exalted but human messiah, rather than individual salvation in focus at all. And it is soteriology that I think is still the core problem leading so many to not only deep doubts but severe anxieties, etc.
“imposture” is the word for the act of being an impostor; “impostor” is the person. “Itinerate” is a verb. You want “itinerant”, the adjective. Sorry to nitpick, but these are in the first paragraph and it distracts from the writing.
No worries, thanks. We bloggers can use editorial help at times, since we type things up and toss them online in hurry!
Howard, you raise the idea that the early church may have struggled to defend/establish a proto-orthodoxy rather than the fully fledged orthodoxy .. and that’s certainly an interesting suggestion. If anything, were that true, it makes it more difficult, not less, to determine prophet from heretic (since it is orthodoxy that acts as litmus). I wonder what makes orthodoxy worth defending (what validates it).
I also agree with your comment about how to set up criteria and methods to best test a given orthodoxy against the “orthopraxy” of its own stated beliefs. In some sense, the Protestant reformation established the bible as a sort of orthodoxy litmus test, but I’ve been finding lately (some) Protestants don’t actually want you examining the coherence of their doctrine against the bible. (So there seems to be limits to how well some orthodoxies conform to their own stated beliefs)
For example I was recently accused of being incoherent for noting that if we examine Paul’s use of the OT according to the orthodox view of Paul, we are either forced to conclude Paul was completely ignorant of OT context, or he purposefully distorted it to misuse it for his own purposes. If the orthodox interpretation of Paul contradicts the OT scripture Paul cites (or says something completely different), this is the result .. I did suggest, however, that the fault might not be with Paul’s use of scripture, but with the orthodoxy instead, and that’s when people became offended.
Some Protestants don’t want the bible taken seriously enough to expose faults with Protestant doctrine itself; thus there are limitations in holding orthodoxy to its own stated beliefs.
Howard
I am not sure what is meant by “in the Spirit”. I fear that the rise of charismatic Christianity may lead me to be anachronistic. I wish there was a “Rosette Stone”, if you will, that showed what parallel thoughts may have accompanied ideas like being “in the Spirit”.
Andrew
I agree that there is a difference between the earlier clash between proto-orthodoxy and various gnosticisms and the later clash between Roman Catholic and Protestant thought, or the split between western and eastern Christianity prior to that. I think the questions that you have presented have troubled me for a while. I would like to say something like “creeds and councils”, but I realize that places me in the precarious situation of dealing with Bishops. Sometimes I’d like to say sola Scriptura, but I think this is an impossible idea because (1) we received our Scripture through the Spirit working in the church and (2) we can’t interpret Scripture without traditions–even if we are reacting against tradition. So this is an ongoing discussion in my head!
So Brian…
You believe Irenaeus’ claims about Marcus? He loads ’em up with standard ancient Mediterranean stereotypes of itinerant charlatans. We find all sorts of ancient authors using it to disparage their opponents or kinds of people they didn’t like.
The sexual slander is also particularly common, including among early Christian writings. You may be interested in Jennifer Wright Knust’s book, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander in Ancient Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2005).
On a different note, been a while. Hope all is well with you and your wife in Texas.
I don’t imagine that there is a way to verify his claims. It is possible that he invented these accusations, or that he generalized when writing about Marcus. I’m too much a novice with early Christian writings like Irenaeus to know if there is something that would indicate that he intended to say something he didn’t think was true.
BTW, didn’t mean to come across accusatory there. Meant for some sarcastic tone to come through in my contrarian comment. I am enjoying your blog posts about various things early Christian related!
As to Irenaeus, it’s helpful to keep in mind (as I’m sure you have picked up on to some extent) that he is explicitly pursuing an incredibly polemical project — in particular trying to represent the variety of Valentinian Christ followers as fundamentally different, precisely because he doesn’t like how they assemble with the Christ followers of whom he approves. Thus Irenaeus goes out of his way to highlight anything that is notionally “different” and to associate them with delegitimizing repugnant practices.
Stephen
No worries, these posts are me throwing thoughts from my reading onto the blog for discussion purposes, so it is a helpful reminder that Irenaeus has an agenda, and a very particular one. It is possible that someone like Marcus wasn’t as bad as he is made to be by Irenaeus. We have one side of that argument only, so it is difficult to know whether Irenaeus would have adopted common rhetorical practices while knowing he was misrepresenting or exaggerating his claims.