he beginning a
considerable section containing, among other matter, passages from the
Sermon on the Mount, in which the language of St Matthew's Gospel is
blended with that of St Luke's. He has also added at the close a few
sentences, beginning, "If thou canst not bear (the whole yoke of the
Lord), bear what thou canst" (vi. 2); and among minor changes he has
introduced, in dealing with confession, reference to "the church" (iv.
14). No part of this matter is to be found in the following documents,
which present us in varying degrees of accuracy with _The Two Ways_:
(i.) the Epistle of Barnabas, chaps. xix., xx. (in which the order of
the book has been much broken up, and a good deal has been omitted);
(ii.) the _Ecclesiastical Canons of the Holy Apostles_, usually called
the _Apostolic Church Order_, a book which presents a parallel to the
_Teaching_, in so far as it consists first of a form of _The Two Ways_,
and secondly of a number of church ordinances (here, however, as in the
Syriac _Didascalia_, which gives about the same amount of _The Two
Ways_, various sections are ascribed to individual apostles, e.g. "John
said, There are two ways," &c.); (iii.) a discourse of the Egyptian monk
Schnudi (d. 451), preserved in Arabic (see Iselin, _Texte u. Unters._,
1895); (iv.) a Latin version, of which a fragment was published by O.
von Gebhardt in 1884, and the whole by J. Schlecht in 1900. When by the
aid of this evidence _The Two Ways_ is restored to us free of glosses,
it has the appearance of being a Jewish manual which has been carried
over into the use of the Christian church. This is of course only a
probable inference; there is no prototype extant in Jewish literature,
and, comparing the moral (non-doctrinal) instruction for Christian
catechumens in Hermas, _Shepherd_ (_Mand._ i.-ix.), no real need to
assume one. There was a danger of admitting Gentile converts to the
church on too easy moral terms; hence the need of such insistence on the
ideal as in The Two Ways and the _Mandates_. The recent recovery of the
Latin version is of singular interest, as showing that, even without the
distinctively Christian additions and interpolations which our full form
of the _Teaching_ presents, it was circulating under the title _Doctrina
apostolorum_.[2]

2. The second part of our _Teaching_ might be called a church directory.
It consists of precepts relating to church life, which are couched in
the second person plural; whereas