Yesterday a friend asked me, "Is it true what I heard the other day, that the Catholic Church is the oldest still-running human institution?" I said yes --- yeah, there's older religions, but you can't say that any of them are institutions per se. If the Temple in Israel was still standing, you'd have one, but it's not.
I thought of that today when Amy Welborn highlighted an article about the Didache, an important teaching document of the early Church. Some parts of this document might date to as early as 48 A. D. --- the parts about liturgy --- and most scholars date it between 60 AD and 110 AD. I wrote a post about it last year, when I was working through some of the early Church documents.
The entire Didache may be read here. It's quite short. Among other things it presents a picture of liturgy in the early Church. An older Christian who was attending Masses and baptisms when the Didache was set down to describe them, might have been the child that Jesus drew onto his lap in the Gospel: after all, the latest estimated date of the Didache is only 71 years after the Crucifixion, and parts of it might only date to 19 years after the Crucifixion. That liturgy is still recognizable today in the Mass. We are today the same body who produced that document, and the style and the flavor is as present to me now as that I would sense in a pastoral letter promulgated yesterday.
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