A piece in Christianity Today looks at the DIdache – the brief, but rich manual of Church teaching that most scholars believe dates anywhere from the late 1st to early 2nd century. Interesting to see a Protestant perspective.

Gashwin Gomes notes:

The author’s locus standi reveals itself subtly, however:

Many writers have noticed a "primitive simplicity" in the way that the Teaching describes the pastoral ministry in local assemblies. One finds in it no elaborate hierarchy of "bishops, priests, and deacons" such as developed in the second century.

Umm, that "elaborate hierarchy" is found in the New Testament itself. And even if one goes with those who would consign 1 Timothy and Titus to pseudonymity (claims that rest on very slender evidence, I’d say), the Letter to the Philippians mentions bishops. And, no matter, these are all canonical, authoritative scripture

Mike Aquilina, at the "Fathers of the Church" blog, has a post with commentary and links:

How old is the Didache? Most scholars place its composition between A.D. 60 and 110. However, one of the top scholars alive, Enrico Mazza, argues very persuasively that the liturgical portions of the document were composed no later than 48 A.D. If he’s correct, that means that our oldest liturgical texts pre-date most of the books of the New Testament.

The Didache, which was rediscovered at the end of the 19th century, reads like a time capsule from the apostolic generation.

Twenty-first century Christians tend to romanticize those founding years of the Church as a golden age of unity, when believers absorbed sound doctrine by osmosis, and when Christians couldn’t help but love one another, and bless their persecutors, and feed the poor.

But that’s not how it was. Early on, the Church faced serious threats from self-proclaimed Christians who denied, for example, that the eternal Word truly became flesh (see 1 Jn 4:2 and 2 Jn 1:7). They also denied the reality of the Eucharist and the necessity of the Church. Quite early in the game, there were even some teachers who held that revelation was a private affair between God and the individual believer. They spun wildly creative religious systems (see 1 Tim 1:4) and gave a green-light to unbridled lust (see Jd 7). To legitimize their “revelations,” such heretics often attributed oracles to the apostles (see Gal 1:7 and 2 Thess 2:2).

Amid this confusion came order and orthodoxy in the Didache. It is, perhaps, the earliest ancestor of today’s Catechism of the Catholic Church. And, indeed, the new Catechism quotes that first one several times (details below).