Knowledge and the Coming Kingdom: The Didache's Meal Ritual and its Place in Early Christianity

(Hardback)

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Knowledge and the Coming Kingdom is a study of the meal prayers of Didache 9-10. The opening chapters pursue a sustained argument regarding the relationship between the Didache's meal ritual and the well-known tradition of Jesus' final meal. The central goal of this argument is to clarify that the silence of the Didache's prayers regarding Jesus' sacrificial death is neither trivial nor the result of textual accident, but is instead tied up with how this ritual works as a ritual. Schwiebert aims to counter a weighty tradition of reading the Didache's testimony in light of the New Testament accounts, and so to free the tradition to become an analytical reference point for a consideration of Christian origins. En route to this goal, ritual theory serves as an ally that offers insights into the workings of a uniquely attested ritual. Having isolated the Didache's tradition in this way, he then examines its original milieu, arguing for a branch of the Jesus movement that held to Jesus' teachings as a privileged form of knowledge even while they affirmed the futurity of God's kingdom and their own (eschatological) existence. From this point, he reassesses the various potential parallels to the Didache's prayers, and their degree of sympathy with this ritual form, to reconstruct a trajectory of the ritual's influence in early Christianity. The clues are traced to Egypt, where (as elsewhere) they finally lead to the loss of this ritual form, often for identifiable reasons.

Reviews

Schwiebert's thesis is innovative...It is admirable to follow this attempt at constructing an over-arching theory. * Expository Times, April 2010 *
This is a deep and complex work with fascinating insights into the terminology (eg paid theou - firmly located as a Jewish not a Hellenistic title) and practice of the early church. Its method challenges many consensus views on the Didache not least because of the use of ritual rather than the New Testament texts as an interpretive key. It will be invaluable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate work on the rituals of the early Church, and well worthwhile for course on the Supper traditions of the New Testament. -- Fergus King * Theological Book Review, Vol 21 No 1, 2009 *
This volume is a significant contribution to the study of the Didaches meal ritual and well worth engaging, precisely because it proposes a radical rereading of Did 9-10. Jonathan Schwiebert shows that the traditional understanding of the Didaches meal as a historical link in a coherent and consistent explanation of the evolutionary growth and the seamless development of the Eucharist is outdated. -- Huub van de Sandt, Tilburg University, The Netherlands * Vigiliae Christianae *

Author Bio

Jonathan Schwiebert is Assistant Professor of Religion at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina, USA.