A Manuscript Found in 1873, a Millennium After It Was Copied

The Didache, a short early Christian manual of instruction, quotes a form of this prayer and tells its readers to say it three times a day, calling it the prayer the Lord commanded in his gospel. If the Didache is as early as many scholars place it, some dating parts of it to the first century, this instruction is among the oldest evidence that the prayer was already in fixed liturgical use, recited on a set schedule rather than offered only as an example of how to pray freely.

The text survived by an unlikely route. For centuries the Didache was known only by title and by scattered quotations in later Christian writers, its own text lost, until Philotheos Bryennios found a complete copy in 1873 while cataloguing manuscripts in a monastery library, a single bound volume now called the Codex Hierosolymitanus for the patriarchate it belonged to, dated by its own scribe to 1056. Bryennios published the text a decade later, and it reentered Christian scholarship after roughly a thousand years transmitted through one surviving copy. The Roberts and Donaldson translation used in this atlas, part of the Ante-Nicene Fathers series, renders that recovered text, so the prayer as quoted from the Didache descends from that single manuscript rather than from any longer or more redundant chain of copies.