Didascalia Apostolorum, the Syrian document and Mary
Didascalia Apostolorum, origin and importance
The Didascalia Apostolorum (“Teaching of the Apostles”) is a Christian ecclesiastical document composed probably in northern Syria in the third century (c. AD 230-250). It is one of the most important texts of early patristic literature for understanding ecclesial organization, the liturgy and Christian discipline before the great councils. The Didascalia has been preserved in its entirety in Syriac and in Greek and Latin fragments. Its content was later incorporated, expanded and modified in the Apostolic Constitutions (fourth century), which replaced it as the normative text.
The Didascalia and the references to Mary
In the Didascalia, Mary is not the central theme, but she appears in contexts that reveal the Marian faith of the Syrian community of the third century. The text mentions the Incarnation of the Word by the Holy Spirit and by the Virgin Mary in terms that presuppose the virginity of Mary as the established faith of the Church. The theology of the Incarnation of the Didascalia is anti-Docetic: it insists on the reality of the birth of Jesus from Mary in order to refute those who denied the humanity of Christ. This insistence on the materiality of the birth, “born of the Virgin Mary,” is directly linked to the esteem for matter and for the body that distinguishes Christianity from Gnosticism.
Syro-Antiochene context and the Eastern Marian tradition
The Syrian Christian tradition is, alongside the Alexandrian, one of the richest in early Mariology. Ephrem the Syrian (fourth century), whose Marian hymns are earlier than the great councils, developed the theology of the Eve-Mary parallelism, the virginity of Mary and the title Yaldatt Alaha (Mother of God in Syriac), which directly prepared the Greek definition Theotókos of the Council of Ephesus (431). The Didascalia is a precursor of this tradition: it documents the Marian faith of Syrian Christianity at a stage prior to the great hymnic flowering of Ephrem.
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