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Ancient Church Orders is a genre of early Christian literature, ranging from 1st to 5th century, which has the aim to offer authoritative "apostolic" prescriptions on matters of moral conduct, liturgy and Church organization. These texts are extremely important in the study of early liturgy and served as the basis for much ancient ecclesiastical legislation. A characteristic of this genre is their pseudepigraphic form. Many of them profess to have been handed down by the Twelve Apostles, in some case purported to have been gathered by Clement of Rome or by Hippolytus of Rome. In the earliest of them, the Didache, extends to the title: ''The teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles by the Twelve Apostles''. The later Testamentum Domini declares itself to be the legacy left by Jesus Christ himself to his Apostles before the Ascension, and to give his own words and commands as to the government of the Church. Apart from the Apostolic Constitutions, which was printed before 1563, all other texts have been discovered and published in the 19th or early 20th century. ==Texts and their relationship== Church Orders were mutually interrelated documents and often circulated in collections. It is easy to point out many direct literal relationships among sections of them. Different scholars since the early 20th century have suggested extremely different historical orders of interrelation. Nowadays the usually accepted family tree contains different roots, and can be so summarized according to Bradshaw:〔 *Didache, or ''Teaching of the Twelve Apostles'', (1st-2nd century, Syria), from which depend * *Didascalia Apostolorum (about 230 AD, Syria) * *Apostolic Church-Ordinance, or ''Apostolic Church-Order'', (about 300 AD, Egypt) *Apostolic Tradition (3rd or 4th century, probably Syria), published in the 19th century under the title of ''Egyptian Church Order'', from which depend * *Canons of Hippolytus (336-340 AD, Egypt) * *Testamentum Domini (?5th century, Syria) * *Epitome of the eighth Book of the Apostolic Constitutions, or ''The Constitutions through Hippolytus'' *Canons of the Apostles, which first appeared as the last chapter of the eighth book of the ''Apostolic Constitution'', shall be considered as a special form of the genre〔 There are other minor texts belonging to the genre of the Ancient Church Orders: the ''Coptic Canons of Basil'' (an Egyptian 4th-century text based mainly on the Canons of Hippolytus) and the Western ''Statuta Eccesiae Antiqua'' (about 490 AD, probably composed by Gennadius of Massilia and based on both Apostolic Tradition and Apostolic Constitutions).〔 It should be noted that usually the Church Orders were transmitted in collections with the same order of materials, even if sometimes free rendered and mixed with additional material. The more ancient collection is formed by ''Didascalia - Didache - Apostolic Tradition''. Later the Apostolic Church-Ordinance took the place of the Didache in the second position and in even later manuscripts the Testamentum Domini took the place of the Didascalia in the first position and the book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions took the place of the Apostolic Tradition in the last position, thus we find ''Testamentum Domini - Apostolic Church-Ordinance - book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions''.〔 The main collections of Church Orders are the following:〔 *the Apostolic Constitutions (about 380 AD, Syria) is a collection of eight books depending mainly from the ''Didascalia Apostolorum'' (books 1-6), from the ''Didache'' (book 7) and from the ''Apostolic Tradition'' (book 8). The seventh and eighth books of the Apostolic Constitutions include so much additional material that they can be considered as separated stand-alone texts. The final chapter of the eighth book is known as the ''Canons of the Apostles'' and had a wider circulation than the rest of the Apostolic Constitutions *the Verona Palimpsest, or ''Fragmentum Veronese'', first published in 1900 by Edmund Hauler, contains Latin free and incomplete versions of the ''Didascalia Apostolorum'', ''Apostolic Church-Ordinanc''e and the ''Egyptian Church Order'' *the Alexandrine Sinodos is extant in Ge'ez, Bohairic Coptic, Sahidic Coptic and Arabic versions and is a collection based on the ''Apostolic Church-Ordinance'', the ''Apostolic Tradition'' and the ''eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions''. It was particularly used in the ancient Coptic and Ethiopian Christianity. The Bohairic version was published in 1848 by Henry Tattam and the Sahidic text was published in 1883 by Paul de Lagarde *the ''Clementine Octateuch'' is extant in Syriac, Bohairic Coptic and Arabic versions, and it is a collection based on the ''Testamentum Domini'', the ''Apostolic Church-Ordinance'', the ''Apostolic Tradition'' (included only in the Arabic version) and the ''eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions''. It was particularly used in the ancient Oriental Orthodoxy and Church of the East. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ancient Church Orders」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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