Christopher Graham - The Hegemony of Didache as Hermeneutical Lens: The Nature and Development of the Dominant Contemporary Trend for Interpreting Early Christian ὁδός-language

The claim of this paper is that the dominant trend in contemporary early Christian scholarship is one in which the ostensibly “metaphorical/figurative” usage of ὁδός-language within Christian texts from the first and second centuries is increasingly being defined according to the specific usage of ὁδός-language within Didache. A direct result of this trend has been a truncated understanding of the significance of the early Christian appropriation of ὁδός-language as a term of self-identification.   

The first part of this paper offers evidence from a wide survey of contemporary scholarship that there does exist an unhelpful employment of Didache as a general hermeneutical reference for the ostensibly “metaphorical/figurative” usage of ὁδός-language in early Christian literature. 

The second part of the paper traces the development of this trend within modern scholarship. A number of key works are considered in this assessment primarily through an analysis of Eero Repo’s monograph Der Weg Als Selbstbezeichnung Des Urchristentums. Published in 1964, Repo’s work is a useful devise inasmuch as it engaged significant biblical and historical scholarship which preceded it and then itself became the object of critical engagement by subsequent scholars in understanding the nature of the early Christian appropriation of ὁδός-language as a term of self-identification.