The Apostolic Age · c. 50–90
The Two Ways
Doctrina Apostolorum
Anonymous
What it is
A short moral catechism setting two roads before the hearer — one of life, one of death — and filling each with plain commands and plain vices. It is the material the Didache opens with and the Epistle of Barnabas closes with, surviving on its own in a Latin manuscript at Freising.
Why it lasted
The oldest layer of Christian teaching that can be isolated as a document: a Jewish ethical catechism taken over whole by the church before anyone thought to write a gospel down.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
Read next