The Discovery of the Didache in Jerusalem Patriarchate Library System a Little Over 70 years Before to Theodore

 What Bryennios stumbled over in 1873 is a nice little case study in how the “Jerusalem Patriarchate library system” actually worked on the ground – and why “but surely it would have been catalogued already” is a bad argument against any late discovery.

Take Codex Hierosolymitanus. On paper it is the crown jewel of the Patriarchate’s holdings: an 11th-century anthology copied by “Leo the notary and sinner” in 1056, containing Barnabas, 1–2 Clement, the long Ignatian collection, a list of the Hebrew Bible books, and what we now call the Didache. In practice, it sat on a shelf in the metochion of the Holy Sepulchre at the Phanar as “a small, thick, black volume” that the Metropolitan of Nicomedia says he had already walked past “many times” while “going through the shelves” of the Jerusalem monastery library.

The key detail in Bryennios’ own reminiscence is the throw-away line: he was literally on his way out of the library, saw this ugly little codex out of the corner of his eye, and decided, almost as a joke, to “give just one glance at that book.” That is how Codex H enters modern scholarship.

So on the one hand you have the abstract idea of a “library of the Jerusalem Patriarchate,” which conjures up armies of catalogers and neat shelf-lists. On the other hand you have the reality: an 11th-century composite codex, containing texts of enormous value for the history of early Christianity, physically present in a major patriarchal collection in the capital of the empire, literally in the hands of a meticulous churchman who had “gone through the shelves many times” – and it still only appears because, one afternoon, he decides not to walk past one more anonymous black book.

That’s your answer to “Shouldn’t this book and its contents have been catalogued already?” Of course in some sense it “should” have been. In another, more practical sense, that is exactly what it means to say that the Jerusalem Patriarchate’s holdings in the late Ottoman period were under-described and under-exploited. The system was not a modern research library. It was a network of monasteries and metochia whose collections had grown by accretion, war, evacuation and gift, with occasional partial catalogues that listed a few prize items and ignored the rest. “Catalogued” in that world often meant “we know there is a codex of Chrysostom somewhere,” not “we have a codicological description and have checked whether the last quire contains a unique Apostolic Church Order.”

Bryennios’ own behavior proves the point. On his first pass, what he noticed and edited were the “respectable” bits: the Synopsis of Scripture and the two epistles of Clement. Those he published promptly in 1875. The Didache he literally overlooked inside the same codex and only realized what he had sometime later. There was no elaborate “discovery protocol,” no 19th-century PR machine. Just a bishop leafing through an ugly volume, recognizing the Clements, and only belatedly recognizing that the anonymous church order at the end was the long-lost “Teaching of the Apostles” people had been talking about since Eusebius.

This is also why the “maybe the Didache is a forgery” line doesn’t really get off the ground. To turn Codex Hierosolymitanus into a modern fake you have to posit a forger who:

– imitates an 11th-century Constantinopolitan hand well enough to fool every palaeographer for 150 years, complete with a colophon dated 1056 and the usual scribal formulas;

– reconstructs a plausible long recension of Ignatius before the 19th-century critical editions, embeds it alongside Barnabas and 1–2 Clement in exactly the sort of miscellany you’d expect a middle Byzantine scribe to put together;

– composes a church order that exactly matches what earlier Greek and Latin sources say about a “Teaching of the Apostles” in scope and tone, explains a whole series of otherwise puzzling allusions in fathers from the second and third centuries, and happens to nail a second-century Syrian/Egyptian ecclesial landscape so well that the argument for its antiquity has only gotten stronger with more work on parallels; and then

– somehow plants this monster forgery in a dusty corner of the Jerusalem Patriarchate’s metochion library in Constantinople, two centuries before anyone who might plausibly have had the philological toolkit to design such a hoax.

That’s not a hypothesis, it’s a comic book.

Once you take seriously how Bryennios actually found H and how haphazardly he exploited it, the whole episode becomes a kind of parable for “late discovery” in this particular library ecosystem. If a dated 1056 codex containing Barnabas, 1–2 Clement, Ignatius and the Didache can sit in a patriarchal library in the capital until 1873 without anyone shouting about it, it is not exactly outlandish to imagine that an 18th-century monastic hand could quietly copy a Clementine letter on the endpapers of an old printed book and have it surface only when a visiting scholar at Mar Saba happens to pull that volume from a shelf 80-odd years later.

And in fact the institutional links line up. Codex H belongs to the Jerusalem Patriarchate’s Holy Sepulchre monastery in Constantinople. The same Patriarchate controlled Mar Saba and the other Palestinian lavras whose books moved back and forth to Constantinople over the 18th and 19th centuries. Callinicus III, who later becomes Patriarch of Constantinople, spent years as a Jerusalem hierarch and was directly involved in managing these very collections; Scouvaras noted that his hand is strikingly similar to the script in the Clement-to-Theodore manuscript. In other words, the world in which Bryennios spots an 11th-century black codex and the world in which a later patriarchal scribe jots Clement on the flyleaves of Voss’s Ignatius are not two different planets. They are the same library system operating over a couple of centuries, with the same habits of keeping things, half-cataloguing them, and leaving the rest to providence and chance.

So if we want to be consistent: either we throw up our hands at the Didache too and start calling Codex Hierosolymitanus an elaborate modern forgery smuggled into the Jerusalem Patriarchate before 1800, or we admit that patriarchal libraries really could – and did – shelter unedited, uncatalogued, textually explosive codices right down into the late 19th century. The discovery of the Didache is not an embarrassment for that model; it is Exhibit A.