Pouczenie Pana dla pogan

Abstract

The “Didache” or “Teaching of the Apostles” I-VI and the “Epistle of Barnabas” XVIII-XX reproduce an earlier document entitled “The Two Ways”, which seems to have been a Jewish manual of moral precepts redacted for Gentiles. It was an independent work, attested as such in a Latin version and in the Arabic translation of a Coptic biography of Shenute, in which “The Two Ways” are quoted among Shenute’s teachings for his monks. The manual has indeed been carried out into the use of the Christian Church. Its original language was probably Hebrew or Aramaic and it must have been written at the time of the Hasmonean kingdom of Judah, which included territories with a large Gentile population. The latter was not forcibly Judaized, as stated by Josephus Flavius, but it was obliged to observe the Noachide Laws, expressing the moral duties enjoined on all men and explained in the manual. The “Damascus Document” IX, 1 seems to refer to this “Lord’s teaching for Gentiles”, as well as do the “Sentences” or Γνῶμαι of Pseudo-Phocylides, a Jewish gnomic poet of Alexandria who lived around the 1st century B.C. The article reproduces the Latin version published by J. Schlecht from the Munich 11th-century manuscript 6264 and provides a Polish translation.