ABSTRACT
Kurt Niederwimmer is the author of what is currently the most comprehensive lineby-line commentary on the Didache, or ‘The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’, the early Christian text which most scholars date to the late first or early second century. After referring to an eccentric group of studies of that early Christian text from the 1930s and 1940s, he wrote:
Niederwimmer continues to list a number of authors – and his list is not exhaustive – who either directly argued this position or who used the fraud-hypothesis as a premise in the other researches on early Christianity and its literary products. However, apart from this notice by Niederwimmer, this ‘British School’2 has not attracted much attention from scholars,3 despite the fact that they were very influential in their time and, indeed, continue to impact on English-language scholarship through their influence on secondary literature and some liturgists.4 The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to this group, to consider the extent to which they can be properly spoken of as a school of thought, and to explore their rationale for breaking with the consensus of other scholars, whether working in French, German or English, on this text.5
