Church Orders

Ancient manuals of church life — not scripture, but read closely by the churches that kept them.

A church order is a manual for how a Christian community lives and worships: how bishops, elders, and deacons are ordained, how catechumens are taught and baptized, how the Eucharist and Pascha are kept, how widows are cared for and the dead buried. Many are written in the names of the apostles or of Jesus himself, which is why they were copied, expanded, and collected into larger books — the Apostolic Constitutions, the Clementine Octateuch, the Ethiopic Sinodos.

These are placed on their own shelf because they are a different kind of writing from the scripture in the rest of the library, even where a church counts them among its broader canon. This collection includes the Testament of Our Lord — an apocalyptic discourse of the risen Jesus followed by a full church order, preserved in Syriac and Ethiopic — the Ethiopic Didascalia, the Statutes of the Apostles and the Apostolic Canons from the Ethiopic Sinodos, and the eight books of the Apostolic Constitutions. Each book page says which churches have used it.

13 books