The Apostolic Constitutions or Constitutions of the Holy Apostles (Latin: Constitutiones Apostolorum) is a Christian collection divided into eight books which is classified among the Church Orders, a genre of early Christian literature, that offered authoritative pseudo-apostolic prescriptions on moral conduct, liturgy and Church organization. The work can be dated from 375 to 380 AD. The provenance is usually regarded as Syria, probably Antioch. The author is unknown, although since James Ussher it has been often considered to be the same author as that of the letters of Pseudo-Ignatius, perhaps the 4th-century Eunomian bishop Julian of Cilicia.

Content

The Apostolic Constitutions contains eight books on Early Christian discipline, worship, and doctrine, apparently intended to serve as a manual of guidance for the clergy, and to some extent for the laity. It purports to be the work of the Twelve Apostles, whether given by them as individuals or as a body.

  • Books 1 to 6 are a free re-wording of the Didascalia Apostolorum, an earlier work of the same genre.
  • Book 7 is partially based on the Didache. Chapters 33-45 of book 7 contain prayers similar to Jewish prayers used in synagogues.
  • Book 8 is a more complex section composed as follows:
  • chapters 1-2 contain an extract of a lost treatise on the charismata
  • chapters 3-46 are based on the Apostolic Tradition, greatly expanded, along with other material
  • chapter 47 is known as the Canons of the Apostles and it had a wider circulation than the rest of the book.

The best manuscript, Vatican gr 1506, has Arian leanings, which are not found in other manuscripts because this material would have been censured as heretical.

William Whiston in the 18th century devoted the third volume of his Primitive Christianity Revived to prove that "they are the most sacred of the canonical books of the New Testament; "for "these sacred Christian laws or constitutions were delivered at Jerusalem, and in Mount Sion, by our Saviour to the eleven apostles there assembled after His resurrection."

Today the Apostolic Constitutions are regarded as a highly significant historical document, as they reveal the moral and religious conditions, as well as the liturgical observances of 3rd and 4th centuries. They are part of the Ante-Nicene Fathers collection.

Canons of the Apostles

The forty-seventh and last chapter of the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions contains the eighty-five Canons of the Apostles, which present themselves as being from an apostolic Council at Antioch. These canons were later approved by the Eastern Council in Trullo in 692 but rejected by Pope Constantine. In the Latin Church only fifty of these canons circulated, translated to Latin by Dionysius Exiguus on about 500 AD, and included in the Western collections and afterwards in the Corpus Juris Canonici.

Canon n. 85 is a list of canonical books: a 46-book Old Testament canon which essentially corresponds to that of the Septuagint, 26 books of what is now the New Testament (excludes Revelation), two Epistles of Clement, and the Apostolic Constitutions themselves, also here attributed to Clement, at least as compiler.

==Epitome of the eighth book ==<!-- Please do not remove the anchor needed by wikilinks -->

It is also known as the Epitome, and usually named Epitome of the eighth Book of the Apostolic Constitutions (or sometime titled The Constitutions of the Holy Apostles concerning ordination through Hippolytus or simply The Constitutions through Hippolytus) containing a re-wording of chapters 1–2, 4–5, 16–28, 30–34, 45–46 of the eighth book. The text was first published by Paul de Lagarde in 1856 and later by Franz Xaver von Funk in 1905. This epitome could be a later extract even if in parts it looks nearer to the Greek original of the Apostolic Tradition, from which the 8th book is derived, than the Apostolic Constitutions themselves.

See also

  • Apostolic Church-Ordinance
  • Alexandrine Sinodos
  • Jus antiquum
  • Verona Palimpsest

Notes

  • Apostolic Constitutions: online English text from the Ante-Nicene Fathers
  • Jewish Encyclopedia: Didascalia
  • This contains a more detailed exegesis of the writings and their possible authorship.
  • Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge: Apostolic Constitutions and Canons