Apostolic Church-Ordinance

The Apostolic Church-Ordinance (or Apostolic Church-Order, Apostolic Church-Directory or Constitutio Ecclesiastica Apostolorum) is an Orthodox Christian treatise which belongs to genre of the Church Orders. The work can be dated at the end of 3rd century CE. The provenience is usually regarded as Egypt, or perhaps Syria. The author is unknown.

This text served as a law-code for the Coptic, Ethiopian Orthodox and other Oriental Orthodox churches. It superseded in authority and esteem the Didache, under which name it sometimes went.

The full and original text, in Greek, was found in a 12th-century manuscript discovered in 1843 at Vienna and published in the same year by Johann Wilhelm Bickell, which named it Apostolische Kirchenordnung. Only other four fragmentary Greek manuscripts are extant.

A complete Syriac ancient translation, with English translation, was published in 1901 by John Peter Arendzen. The Ge'ez version was first published in 1691 by Hiob Ludolf.

The Apostolic Church-Ordinance usually is found also in ancient collections of Church Orders. It is the second book in the Verona Palimpsest, it is the first book in the Alexandrine Sinodos and in the Bohairic version of the Clementine Octateuch, while the Arabic version of the Clementine Octateuch has it in the second place, and the Syriac version of it has it in the third place. Thus we have many early translations of the Apostolic Church-Ordinance in Latin, Ge'ez, Bohairic Coptic, Sahidic Coptic, Arabic and Syriac. For the publication details of these versions, see articles about the relevant collections.

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