APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS, a collection of ecclesiastical regulations in eight books, the last of which concludes with the 85 Canons of the Holy Apostles, in Greek, OLarayai or OLara stS TWv ayuov asrocTOAcwv &La'KXrlµEvTos TOV paicov re Kai 7roXiTov. KaOoXcKij hulaoeaXia. By their title the Constitu tions profess to have been drawn up by the apostles, and to have been transmitted to the Church by Clement of Rome; some times the alleged authors are represented as speaking jointly, sometimes singly. From the first they have been very vari ously estimated; the Canons, as a rule, more highly than the rest of the work. The most extravagant estimate of all was that of Whiston, who calls them "the most sacred standard of Christianity, equal in authority to the Gospels themselves, and superior in au thority to the epistles of single apostles, some parts of them being our Saviour's own original laws delivered to the apostles, and the other parts the public acts of the apostles." (Historical preface to Primitive Christianity Revived, pp. Others, however, real ized their composite character from the first, and by degrees some of the component documents became known. Bishop Pearson was able to say that "the eight books of the Apostolic Constitutions have been after Epiphanius's time compiled and patched together out of the didascaliae or doctrines which went under the names of the holy apostles and their disciples or successors" (Vind. Ign., i., cap. 5) ; whilst a greater scholar still, Archbishop Usher, had already gone much further. Writing in 1644, and forestalling the results of modern critical methods, he had concluded that their compiler was none other than the compiler of the spurious Ignatian epistles (i.e., the epistles in the longer of the two Greek versions). The Apostolical Constitutions, then, are spurious, and they are one of a long series of documents of like character.
These documents are the outcome of a tendency which is found in every society, religious or secular, at some point in its history. The society begins by living in accordance with its fundamental principles. By degrees these translate themselves into appropriate action. Difficulties are faced and solved as they arise; and when similar circumstances recur they will tend to be met in the same way. Thus there grows up by degrees a body of what may be called customary law. Plainly, there is no particular point of time at which this customary law can be said to have begun. To all appearances it is there from the first in solution and gradually, crystallizes out; and yet it is being continually modified as time goes on. Moreover, the time comes when the attempt is made, either by private individuals or by the society itself, to put this "customary law" into writing. Now when this is done, two tenden cies will at once show themselves. (a) This "customary law" will at once become more definite : the very fact of putting it into writing will involve an effort after logical completeness. There will be a tendency on the part of the writer to fill up gaps ; to state local customs as if they obtained universally; to introduce his personal equation, and to add to that which is the custom that which, in his opinion, ought to be. (b) There will be a strong tendency to fortify that which has been written with great names, especially in days when there is no very clear notion of literary property. This is done, not with any really deliberate conscious ness of fraud, but rather to emphasize the importance of what was written, and the fact that it was no new invention of the writer's. In a non-literary age fame gathers about great names; and that which, ex hypothesi, has gone on since the beginning of things is naturally attributed to the founders of the society. Then come interpolations to make this ascription more probable, and the prefixing of a title, then or subsequently, which states it as a fact. This is precisely the way in which the Apostolical Constitu tions and other kindred documents have come into being. They contain evidence of the greatest value as to the order of the Church in early days; evidence, however, which needs to be sifted with the greatest care, since the personal preferences of the writer and the customs of the local church to which he belongs are con tinually mixed up with things which have a wider prevalence. The earliest collections of this kind, which are known to us, are the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, itself compiled from earlier materials, and dating from about i 20 (see DIDACHE) ; The Apostolic Church Order dating from about 3o0 and containing older fragments of Church law, including parts of the Didache; and the Didascalia Apostolorum, originally written in Greek, but known through a Syriac version and a fragmentary Latin one published by Hauler. It is of the middle of the 3rd century—in fact, a passage in the Latin translation seems to give us the date A.D. 2 54. It emanates from Palestine or Syria, and is independent of the documents already mentioned ; and upon it the Constitu tions themselves very largely depend (see also under HIPPOLYTUS,