ABSTRACT
Church Orders were mutually interrelated documents often circulated in collections and in which material tended to appear in the same order, but perhaps, further elaborated according to need. Paul Bradshaw has referred to them as 'living literature'. The earliest, the Didache, the Didascalia and the Apostolic Church Order, covered matters of Christian life as a whole; liturgical directions were almost tangential to the whole exercise. The case for Roman origin of this well-known document relies largely on Hippolytus being the author, which is doubtful. Testamentum Domini describes the daily services of an ascetic minority within a larger community. Apostolic Constitutions alone clearly describes common prayer at least twice daily, though Apostolic Tradition may indeed witness to such a pattern, and the Testamentum Domini appears to suggest a pattern of prayer at evening, at night, and in the morning. The Epitome and the Canons of Hippolytus know of prayer at cockcrow.
