When it is said
The Didache gives the words for the Eucharist, the Church’s meal of thanksgiving. First comes a prayer over the cup, then one over the broken bread, then a thanksgiving after the meal.
The first of these two prayers is part of the prayer over the bread. The second comes in the thanksgiving after the meal.
No service of today uses it. Anyone may pray it for the whole Church.
Where it comes from
No author known
A handbook from about AD 100
The Didache, or “The Teaching of the Apostles”, is a short handbook of the early Church. It teaches, among other things, about baptism, prayer and fasting, and the Eucharist. The scholar J. B. Lightfoot dated it to the first century or the start of the second. Clement of Alexandria, an early Christian teacher, quoted it as “scripture”.
J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, The Apostolic Fathers (1891), The Teaching of the Apostles
A single copy
Eusebius, the early Church historian, mentioned a book called the Teaching of the Apostles. Only one full copy is known, in a Greek manuscript dated 1056. Its find was announced in 1875, and the Didache was printed in 1883. Lightfoot took its grain “scattered upon the mountains” as a clue that it was written in Syria or Palestine.
J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, The Apostolic Fathers (1891), The Teaching of the Apostles
The Scripture in it
… and not only for the nation, but also for the scattered children of God, to gather them together into one.
And He will send out His angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’
Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
In Greek
Ὥσπερ ἦν τοῦτο τὸ κλάσμα διεσκορπισμένον ἐπάνω τῶν ὀρέων καὶ συναχθὲν ἐγένετο ἕν, οὕτω συναχθήτω Σου ἡ ἐκκλησία ἀπὸ τῶν περάτων τῆς γῆς εἰς τὴν Σὴν βασιλείαν· ὅτι Σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ δόξα καὶ ἡ δύναμις διά Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας.
Μνήσθητι, Κύριε, τῆς ἐκκλησίας Σου, τοῦ ῥύσασθαι αὐτὴν ἀπὸ παντὸς πονηροῦ καὶ τελειῶσαι αὐτὴν ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ Σου, καὶ σύναξον αὐτὴν ἀπὸ τῶν τεσσάρων ἀνέμων, τὴν ἁγιασθεῖσαν, εἰς τὴν Σὴν βασιλείαν, ἣν ἡτοίμασας αὐτῇ· ὅτι Σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας.
From the Didache in Greek (9:4 and 10:5), on Greek Wikisource, with capitals for God.