A problem for scholars of the Didache is the need to assign provenance and dates for the text. This has led to a variety of options, from the contexts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to a range of years from the mid-first to fourth centuries. Unless one sees the Didache as a complete work originally written to be utilized from beginning to end as attested by the manuscript of Codex Hierosolymitanus 54, a quagmire of likely sources and hands likely have been at work in developing the tradition preserved there. Following the guidelines of Social Identity Theory, this essay proposes that the evolution of the Didache presents a uniquely complicated situation in that its various source elements probably were compiled within fluctuating contexts while the eventual collection of those elements was accomplished in another separate environment. To that end, one might expect individual portions of the work to reflect two separate lenses of interpretation: an earlier set of circumstances possessing the view of the originator of the materials in question and a later setting reflecting the orientation and emphasis of an editor who reassigned those earlier materials for a more relevant purpose. By way of illustration, the witness of the Apostolic Constitutions for the Didache tradition stands as an exemplar of this very theme: a reification of the work’s original purpose(s) derived from within one context but assigned to another. This essay seeks to suggest some general guidelines by which to identify the two differing viewpoints that may be at work within the text as now known from H54. While it is impossible to know the specifics either of the original settings or their eventual combination, the relevance of both lenses of interpretation are important as tools by which to understand the tradition’s evolving function in early Christian literature.