Search for the Origins of Christian Worship

Title: Search for the Origins of Christian Worship

Author: Bradshaw, Paul F.

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Synopsis

This is a substantially expanded and completely revised verision of Bradshaw's classic account, first published in 1993. Traditional liturgical scholarship has generally been marked by an attempt to fit together the various pieces of evidence for the practice of early Christian worship in such a way as to suggest that a single, coherent line of evolution can be traced from the apostolic age to the fourth century. Bradshaw examines this methodology in the light of recent developments in Jewish liturgical scholarship, of current trends in New Testament studies, and of the nature of the source-documents themselves, and especially the ancient church orders. In its place he offers a guide to Christian liturgical origins which adopts a much more cautious approach, recognizing the limitations of what can truly be known, and takes seriously the clues pointing to the essentially variegated character of ancient Christian worship.

Content

1. Shifting Scholarly Perspectives

• Book about the first few centuries of Christian worship
• The Philological Method
  • Early study was based upon the assumption that Christ or at least the apostles - would have left clear directives
  • The variety of eucharistic rites must be ultimately derived from a single apostolic model
  • Apostolic Constitutions discovered in late 17th century was believed to be the comprehensive liturgy as set forth by the apostles.
  • "The philological method does not function nearly as well with such material as it does with parallel texts that can be compared with one another.
  • Liturgical manuscripts are not unique in this respect. They belong to a genre which may be called "Iiving literature'.This material which circulates within a community and forms a part of its heritage and tradition but is constantly subject to revision and rewriting to reflect changing historical and cultural circumstances.
  • Some liturgical texts included "liturgical debris"
• The Structural Approach
  • “In his well-known work, The Shape of the Liturgy, first published in 1945, Gregory Dix (1901-52) was one of the severest critics of attempts to find a single original apostolic eucharistic rite.16 However, he did not really abandon the theory, but merely revised it. In his view, the various forms of the Christian Eucharist did have a common origin, but this was to be sought in the structure or shape of the rite rather than in the wording of the prayers:”
  • “first-century Jewish liturgy from which Christian worship took its departure was not nearly so fixed or uniform as was once supposed, and that New Testament Christianity was itself essentially pluriform in doctrine and practice.”
  • “what was once one loose collection of individual local churches each with its own liturgical uses, evolved into a series of intermediate structures or federations (later called patriarchates) grouped around certain major sees.”
• The ‘Organic’ Approach
  • “The basic flaw in this approach was a failure to recognize the essential difference between nature and culture:”
• The Comparative Method
• “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion”
  • “it is dangerous to read any ancient source as though it was a verbatim account of a liturgical act.”
  • “Even the fourth-century sets of homilies delivered to new converts to Christianity and intended to instruct them in the meaning of the liturgies of baptism and the Eucharist cannot be presumed to be mentioning everything that was said or done in those services.”
  • “we need to be aware of being too ready to draw the following conclusions:
    • (a) That Authoritative-sounding Statements are Always Genuinely Authoritative” “When some early Christian author proudly proclaims, for example, that a certain psalm or canticle is sung ‘throughout the world’, it probably means at the most that he knows it to be used in the particular regions he has visited or heard about”
    • “(b) That Liturgical Legislation is Evidence of Actual Practice”
      • “Just because an authoritative body makes a liturgical regulation does not mean that it was observed ”
      • “Synodical assemblies do not usually waste their time either condemning something that is not actually going on or insisting on the firm adherence to some rule that everyone is already observing. ”
      • “John Chrysostom describes those who fail to stay for the reception of communion at the celebration of the Eucharist as resembling Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper,”
    • “(c) That Even When a Variety of Explanations Exist for the Origin of a Practice, One of Them Must be Genuine”
      • “Sometimes several writers will allude to the same custom but offer widely differing stories as to its true meaning or origin”
  • “Indeed, the very existence of multiple explanations and interpretations is itself a very good indication that no authoritative tradition with regard to the original purpose and meaning of the custom had survived, and hence writers and preachers felt free to use their imaginations. ”

2. The Background or Early Christian Worship

• “The Influence of Paganism”
• “Gordon J. Bahr in 1970, which encouraged many subsequent scholars to look more closely at the Graeco-Roman background of both Jewish and Christian meals in their attempts to understand the early Eucharist,9 there can be seen a growing trend to take more seriously the influence of the wider pagan environment on the earliest patterns of Christian worship.10
• The Influence of Judaism”
  • “On the other hand, the recognition that Christianity inherited many of its liturgical practices from Judaism has been very long established, and can be traced back at least to the late seventeenth century.”
  • “1945 of Gregory Dix’s magisterial work The Shape of the Liturgy'* it became axiomatic for those searching for the origins of every aspect of primitive Christian liturgical practice to look primarily for Jewish antecedents”
  • “While at one time it seemed perfectly possible to state with a considerable degree of assurance what Jewish worship was like in the first century, now things are by no means so clear. What can only be described as a revolution in Jewish liturgical studies has taken place, a revolution which has almost completely changed our perception of how sources should be used to reconstruct the forms of worship of early Judaism”
• “Earlier Jewish Liturgical Scholarship”
• “The Influence of Joseph Heinemann (1915-77)”
  • “Heinemann argued that the process of standardization took place only gradually. By the second century CE ‘only the number of the benedictions, their order of recitation, and their general content had been fixed, as well as the occasions of their recitation and the rules which governed them, but not their exact wording”
• “More Recent Jewish Scholarship”
  • “the rabbis set down in the Mishnah,Tosefta, and the twoTalmuds as ‘normative’ necessarily originated with the masses and not within rabbinic circles themselves.”
  • “The newer school of rabbinic scholarship, however, approaches the sources with an awareness that one cannot automatically assume a simple historical reading to be reliable. Rabbinic literature, like the biblical books, was created not simply to chronicle the past but to promote and justify the world-view of those responsible for its redaction.”
  • “Judaism underwent after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The religion which emerged in the period afterwards was by no means identical with the religion which had been current in the decades preceding it”
• “Reconstructing the Jewish Background to Christian Worship”
  • “John Chrysostom tells us that some ordinary Christians were attending both synagogue ”
  • “On the other hand, after the close of the first century, liturgical influence from Judaism to a now predominantly Gentile Church is likely to have been relatively marginal,”
  • “What is equally important for the background of Christian worship is that we should not single out any one Jewish tradition as normative and treat others as deviations,”
  • “we shall examine briefly four areas: possible elements of synagogue liturgy; the practice of daily prayer; forms of prayer themselves; grace at meals
• “Synagogue Liturgy in the First Century?”
  • “The Mishnah lists five actions which it says cannot be performed communally without the presence of a quorum of ten adult males: the recitation of the Shema, the recitation of the Tefillah, the priestly blessing, the reading from the Torah, and the reading from the Prophets.”
  • “The Babylonian Talmud prescribed that the entire Pentateuch should be read through in a year, on a consecutive basis, interrupted only by special lections on festal days. The Palestinian practice, on the other hand, was different, and the traditional scholarly theory has been that in this case there was a standard lectionary cycle lasting exactly three years, both for the Torah and for the Prophets”
• “The Question of Psalmody”
• Daily Prayer
  • “Whatever its origins, there are a number of signs that the twice-daily recitation of the Shema was already more widely practiced prior to the destruction of the Temple.”
  • “An important dimension of post-70 CE Judaism was the obvious need to stress its continuity with the past, and to give authority to the practices it then prescribed by affirming their antiquity.”
• “First-century Jewish Prayer-patterns”
  • “Grace at Meals According to the Mishnah, nothing was to be eaten without God having first been blessed for it, and the short berakot to be used for each kind of food are quoted (Ber. 6.1-3). Zahavy has suggested, however, that this fully-fledged system of food-blessings, recited before eating, was not formalized until at least the middle of the second century, and was built upon an older tradition of saying blessings over wine and grace at the end of a meal,”

3. Worship in the New Testament

• “The Tendency Towards ‘Panliturgism’
  • While some scholars have been inclined to deny that the New Testament supplies much evidence at all for what the early Christians were doing in their regular worship, others have sometimes displayed what has been called a certain ‘panliturgism’ - a tendency to see signs of liturgy everywhere,' ”
  • “For example, it has often been stated that the Gospels were intended for public reading within regular Christian worship, and hence their composition would have been shaped to some extent by the Jewish lectionary”
  • “Most of these theories do not have the slightest evidence to support them.”
  • “Closely related to these claims is the question of the extent to which Christianity separated itself from Judaism from the outset, and therefore the degree to which Jewish liturgy would have continued to exercise a formative influence on Christian worship, especially in the predominantly Gentile churches founded by Paul”
• “The Tendency to Read Back Later Liturgical Practices”
• “The Tendency Towards Harmonization”
  • “Each of the New Testament books, therefore, needs to be examined for what it may have to reveal about the worship of the particular Christian community from which it emerges, as well as for remnants of even earlier liturgical traditions which it may have preserved, before any attempt is made to look for common features shared by these different churches.”
• “Liturgy in the Acts of the Apostles”
  • “One of the major problems with regard to the New Testament is that nearly all the explicit references to and descriptions of Christian worship occur in one book - the Acts of the Apostles”
  • “Although various scholars have expressed a strong preference for one position or another in both these and other instances in the Book of Acts, the inevitable uncertainty which is raised by the alternative explanations means that it is difficult to use the evidence of this source with any degree of confidence to reconstruct first-century Christian liturgy.”
• “Literary Metaphor or Liturgical Practice?”
  • “The other New Testament books, and especially the Epistles, tend to offer possible allusions to what Christians were doing liturgically more often than explicit descriptions of practices. But once again there is a serious difficulty about how these should be interpreted”
  • “The same questions have been asked of other baptismal images in the New Testament. For example, Christians are spoken of as having been sealed with the Holy Spirit (see 2 Corinthians 1.22; Ephesians 1.13; 4.30), and Revelation 7.3f. describes the sealing of the servants of God as being ‘upon their foreheads’. Is this merely a metaphor, or an allusion to a liturgical ceremony of making the sign of the cross on the foreheads of the newly baptized, ”
• “Possible Early Christian Hymns and Prayers”
  • “reveal how extremely difficult it is to establish objective criteria to distinguish actual hymns from mere poetic passages,55 or to know whether the composition simply originated with the author or some other anonymous person, or was in real liturgical use in a Christian community. ”
• “The Origins of Christian Baptism63”
  • “The custom of baptizing new converts to Christianity appears to have been derived from John the Baptist, but the source of his practice is uncertain. ”
  • “All three synoptic Gospels record Jesus’ own baptism by John but say nothing of him baptizing his followers. “The Gospel of John, on the other hand, does not mention Jesus being baptized but does speak of him baptizing others”
  • “On the other hand, what is clear from the New Testament is that the process of becoming a Christian was interpreted and expressed in a variety of different ways. So, for example, in some traditions the emphasis was clearly placed on the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 2.38); in others the metaphor of birth to new life was used (John 3.5f.; Titus 3.5-7); in others baptism was understood as enlightenment (Hebrews 6.4; 10.32; 1 Peter 2.9); and in Paul’s theology the primary image was union with Christ through participation in his death and resurrection (Romans 6.2ff.)”

Other facts

• Used for: Foundations of Liturgy & Sacrament TRS 640
• Purchased: January 2016

Bibliographic info

• Personal name: Bradshaw, Paul F.
• Main title: The search for the origins of Christian worship : sources and methods for the study of early liturgy / Paul F. Bradshaw.
• Edition: 2nd ed.
• Published/Created New York : Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0611/2001058098-d.html
• ISBN 0195217322 (pbk. : alk. paper)
• LC classification (full) BV185 .B734 2002
• Dewey class no. 264/.009/015
• LOC permalink https://lccn.loc.gov/2001058098