Divine Liturgies: Human Problems in Byzantium, Armenia, Syria and Palestine

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In obedience to Jesus' command, 'Do this in remembrance of me', the ritual repetition of the Lord's Supper down through the ages and across multiple Christian cultures in the liturgies of East and West, has given rise, inevitably, to innumerable diversities of shape, text, cultural context, and theological interpretation, as well as to debates, sometimes heated, among modern experts as to the methodologies for resolving the problems arising from these differences. The problems of cultural history, structural, historical, and textual reconstruction, theological interpretation, and method involved in the modern scholarly debate on these issues, are the object of the studies in this volume, dedicated to the liturgies of Byzantium, Armenia, Syria, and Palestine.

SYNOPSIS

A Jesuit, Taft (Pontificio Instituto Orientale, Rome) investigates early versions and transmission of the Christian liturgy. In ten essays originally published between 1982 and 2000, he discusses problems in the history of culture and historical reconstruction, problems of anaphoral structure and interpretation, and problems of method. Among the specific topics are women at church in Byzantium, some structural problems in the Syriac Anaphor of the Twelve Apostles, ecumenical scholarship and the Catholic-Orthodox epiclesis dispute, the skeuophylakion of Hagia Sophia and the entrances of the liturgy, and comparative liturgy 50 years after Anton Baumstark (died 1948). Additional notes and references are appended.