Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and thirteenth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. It is an addendum to the volumes of liturgies and church orders (volumes 97 to 101): it does not reprint those liturgies, but sets out what they have in common and where they differ. The first part introduces the subject and lists the liturgies in order of date. The second part follows eleven moments in the making of the Christian service, from the synagogue and the upper room to the fifth century, and sets the Jewish prayers beside the earliest Christian ones. The third part, the largest, takes the 28 parts of the service one by one, from the opening greeting to the dismissal, and quotes the words of each part in each of 25 texts. The last part prints one whole liturgy, that of Saint Basil.

Quotations in the comparison are word for word from the translations printed in this series, and were checked by a script against the texts. The notes that follow them, the marks that say whether a part is in a text or only hinted at, and the summaries were prepared with the help of artificial intelligence and are our judgment; a liturgist may disagree.

The Liturgy of Saint Basil

The Liturgy of Saint Basil is printed in the English of Isabel Hapgood (1906), the later Orthodox text. The Greek of the Barberini manuscript, which the website prints beside it, is not printed in this book. Hapgood’s English was read by machine from a scan and has not been proofread against the printed pages, so a misreading may remain.

Dates and authorship

The dates of the liturgies are those of the oldest text that survives and not of the first time the prayers were used, which is often earlier. Many of the liturgies carry the name of an apostle or a Father, Mark, James, Clement, Basil or Chrysostom, who may have had little to do with the form in which they were written down.