Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the ninety-seventh volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the liturgies, the church orders and the decisions of the councils that do not belong to any one author. This volume holds the ancient liturgies of the East and of Milan, with a survey of the worship of the Church in the first three centuries.
Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.
The translations
The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. Most of the liturgies in this volume were read by machine from scans of nineteenth-century books and have not been proofread against the printed pages, so a misreading may remain. Where a liturgy appears in more than one translation, each is printed in full under its own title.
In this volume
A liturgy is the fixed order of public worship: the prayers the priest says, the calls of the deacon and the answers of the people. This volume gathers the chief eucharistic liturgies of the Eastern churches and of Milan, in the English of nineteenth-century translators, and opens with Frederick Warren’s survey of the worship of the Church in its first three centuries, which sets out what the early Fathers say about baptism, the Eucharist, ordination and prayer.
The great families of rites follow one another by region: Jerusalem and Antioch (the liturgies of James and of Clement), Alexandria (Mark and Cyril), Constantinople (John Chrysostom), Armenia, the Church of the East (the Liturgy of the Blessed Apostles, Addai and Mari) and, in the West, the Ambrosian rite of Milan. Some rites are printed in more than one English version, made from different manuscripts and editions, so that the reader can compare them; they differ in wording and in the order of some prayers.
Dates and authorship
The rites printed here are older than the books that carry them, and the dates given for their origin are the estimates of the translators and are debated. Each work begins with a short introduction that says what is known of its text and its date, and what is uncertain.