The Earliest Liturgical Witness

Chapters 61 and 65–67 of Justin’s First Apology, written around 155, are the earliest detailed description of Christian baptism and the Eucharist that survives — an eyewitness account, given to an emperor in plain prose, of how Christians were made and how they worshipped in mid-second-century Rome. Justin describes the catechumenate and the washing of regeneration; the kiss of peace; the President’s thanksgiving over bread and a cup of wine mixed with water; the people’s “Amen”; the deacons’ distribution; the carrying of the gifts to the absent; and the whole shape of the Sunday assembly, with its readings, sermon, common prayers, offering, and collection for the poor. This file lays out that witness and weighs its immense value.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Why These Chapters Matter

For the historian of the liturgy there is nothing else quite like First Apology 61, 65–67. The Didache (late first or early second century) is older but terse, allusive, and in places puzzling; the developed liturgical texts — the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus, the Syrian and Egyptian anaphoras, the classical Byzantine liturgies — are later. Justin alone, in the middle of the second century, sets out the shape of Christian initiation and the Sunday Eucharist in continuous, intelligible description, precisely because he is explaining it to outsiders who must be made to understand that nothing criminal occurs (First Apology 61, 65–67; ANF 1). The result is the single most important window onto early Christian worship before the fourth century, quoted in every serious study of liturgical origins (Jasper and Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist, pp. 28–30; Jungmann, The Early Liturgy, ch. 4).

The Audience and the Openness

It is worth dwelling on the remarkable fact that Justin describes these rites at all. By the later centuries the Church practiced a “discipline of the secret” (disciplina arcani), guarding the mysteries of baptism and Eucharist from the eyes of the unbaptized and unfolding their meaning only after initiation, as in the Mystagogical Catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem (see St. Cyril of Jerusalem). Justin, by contrast, lays the rites open to an emperor and the reading public, in plain expository prose. This openness is itself an apologetic strategy — he describes the worship precisely to dispel the lurid rumors of cannibalism and incest, showing that what Christians actually do at their assemblies is sober, ordered, and innocent (First Apology 61, 65–67; ANF 1). The result is a gift to history: because Justin was answering slander rather than guarding a secret, he tells us what later writers, bound by the discipline of the secret, would only hint at. The candor born of persecution is the reason we possess so clear a window onto the worship of the second-century Church.

Baptism: The Washing of Regeneration (1 Apology 61)

Justin describes baptism as the rite by which a person, having been persuaded of the truth of Christian teaching and having undertaken to live by it, is made new. The candidates are first taught to pray and fast for the forgiveness of their sins, the whole community fasting and praying with them; then “they are brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated. For, in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, they then receive the washing with water” (First Apology 61; ANF 1). Justin grounds the rite in the Lord’s own words — “Except ye be born again, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” — and explains its meaning: this washing is called “illumination” (phōtismos), because those who learn these things are illuminated in their understanding (First Apology 61; ANF 1). Three features deserve note: the rite is administered into the threefold Name, in language closely echoing Matthew 28:19; it is preceded by instruction, repentance, prayer, and fasting (the rudiments of a catechumenate); and it is understood as regeneration and illumination, not a mere symbol. This is the earliest narrative description of the actual administration of Christian baptism we possess.

The Eucharist of the Newly Baptized (1 Apology 65)

Justin then describes what immediately follows baptism — the new Christian’s first Eucharist. The newly washed are led “to those who are called brethren,” where they assemble; common prayers are offered “for ourselves… and for all others in every place”; and the assembly seals its prayers with the kiss of peace: “we salute one another with a kiss” (First Apology 65; ANF 1). Then bread and “a cup of wine mixed with water” are brought to “the president of the brethren,” who “taking them, gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and offers thanks (eucharistian) at considerable length for our being counted worthy to receive these things at His hands.” When he has finished the prayers and the thanksgiving, “all the people present express their assent by saying Amen,” — Justin pauses to gloss the Hebrew word for his Greek readers — and then “those who are called by us deacons give to each of those present to partake of the bread and wine mixed with water over which the thanksgiving was pronounced, and to those who are absent they carry away a portion” (First Apology 65; ANF 1). In a single paragraph we have the offering of bread and the mixed cup, the President’s extempore thanksgiving “at considerable length,” the congregational “Amen,” communion under both kinds distributed by deacons, and the reservation and carrying of the sacrament to the absent — a remarkably complete eucharistic shape.

Who May Receive (1 Apology 66)

Chapter 66 states the conditions of communion and gives Justin’s eucharistic doctrine, treated more fully in the companion file (see Eucharistic Realism in Justin). Three things govern admission to the eucharistic food: right belief, baptism, and right living. “And this food is called among us Eucharistia, of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined” (First Apology 66; ANF 1). Already in the mid-second century, then, the Eucharist is a closed table — reserved to the baptized faithful in good standing, not offered to the catechumen or the unbeliever. Justin adds that the demons, in mockery, had taught the same rite of bread and a cup in the mysteries of Mithras (First Apology 66; ANF 1) — for him a sign that the enemy counterfeits the truth.

The Sunday Synaxis (1 Apology 67)

Chapter 67 gives the order of the ordinary weekly assembly — the fullest early description of the shape of Sunday worship. “And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and… when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons” (First Apology 67; ANF 1). The structure is the recognizable ancestor of the Liturgy of the Word followed by the Liturgy of the Eucharist: readings (“the memoirs of the apostles” — the Gospels — “or the writings of the prophets”), the sermon, the standing common prayers, the offering of bread and the mixed cup, the eucharistic thanksgiving, the “Amen,” and communion (see The Divine Liturgy).

Justin then describes the collection: those who are prosperous and willing give what they wish, and what is gathered is deposited with the President, “who succours the orphans and widows, and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds, and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need” (First Apology 67; ANF 1). Finally he explains why Sunday: it is “the first day, on which God… made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead” (First Apology 67; ANF 1). The Lord’s Day is thus already fixed as the Christian day of worship, anchored in creation and resurrection — the earliest explicit explanation of the Christian Sunday on record.

What Justin Does Not Tell Us

The very plainness of Justin’s account also marks its limits, and an honest reading must register them. He gives us the shape of the rites, not their texts. The President’s eucharistic thanksgiving is offered “according to his ability” (kata dynamin) and “at considerable length,” which tells us that in the mid-second century the great prayer was still extemporized within a fixed pattern rather than read from a fixed formula (First Apology 67, 65; ANF 1); we therefore have no second-century anaphora to set beside the description. Justin says nothing explicit about an invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts (an epiclesis), nothing about the kind of ministerial ordering beyond “the president” and “the deacons,” and little about the calendar or the cycle of readings beyond the weekly Sunday gathering. Nor does he describe a separate dismissal of catechumens, though his insistence that only the baptized and believing may communicate (First Apology 66) implies the discipline that would later become the formal separation of the “Liturgy of the Catechumens” from the “Liturgy of the Faithful.” These silences are not defects in Justin — he was describing, not legislating — but they caution against reading the later, fully developed liturgy back into his text. What he gives is the skeleton; the flesh of fixed prayers, hymns, and ceremonial grew in the centuries after him (Jungmann, The Early Liturgy, ch. 4; Jasper and Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist, pp. 28–30).

Two Eucharists, One Rite

A reader sometimes wonders why Justin describes the Eucharist twice — once in chapter 65, attached to baptism, and again in chapter 67, as the regular Sunday assembly. The two descriptions are not of two different rites but of the same Eucharist in two settings. Chapter 65 shows the Eucharist as the immediate sequel and seal of Christian initiation: the newly baptized, having been washed and brought into the assembly of “the brethren,” at once shares for the first time in the common prayers, the kiss of peace, and the holy food — initiation flowing directly into communion, as it still does in the Orthodox rite, where baptism, chrismation, and first communion form a single continuous mystery. Chapter 67 then shows the same Eucharist as the recurring weekly act of the whole community, with the addition of the readings and the sermon that precede it and the collection that follows. Read together, the two chapters tell us that for Justin’s church the Eucharist was both the gateway into the body (received by the newly baptized) and the regular nourishment of the body (received every Lord’s Day) — the one bread by which Christians are made and sustained (see Eucharistic Realism in Justin).

The Value of the Witness

Taken together these chapters give the essential anatomy of Christian worship as it stood a century after the apostles: baptism into the Trinity, preceded by catechesis and repentance; a Eucharist of bread and mixed cup, consecrated by a presidential thanksgiving and sealed by the people’s “Amen”; communion under both kinds, distributed by deacons and reserved for the absent; a weekly Sunday synaxis of Word and Sacrament; and a diaconal charity binding the worship to the care of the poor. The continuity with the later Orthodox Divine Liturgy is unmistakable in shape if not yet in fixed text — the readings and sermon, the prayers of the faithful, the offering, the anaphora of thanksgiving, the communion. That the Church’s worship is recognizably the same enterprise across eighteen centuries is something Justin, more than any other single witness, lets us see (Jungmann, The Early Liturgy, ch. 4; Jasper and Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist, pp. 28–30).

References

Justin, First Apology 61, 65–67. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; and Minns & Parvis, Apologies (OECT, 2009).
Jasper, R. C. D., and G. J. Cuming, eds. Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed. 3rd ed. New York: Pueblo, 1987.
Jungmann, Josef A. The Early Liturgy to the Time of Gregory the Great. Trans. Francis A. Brunner. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959.