From the Upper Room to the Byzantine Rite

The Divine Liturgy has a documentable history reaching back to the Last Supper and the apostolic “breaking of bread.” This file traces the main line of that development: the dominical institution and the eucharist of Acts; the earliest eucharistic prayers (the Didache, the anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition, the East-Syrian Addai and Mari); the great regional families, above all the Antiochene/West-Syrian; and the Byzantine synthesis at Constantinople described by Robert Taft.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Institution and the Apostolic Eucharist

The Liturgy’s origin is the Lord’s own act on the night before his passion: “he took bread, and gave thanks [eucharistēsas], and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19; cf. Matthew 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; 1 Corinthians 11:23–25). The command “do this in remembrance of me” (eis tēn emēn anamnēsin) is the charter of every later Liturgy, and the pattern of the Lord’s action — taking, giving thanks, breaking, giving — is the skeleton the developed rite still shows in the offertory, the anaphora (the “giving thanks”), the fraction, and the communion (Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dacre, 1945, ch. 4, on the “four-action shape”; Bradshaw and Johnson, The Eucharistic Liturgies, Liturgical Press, 2012, ch. 1).

The earliest description of the Church’s continuing life names the Eucharist among its four pillars: the first believers “continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42; cf. 2:46, “breaking bread from house to house”; 20:7, the gathering “upon the first day of the week… to break bread”). By the mid-second century St. Justin Martyr can give an outward description of the Sunday synaxis that already shows the two-part shape the Byzantine Liturgy keeps: readings from “the memoirs of the apostles” and the prophets, a sermon by the president, common prayers, the kiss, the bringing of bread and wine, a long prayer of thanksgiving “according to his ability” over them to which the people answer “Amen,” and the distribution of the eucharistized gifts, with portions carried to the absent (Justin, First Apology 65–67; trans. ANF 1). Justin’s account is decisive evidence that the structure — word, then eucharistic prayer and communion — was fixed early, even while the wording of the prayer was still improvised.

The Earliest Eucharistic Prayers

For the earliest period the wording of the eucharistic prayer (the anaphora) was not fixed but composed by the presiding bishop, within a shared pattern. Several early witnesses survive:

  • The Didache (chs. 9–10), a first- or early-second-century church order, preserves table-prayers of thanksgiving over cup and bread whose relation to the later anaphora is debated but which attest the primitive language of eucharistic blessing (Didache 9–10; Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 2nd ed., Oxford, 2002, ch. 2).
  • The anaphora embedded in the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus of Rome offers a full early eucharistic prayer with thanksgiving, institution narrative, anamnesis, and an invocation of the Spirit — long treated as a third-century Roman text and a key witness to early structure. [Disputed: the authorship, date, and provenance of the Apostolic Tradition. Older scholarship attributed it to Hippolytus of Rome (c. 215); recent critical work (Bradshaw, Johnson, and Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary, Hermeneia, Fortress, 2002) argues that it is not the work of a single author or moment but “living literature,” a composite compiled over several generations, so that its anaphora cannot safely be read as a photograph of early-third-century Roman practice. The prayer remains an important early witness; its precise date and place are no longer secure.]
  • The East-Syrian Anaphora of Addai and Mari, still used by the Assyrian Church of the East, is among the oldest anaphoras in continuous use and is remarkable for containing no explicit institution narrative in its traditional form — a fact of great importance to the later East–West debate over the words of consecration (see the epiclesis and the consecration). Its antiquity and structure are extensively studied (Gelston, The Eucharistic Prayer of Addai and Mari, Oxford, 1992). In 2001 the Roman Catholic Church, through the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, recognized this anaphora as valid despite the absence of an institution narrative — a striking datum for the theology of consecration.

These texts show both the early fixity of the shape (thanksgiving culminating in the sharing of the gifts) and the early diversity of the wording, out of which the great regional liturgies would later crystallize (Bradshaw and Johnson, The Eucharistic Liturgies, 2012, chs. 2–4).

The Regional Families

As the anaphora moved from improvisation to written formulary (roughly the fourth century onward), distinct regional liturgical families took shape around the great sees. Liturgiologists distinguish, among others, the Antiochene / West-Syrian family (Antioch, Syria), the East-Syrian family (Addai and Mari), the Alexandrian / Egyptian family (the Liturgy of St. Mark, the Egyptian Basil), the Roman and other Western families, and the Hagiopolite family of Jerusalem (the Liturgy of St. James) (Taft, The Byzantine Rite, Liturgical Press, 1992, ch. 2; Wybrew, The Orthodox Liturgy, SVS Press, 1990, chs. 1–2). The Byzantine rite belongs, in its anaphoral structure, to the Antiochene / West-Syrian type, in which the great prayer runs: opening dialogue — thanksgiving to the Father — Sanctus — post-Sanctus — institution narrative — anamnesis — epiclesis — intercessions (Wybrew, The Orthodox Liturgy, 1990, ch. 4; Taft, The Byzantine Rite, 1992). This is the shape of both the Chrysostom and the Basil anaphoras, and it distinguishes them from the Alexandrian type, in which the intercessions and a first epiclesis precede the Sanctus.

The Byzantine Synthesis

The Liturgy Orthodox Christians serve today is the product of a long synthesis centered on Constantinople and described in detail by Robert Taft. The imperial capital drew together several streams: the “cathedral” rite of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, with its stational processions through the city (the origin of the entrances); the monastic office and piety, above all of the Stoudios monastery, which shaped the fixed order of hymns and the Typikon; and the influence of Jerusalem’s Hagiopolite tradition (Taft, The Byzantine Rite, 1992, chs. 3–5; Wybrew, The Orthodox Liturgy, 1990, chs. 5–7). Over these centuries the Liturgy acquired its now-familiar features by accretion and interpretation: the enarxis (the three antiphons with their litanies) was prefixed to what had been a Liturgy beginning with the entrance; the Little and Great Entrances — originally the simple bringing-in of the Gospel book and of the gifts — grew into solemn processions with their proper hymns; the Cherubikon was added under the Emperor Justin II in 573–574 (Taft, The Great Entrance [A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, vol. II], Pont. Or. Inst., 1978); the proskomedia or preparation of the gifts developed into an elaborate rite performed before the Liturgy proper (Taft, The Byzantine Rite, 1992, ch. 5). Meanwhile the once-dominant Liturgy of Basil yielded its everyday place to the shorter Chrysostom, which by the end of the first millennium had become the ordinary Liturgy of the Byzantine world (Taft, The Byzantine Rite, 1992, ch. 4).

The synthesis was essentially complete by the fourteenth century, when the Diataxis (order of service) of Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos of Constantinople standardized the ceremonial that parish and monastic use had been refining, and when St. Nicholas Cabasilas and St. Symeon of Thessalonica wrote the mature commentaries that interpret the rite in its finished form (Taft, The Byzantine Rite, 1992, ch. 6; on Cabasilas see St. Nicholas Cabasilas). The essential point for the Orthodox reader is that the Liturgy is genuinely traditional in the strict sense: not the invention of any one man or age, but the gradual, Spirit-guided crystallization of the Church’s worship around the unchanging core given by the Lord — the taking of bread and wine, the great thanksgiving, and the communion of the Body and Blood.

See Also

References

  • Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (The Byzantine synthesis; the regional families; the growth of the entrances and the proskomedia.)
  • Taft, Robert F. A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Vol. II, The Great Entrance. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 200. Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1978. (The Cherubikon under Justin II, 573–574.)
  • Wybrew, Hugh. The Orthodox Liturgy: The Development of the Eucharistic Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1990. (The regional families; the Antiochene anaphoral shape; the Constantinopolitan development.)
  • Bradshaw, Paul F., and Maxwell E. Johnson. The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution and Interpretation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012. (The institution, the early prayers, the families.)
  • Bradshaw, Paul F., Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips. The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002. (The Apostolic Tradition as composite “living literature.”)
  • Gelston, Anthony. The Eucharistic Prayer of Addai and Mari. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. (The East-Syrian anaphora without an institution narrative.)
  • Dix, Gregory. The Shape of the Liturgy. London: Dacre Press, 1945. (The four-action shape of the Eucharist.)
  • Justin Martyr. First Apology 65–67. Trans. ANF, vol. 1. (The earliest description of the Sunday synaxis.)
  • Scripture: Luke 22:19; Matthew 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; 1 Corinthians 11:23–25; Acts 2:42, 46; 20:7. Didache 9–10.