Shaping Christian Ritual

Eucharistic prayers, called anaphoras in the Eastern churches, are at the heart of the Mass. According to Catholic and Orthodox belief, when uttered by the priest, they have the power to consecrate the bread and wine offered, changing them into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In all traditional liturgies, Eucharistic prayers are lengthy and complex prayers, distinct from the other liturgical prayers. The anaphoras of the various traditions resemble each other in their rhetorical structure and key components, but there are also significant differences. Liturgical scholars have proposed various answers to the question of how this similarity and diversity has developed over the centuries. In short, how did the Eucharistic prayers evolve into the elaborate rhetorical compositions they are now especially in the Eastern churches? Research has come a long way in answering these questions. It is now recognised that the early stages of Christian liturgical praying was characterized by a diversity of practice, and that the bishop had the liberty to improvise his prayers, even though his freedom was gradually limited by the emergence of conventional themes and formulas. Although model prayers had occasionally circulated in written form, it was as late as the fourth century that bishops put their prayers in writing. Even after that, the prayer texts remained fluid until the second millennium. However, exploring the early oral and semi-written period of liturgical praying and the gradual fixation of the prayer texts faces a major methodological problem: the lack of sources. Since liturgy was liable to change, its manuscripts had to be up to date, and since most of the surviving manuscripts date from the eighth century and beyond, scholars only rarely find codices which faithfully preserve the fourth-eighth century text of liturgies. Using the late codices to speculate on late antique or early Christian text of these prayers is, however, fraught with difficulties. There is one significant exception to this rule: the papyri preserved in the dry sand of Egypt. These are fragments of original liturgical manuals used by priests in the fourth to eighth centuries, which contain the late antique text of these prayers. 19 Greek and Coptic papyri stand out among them, preserving fragments of the anaphora of St Mark, the traditional Eucharistic prayer of the Church of Alexandria, and closely related prayers, in the fourth- to eighth-century shapes of the text. This anaphora continued to be recited and is also documented in medieval manuscripts in Greek, in Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic, in classical Ethiopic, and in Arabic, and it is occasionally used in the Coptic orthodox church up to now. This unparalleled wealth of documentation allows us to follow the textual history of this anaphora in detail and thus to observe a dynamically changing liturgical text between orality and writing. In my project I will study this anaphora and its manuscripts from different perspectives: I will edit new witnesses to its text, I will explore well-known ones with new approaches, I will study how the changes in its text reflect historical circumstances, and I will search the vast corpus of Coptic magical papyri for hints to its actual use and influence. Through this research I expect to formulate new observations on a core question of liturgical scholarship: how did liturgies, and especially Eucharistic prayers, change in their early, formative period?