The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy (review)

Every once in a while a book is published which asks fresh and searching methodological questions of a discipline. Tacit assumptions are spelled out, presuppositions are investigated, and long-standing hypotheses are proved to be attractive and imaginative but, alas, unsubstantiated by the evidence. Paul F. Bradshaw has produced just such a work. Indeed, this reviewer has been forced painfully to conclude that he must revise the content of his own courses in substantive ways and discard many of those cherished "insights" which he has so confidently presented for years.

The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship is an important scholarly work of the first order, as rigorously critical and well organized in its evaluation of the sources as it is fascinating in its conclusions. In relatively few, surprisingly readable pages, the author has achieved that kind of rare contribution with which future scholars will have to be in creative dialogue. His book will be an indispensable reference volume not only for scholars with an academic interest in the cautious, well-founded construction of the history of Christian Liturgy but also for professional liturgiologists who are working with an ecclesial commission for the modern revision of public worship. Seminary, college, and university librarians will want to procure a copy for their collections. Academics will want to reflect critically upon the validity of those wonderful theories which have heretofore informed their own class presentations.

In the course of his study, Professor Bradshaw provides us with a comprehensive status questionis which summarizes all the liturgical research of the past century and longer. He reviews both the extant sources themselves for reconstructing early liturgical history and all the hypotheses and debates which have surrounded their date of composition, authorship, geographical provenance, literary form, redaction-history, extent of ecclesial influence, official approbation, and overall significance in the process of evolving rites. He supplies us with such abundant documentation by way of annotated footnotes on every page that he may be forgiven for not including a bibliography at the end. His "Index of Modern Authors" contains all the famous scholars in the historical of liturgical research such as Louis Bouyer, Bernard Botte, R. H. Connolly, E. C. Ratcliff, Gregory Dix, and E. J. Yarnold, together with scores of others.

Dr. Bradshaw devotes his whole first chapter to reflecting upon the witnesses to the Jewish background of Christian worship as found in private and synagogal first-century prayer-patterns, especially the berakah (in Greek eulogētos) and the hodayah (in Greek homologeo, later eucharis-teo).

In the second chapter he analyzes all the New Testament references to prayers and hymns, Baptism, Holy Eucharist, and dominical assemblies as well as to stories of the disciples' participating in temple and synagogue worship.

In the fourth and fifth chapters he looks at the ancient church orders such as Didache, The Apostolic Tradition, and The Apostolic Constitutions; patristic references in writers such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Augustine, the mystagogical catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia; eucharistic prayers such as those ascribed to Basil and to John Chrysostom; and The Pilgrimage of Egeria.

Our author makes perhaps his most important contribution in his third chapter, where he suggests ten principles of "Interpreting Early Christian Liturgical Evidence." Here he provides a conservative and sophisticated methodology for studying the primary liturgical sources from Christian antiquity. For this reviewer, the most creative principles are three, and these shall serve as examples.

In his first principle, Dr. Bradshaw insists that "What is common is not necessarily most ancient, and what is least common is not necessarily least ancient." He argues here against the tendency of scholars to presume that there was a single root, a primitive unitary substratum from which diversities arose in later centuries. In fact, early Christianity was pluriform in polity, doctrine, and...