1st Edition

Divine Liturgies - Human Problems in Byzantium, Armenia, Syria and Palestine

By Robert F. Taft Copyright 2001
    316 Pages
    by Routledge

    In obedience to Jesus' command, 'Do this in remembrance of me', the ritual repetition of the Lord's Supper down through the ages and across multiple Christian cultures in the liturgies of East and West, has given rise, inevitably, to innumerable diversities of shape, text, cultural context, and theological interpretation, as well as to debates, sometimes heated, among modern experts as to the methodologies for resolving the problems arising from these differences. The problems of cultural history, structural, historical, and textual reconstruction, theological interpretation, and method involved in the modern scholarly debate on these issues, are the object of the studies in this volume, dedicated to the liturgies of Byzantium, Armenia, Syria, and Palestine.

    Contents: Preface; Problems in the History of Culture and Historical Reconstruction: Women at church in Byzantium: where, when - and why; Byzantine liturgical evidence in the Life of St. Marcian the Å’conomos: concelebration and the preanaphoral rites; The Armenian ’Holy Sacrifice (Surb Patarag)’ as a mirror of Armenian liturgical history; Problems of Anaphoral Structure and Interpretation: Some structural problems in the Syriac Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles I; Understanding the Byzantine anaphoral oblation; Ecumenical scholarship and the Catholic-Orthodox epiclesis dispute; Problems of Method: Quaestiones disputatae: the skeuophylakion of Hagia Sophia and the entrances of the liturgy revisited (parts I-II); The bematikion in the 6/7th-c. Narration of the Abbots John and Sophronius (BHGNA 1438w): an exercise in comparative liturgy; Comparative liturgy fifty years after Anton Baumstark (d. 1948): a reply to recent critics; Additional notes and comments; Indexes.

    Biography

    Robert F. Taft