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2.2 The Apostolic Constitutions (Late Fourth Century)
Somewhat further to the West—from Seleucia-Ctesiphon towards Antioch—the second and eighth books of the Apostolic Constitutions contain obvious attestations of a standardized form of the Eucharist preceded by a Liturgy of the Word.1 It mentions the reading of “the Law and the Prophets, our [i.e. the Apostles’] Letters, the Acts and the Gospels”2 by a presbyter or deacon and “Moses, Joshua, Judges, Kings, Chronicles, the Return (from the exile, i.e. Ezra); then the writings of Job and Salomon and the sixteen Prophets” followed by the singing of the “hymns of David”, the Acts of the Apostles, Pauline Letters concluded by the Gospels, whose reading is elevated over the other scriptural texts by different liturgical means;3 “the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospel”4, or “Prophets and Gospel”5. Each of the readings is followed by the singing of Psalms. A sermon may be added.6 After the dismissal of the catechumens,7 the assembly prays. The deacons prepare the gifts and men and women exchange the kiss of peace separately. The deacon pronounces intercessions and the bishop blesses the people. The celebration of the Eucharist follows.
These texts assume that the bishop’s church owns a considerable series of books for the performance of the liturgy. They do not address the question how less affluent congregations celebrated Liturgies of the Word. Its representativity is (as often in this genre) debatable. In this system, mostly Old Testament readings precede the reading of the Gospels—the obvious point of culmination of the sequence of proclaimed texts.
2.3 Origen
Harald Buchinger observes that Origen “gives no unambiguous testimony for the connection of the celebration of the Eucharist with a Liturgy of the Word”1. Nevertheless, circumstantial evidence shows that Origen may already have known this connection as well as the performance of one single Eucharistic prayer over bread and wine following—not preceding—a Liturgy of the Word. It may be inferred from Origen’s extant homilies that Gospel pericopes were read on Sundays and could be preceded by readings from other books.2 According to Buchinger, “every further reconstruction remains simply a projection of later conditions”3. Origen’s church most probably performs a common prayer of all faithful and the kiss of peace before the celebration of the Eucharist.4
Apart from all uncertainty, Origen seems to presuppose that Eucharistic celebrations were preceded by Liturgies of the Word. If this custom should go back to a kind of first century Christianity, it becomes inexplicable why congregations in the Christian East could have been living for centuries in ignorance of this custom. If Liturgies of the Word containing the reading of Gospel texts should be an innovation of the early third century, one would need to postulate a powerful hierarchy that could enforce world-wide liturgical reforms. The reconstruction of such an institution would be anachronistic. However, one may imagine a powerful movement in Early Christianity whose adherents would propagate liturgical customs on their own initiative. The opposition against Marcion could have been such a movement uniting diverse writers without orchestration from an established authority.
2.4 Tertullian
At this point, two texts from Tertullian’s oeuvre must be mentioned as it seems that this author is talking about a Liturgy of the Word that precedes the consumption of the Eucharistic meal as the typical form of Christian meeting.1 In De anima 9, Tertullian mentions visions of a prophetess during dominica sollemnia.2 The prophetess derives subjects for her prophecy from the readings of scripturae (leguntur), the singing of psalms, or the performance of sermons. The reading of a Gospel text and the Eucharist are not mentioned.3 The list contains activities at a Christian—in this case, a Montanist—meeting. Even if the list does not testify to a complete repertoire of ritual elements of Christian gatherings, a Gospel reading within a Liturgy of the Word and preceding the Eucharist is nothing but mere conjecture.
Similar observations can be collected from Tertullian’s (pre-Montanistic) Apologeticum 39, a chapter that contains a bright description of the Christian Eucharistic meeting against the background of the dark depiction of other groups’ disgusting behavior at meals. Tertullian mentions prayer, the exposition of scriptural texts, and sermons that lead up to ethical topics. This chapter does not describe the reading of scriptures.4 Tertullian does not, likewise, mention that Gospels are read as part of Eucharistic or non-Eucharistic meetings. He does not, moreover, refer to a ritual link between the meal and a kind of meeting that may be devoted to learning and study. The sequence of liturgical actions does not, furthermore, reflect the structure of any single liturgical performance. The chapter discusses diverse topics in a polemical way.5 While theological topics would of course be discussed as parts of the table-talk in Tertullian’s congregations, the ritualized performance of scripture readings was not an integral part of Eucharistic celebrations.
With these observations, the search for Liturgies of the Word comes to an end. Christians of Tertullian’s time are interested in the Holy Scriptures including the Gospels.6 Nevertheless, they do not perform Liturgies of the Word connected with the celebration of their Eucharists. Liturgies of the Word apparently emerged only after the demise of sympotic Eucharists—a process that had only begun in Tertullian’s church.7 Testimonies for early readings of the Gospels locate those readings in Liturgies of the Word. Liturgies of the Word emerge in the third century. This observation does not, of course, silence the question whether there could have been other forms of ritualized Gospel readings.
3 Liturgical Functions of the Gospels in the Gospels and in
1 Corinthians?
Going back in the history of Christian liturgies, the typical and technical Liturgy of the Word that contained a reading of the Gospels makes its appearance in the middle of the third century. Christian groups were used to engaging in the reading and exegesis of the Bible before that time. One may thus ask whether or not this activity was an integral component of Christian meals before the sources mention the Gospels as part of Liturgies of the Word. Thus, two passages of the Gospel of Luke and the last chapters of the First Letter to the Corinthians may point to more ancient liturgical needs for Gospel texts than the late fourth century Eucharistic liturgies.
3.1 Marcion/Luke 22 and 24
Read as texts from the second century, the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper (especially Luke’s) corroborate these observations. Marcion/Luke 22 describes Jesus’ last celebration of Pesach as a typical symposium. The account does not have any interest in a historical reconstruction of customs how to celebrate Pesach in Jerusalem in late Second Temple times. It is devoid of anything that points to a first century celebration of a pilgrim festival in Jerusalem. As any etiology, it is created in the image of the celebration that it should furnish with a dignified prehistory. As an etiology for the performance of Eucharists, it is entirely uninterested in Easter. If Eucharistic celebrations should always have been preceded by a liturgy of word, Marcion/Luke 22 would totally fail in this function. For, Jesus and his disciples enter the room and begin to eat their dinner immediately. There is not the slightest trace of reading or talking about scripture before the meal.
In a sympotic event, it befits a host to invite his guests to a learned conversation after the conclusion of the dinner. According to Marcion/Luke 22, Jesus abides by this rule.1 They discuss several stereotype topics of the literary repertoire of ancient table-talk. This chapter shows that Christians met for communal meals. They may have read and/or discussed biblical and exegetical topics after the meal. Sympotic Eucharists could not have been connected with a Liturgy of the Word preceding the meal. The etiology for the Eucharist does not support celebrations preceded by a Liturgy of the Word. Whatever the time of composition of the Gospels, their authors could not yet envisage a celebration like the third/fourth century combination of a Liturgy of the Word with a Eucharist.
Justin’s use of a paraphrase of the institution narratives corroborates this understanding. His group does not celebrate a form of sympotic Eucharist that could claim to derive from Jesus’ institution. For Justin, the institution narrative is only used in order to legitimize the exclusion of people who do not belong to his congregation from the consumption of the Eucharistic elements.2 Justin is not interested in an etiology for his celebration (which does not fit to the Gospel texts, especially not to Luke) but in a bit of scriptural support for the exclusion of non-members from the participation in the food.
This is corroborated by the observation that Justin could have used an alternative etiology for his celebration: the account of Jesus’ discussion with Emmaus and Cleopas after Jesus’ resurrection (Marcion/Luke 24:13–35). Yet, he does not quote this pericope for this purpose. The verse that makes Jesus discuss passages from “Moses and all the Prophets” (Luke 24:27) is Luke’s expansion of Marcion’s text.3 The idea that Jesus expounded the Torah and the Prophets in front of the two disciples on their way from Jerusalem and thus before they reclined for dinner did not occur to Marcion. However, Luke was interested in a purely theological, anti-Marcionite argument regarding the integration of Jesus’ life and death into a kind of Old Testament salvation history. Luke did not want to talk about the Eucharist, let alone about a compulsory Liturgy of the Word preceding it. This is borne out by the fact that Marcion/Luke 24 does not end in a meal. Jesus vanishes and the meeting is disrupted completely before the beginning of a meal. Neither for Marcion nor for Luke is the story of Emmaus and Cleopas an etiology for the structure or the meaning of the Eucharist.
Marcionite/Lukan descriptions of the Last Supper and the conversation of Jesus with the two disciples on their way from Jerusalem show that a Liturgy of the Word was just not imaginable, let alone regarded as a constitutive element of the Eucharist. However stylized, the Eucharist is a kind of meal. It could have been followed by sympotic table-talk (Marcion/Luke) or preceded by the study session of a group of philosophers (Justin, see below). Neither a Liturgy of the Word, nor a philosophic study session, nor a (perhaps archaizing) bit of standardized table-talk was regarded as an indispensable constituent of a Eucharist.
3.2 Luke (not Marcion) 4:16–22
In the same way as the author of Luke’s Gospel corrected the story of Jesus’ meeting with Emmaus and Cleopas, he also added Jesus’ reading and exegesis in the Synagogue of Nazareth as an argument against Marcion.1 Jesus reads and expounds a passage from the Old Testament prophets. There is no hint to a meal following the service in Nazareth. In a similar way as Justin wanted the Emperor to understand his own group, Luke depicts Jesus as a teacher who expounds a passage of what should be regarded as Holy Scripture. He explains its importance and meaning for the listeners. There is no reason to doubt that certain Jewish groups met for the reading and discussion of the Hebrew Bible in the first and second centuries C.E. (see below). Elements of a rabbinic Sabbath morning liturgy can be read into the background of this very brief text, not out of it. The claim that the text should reveal a faint inkling of rabbinic celebrations of Torah reading becomes more plausible, if Luke 4:16–22 originated in the second half of the second century.
3.3 1 Corinthians 11–14
Matthias Klinghardt has shown that 1 Cor 11–14 is a literary unit that also represents a sequence of ritual acts that was immediately comprehensible as a Greek or Roman banquet. The chapters 12–14 collect rules and allude to literary conventions about proper table talk.1 Thus, the structure of the Christian meeting according the First Letter to the Corinthians does not only rule out that a Liturgy of the Word should have been performed before the meal. It also shows that a kind of reading of a Gospel text (that would have been composed after this letter) did not have a logical slot in this event—neither after nor before the meal.
For the time being, it is the most important structural lesson that must be learned from Paul’s letter that reading texts, learned discussions, and other forms of table-talk would take place after the meal rather than preceding it. The letter collects rules for the proper behavior at Christian banquets along the course of a sympotic celebration. Although any kind of text could be read, recited, sung, proclaimed, etc. in Christian meetings, none of them contains a ritual slot that requires or just favors Gospel texts.
4 A Liturgy of the Word in Justin’s Congregation?
The preceding discussion led to the conclusion that Gospels were not needed for Christian liturgies for roughly a century after the destruction of the Second Temple—a date that is often associated with the time of composition of the Gospels.1 In the course of this argument, one author had been passed over: Justin, the Philosopher2 and Martyr. This omission requires rectification, because the description of the Eucharist in Justin’s First Apology appears to prefigure the structure of the medieval mass: a Liturgy of the Word followed by the celebration of the Eucharist.
4.1 Philosophers Reading Texts
Justin’s group is convened weekly, on the “Days of Helios”.1 At their meetings, someone reads the “memorabilia of the Apostles (apomnēmoneumata tōn apostolōn) or the writings of the prophets (syngrammata tōn prophētōn) as long as possible”2. After that, the presider “makes a verbal admonition and stimulation for the imitation of these good things”3. The whole congregation rises and prays. The celebration of the Eucharist follows.4 Like other groups of this epoch,5 Justin’s community did not regard this kind of scripture study as compulsory component of Eucharistic celebrations. The group also performed the Eucharist right after a baptism.6
According to the Acts of his Martyrdom, Justin denies knowing any other Christian group in Rome except for his own (which is obviously wrong).7 The ancient editors of a younger recension of the Acts expanded the significance of Justin’s testimony making it a statement about all Christians of Rome (which is no less absurd).8 Justin depicts his group as philosophers, open to outsiders and generous to members who did not participate in the meetings. The group reads texts, because philosophers are interested in texts.9
4.2 The Memorabilia of the Apostles
Justin’s congregation reads “the memorabilia (apomnēmoneumata) of the apostles or the writings of the prophets”.1 The latter group of texts seems to comprise parts of the Hebrew Bible besides other material like the books of Hystaspes and the Sibyl.2 Tatian mentions that those books laid the foundation for his own conversion to Christianity.3 He had been “convinced” of their truth. This terminology echoes one of Justin’s elements of the definition of a Christian. One must be “convinced” of the community’s teachings.4 The study of the Sibyl, the Old Testament prophets, and the ancient philosophers support the community’s identity.
Christian authors use the term apomnēmoneumata infrequently for writings about famous persons. Thus Origen refers to apomnēmoneumata of (i.e. “about”) Apollonios of Tyana.5 The work was written by a “philosopher” not a Christian. For Origen, it is reliable, because it tells a story that is embarrassing for philosophers. It speaks about a philosopher who falls prey to the witchcraft of Apollonius. Kelsos had claimed that philosophers should be immune against the lures of wizardry.
In an exegetical catena fragment, Apollinaris of Laodicea (died ca. 392) expounds John 20:30. According to Apollinaris “John also teaches us, why he deemed the apomnēmoneumata of Christ’s (earthly) presence worthy of being written down; (viz.) that they (are recorded for) the greatest benefit of their readers …”.6 Apomnēmoneumata are stories about Christ contained within the (canonical) fourth Gospel.
The “memorabilia” of the Apostles and the Prophets are the foundation of Justin’s belief of the cosmic function of the Logos. The term is vague enough in order to require Justin to explain it—apomnēmoneumata, the “so-called Gospel(s)”.7 He prefers the term apomnēmoneumata over the term “Gospel” (euangelion/euangelia). The term euangelion could still have been tainted by the fact that Marcion had been the first one to adopt this term as a designation for a—i.e. his—Gospel.
Justin paraphrases the story of Heracles at the crossroads from Xenophon’s Apomnēmoneumata of Socrates in the Second Apology.8 He refers to this source as “that Xenophontic one (Xenophōnteion)”—apparently “(that) book” (Minns and Parvis: “story”). Xenophon did not name his book Apomnēmoneumata. Nevertheless, it seems to have been known under this designation already in Justin’s time. The term apomnēmoneumata is appropriate for the subject that Justin wants to refer to and for the persons who should understand this designation.9 Gabriella Aragione admits that many of the attestations of the term as designations for books come from florilegia like Diogenes Laertius which postdate Justin’s time,10 even though she assumes that it may have been in use already in the second century.11 Regarding Old Testament texts, Justin was able to refer to “the Prophets” or to Moses who enjoyed a reputation of honor and seriosity among Justin’s fellow philosophers.12 However, he had to appeal to other concepts with regard to the Gospels.
Justin neither invented nor liked the term “Gospel”,13 although he knew its positive connotations.14 His readers could be expected to understand this designation. The apomnēmoneumata are not, apparently, congruent with material that is extant in the four canonical Gospels.15 The term refers to a genre of contents (viz. memorable stories about—and sayings of—Jesus), not to a certain text. Justin’s mixed quotations may also point to the use of a Gospel harmony, which may point to the existence of the canonical Gospels as well as Marcion’s.16
As the Gospels were brand-new texts in Justin’s time, so was the total lack of conventions to use them in a typically Christian way. Justin’s group did not perform reading sessions that were standardized or ritualized beyond what was normal for groups of philosophers. There was neither a yearly cycle of festivals,17 nor a well-established catechetical corpus that insiders of the group could be expected to have mastered. Justin’s designation for these texts, their use in the meetings of his group, and the fact that he does not quote a single line verbatim would be absurd, if these four books had already been the undisputed basis of the Christians’ identity and liturgy for roughly a century. Justin’s group read and discussed Gospel material among other texts because they were interesting, new, and controversial. However, they chose the reading material for similar reasons that may have led to the establishment of the Liturgy of the Word later. Old Testament Prophets and canonical Gospels establish and proclaim an anti-Marcionite stance.
