 |
|
    |
 |
||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Liturgy in the Absence of HippolytusPAUL F. BRADSHAWThe Kavanagh Lecture delivered October 10, 2002It was in my contribution to the Festschrift for Aidan Kavanagh that I first "came out," as it were, and added my name to the short—but growing—list of those who cannot accept that the ancient church order known as the Apostolic Tradition was in fact the work of Hippolytus of Rome.1 It seemed only appropriate, then, that in this Aidan Kavanagh lecture I should return once more to that subject, especially as it happens to coincide with the publication of a major commentary on the document, on which I have been working with two of my former doctoral students, Maxwell Johnson and Edward Phillips, during the intervening years.2 For those of you who have not been following closely this scholarly dispute about authorship, I should explain that a number of ancient church orders, as they were called, were discovered during the nineteenth century.3 These purported to give "apostolic" prescriptions about the ordering of the life of Christian communities, including in most cases their liturgical practices. They were, therefore, eagerly seized upon by scholars as providing crucial sources of information concerning the worship practices of early Christians, about which we otherwise know relatively little. Among them was one anonymous text to which, for want of a better title, the name "the Egyptian Church Order" was at first given. However, early in the twentieth century the claim was made that it was in reality a work by the early-third-century Hippolytus of Rome, the Apostolic Tradition, previously thought to have been lost. While the majority of scholars accepted that attribution, some did not, and in recent years the arguments against its accuracy have grown. A particularly important contribution to the debate was made by Marcel Metzger in a series of articles from 1988 onwards.4 He argued that it is not the work of any single author at all but rather a piece of "living literature." Its lack of unity or logical progression, its frequent incoherencies, doublets, and contradictions, all point away from the existence of a single editorial hand. Instead, it has all the characteristics of a composite work, a collection of community rules from quite disparate traditions. In my contribution to Aidan Kavanagh's Festschrift, I carried this argument further and suggested that not only are the contents an aggregation of material from different sources, but that they appear to arise from different geographical regions and from different historical periods, some from perhaps as early as the middle of the second century and others as late as the middle of the fourth. This means that they do not represent the liturgical rites of any one early Christian community, but are a quite artificial amalgam. The newly published commentary attempts to work out this claim in detail. |
||||||
 |
||||||
|
Academics | Admissions | Alumni | Works | Listen | Look | Contact | Index | Home | Yale University
|