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Yet, if this is really the case, why should earlier scholars have been so sure that this unnamed and unsigned text was the work of Hippolytus? The attribution rests chiefly upon the foundation that both the prologue and epilogue of the work apparently use the expression "apostolic tradition," and that two church orders derived from this one do refer to Hippolytus as having been their author. While these latter claims are clearly untrue, because the works in question were very obviously composed a century or more after the time of Hippolytus, it is alleged that this is evidence that the source they were using did indeed come from the hand of Hippolytus. However, these arguments can easily be challenged. The tendency to associate documents with apostolic figures, or with those believed to have close connections to such persons, so as to enhance their authority, is very common in the ancient Christian world, and other works are known to have been falsely attributed to Hippolytus.5 Moreover, Christoph Markschies has recently argued that not only was the ascription of the derived texts not made until the late fourth or early fifth century (and thus much too late to credit it with any historical reliability), but the apparent references to "apostolic tradition" in the prologue and conclusion of the document have been misinterpreted by other scholars and consequently cannot allude to the title of the work.6 In any case, even the very existence of a work entitled Apostolic Tradition by Hippolytus is questionable. While the title does appear in an anonymous list of writings on the right-hand side of the base of a statue discovered in Rome in 1551, this list does not correlate exactly with the works of Hippolytus, works cataloged by both Eusebius and Jerome. Very surprisingly, it omits those that are most strongly attested as genuinely his,7 and this has led some scholars to propose the existence of two authors, or even a school of authors, responsible for the works on the list.8 In a final bizarre twist to the tale, recent research has revealed that the statue itself was in origin not a representation of Hippolytus at all, but of a female figure restored in the sixteenth century as a male bishop because of the list of works inscribed on its base, using parts taken from other statues.9 It is because of these various factors that, as I indicated at the beginning, a steadily growing number of scholars has now begun to question the conventional attribution, although a recent commentary on the text by Alistair Stewart-Sykes has attempted to defend a position close to the traditional one by postulating three different layers to the text: a primary stratum of older material inherited by a third-century school of authors in Rome associated with the name of Hippolytus, and subsequent redactions and expansions of that material by two different members of that school.10 It is very much to be regretted that his commentary appeared just too late for attention to be given to it in our own commentary, and I hope to publish a separate response to its arguments in due course. At this stage you may be wondering what such an obscure academic dispute might have to do with the wider history of liturgy or with present-day liturgical revision. Far from its being an unimportant sideshow, as might appear at first sight, I intend to demonstrate that its consequences are far-reaching. First, very many of the claims that are made about what the whole of "the early church" did in its worship turn out to rest chiefly, and in some cases entirely, upon the evidence of this one document. If this church order is not a reliable guide to what even one local community was doing in the third century, but contains composite rites that were never celebrated in that particular form anywhere in the world, then this has profound consequences for the picture that we paint of early Christian liturgies. Second, because there are so very few detailed sources for early Christian liturgical practices, modern liturgical revision has to a very considerable extent drawn upon this particular text in order to produce the rites currently in use in many churches. Thus if the historical foundations of these constructions turn out to be sand rather than the firm rock that they were imagined to be, the effects on our present-day worship practices could be considerable. We may all need to don hard hats to escape the falling masonry of liturgy in the absence of Hippolytus. |
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