Thus the catechumenal rites, rather than being the outward expression of a genuine inner conversion that had already taken place, now became instead the means of producing a powerful emotional and psychological impression upon the candidates in the hope of bringing about their conversion. The greater formalization of the final preparation for baptism, with its periodic punctuation with ritual moments that might involve such things as exorcism or the tasting of salt, is not an advance upon the less formalized preparation of earlier centuries, but a sign that the process was no longer working properly and needed shoring up.¹² It may therefore not provide the best ritual or theological model for Christian initiation in our own day.

Eucharistic Practice

With regard to the Eucharist, the effect of the removal of Hippolytus is even more startling. There has been a tendency to regard the eucharistic prayer in the Apostolic Tradition as reflecting the pattern that eucharistic prayers had reached nearly everywhere by the early third century. This included a narrative of institution, a recapitulatory anamnesis section, and possibly an epiclesis of the Holy Spirit, though this last is a debated point. I have argued that this eucharistic prayer in its present form is a fourth-century compilation, even though it does contain some very much older material. If we exclude it from consideration, then there is no firm evidence at all from other sources for the existence of eucharistic prayers of this type before at least the middle of the fourth century. Thus what scholars today would think of as the classic shape of the prayer, and have made the model for modern eucharistic prayers in a wide range of Christian denominations, appears to be quite a late-comer on to the scene. Far from capturing in our worship today the shape and spirit of truly early Christian eucharistic practice, we have adopted a form that is representative of a somewhat later period. As I said before, there is nothing wrong with that, provided that we recognize what we have actually done, and do not pretend to ourselves and to others that we have somehow managed to reproduce something close to what the apostles would have experienced in their worship.

But there is more. Because the location of the eucharistic prayer in the Apostolic Tradition interrupts the sequence of directives about ordination, coming immediately after the ordination of a bishop and before those of presbyters, deacons, and other orders, it has the appearance of a later insertion into the text. I have suggested that it did not originally belong there, but was added by a later redactor, who presumably thought it incomprehensible that the document would have failed to make any provision for such a crucial element in Christian eucharistic practice. But is it true that prior to this the text contained no eucharistic material at all? We have argued in our commentary that what is now presented as a non-eucharistic meal in the latter part of the Apostolic Tradition (chapters 25ff.) was originally understood as being the eucharistic meal of the Christian community, even if our later redactor failed to recognize it as such because it was so different from what eucharistic rites had become by his day. Although it provides no actual prayer texts, this material insists on the blessing of bread and the sharing of a common cup by baptized Christians, from which catechumens are rigorously excluded, and it demands that a member of the clergy be present for it to take place. In other words, it is similar to what we find in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch and in the Didache, and to a large measure in the description given by Justin Martyr.

If we are prepared to take such sources as typical of at least some second-century practice, then our picture of what early Christians did for their Eucharist undergoes a quite radical change. I fear that we have all been misled by the seductive picture painted by Gregory Dix over fifty years ago in his classic work, The Shape of the Liturgy,¹³ and so we imagine that:

• there was a very high degree of standardization in Christian practice everywhere from a very early date;
  

• that the form of the eucharistic rite was from the first modeled on what Dix described as the sevenfold shape of the Last Supper, which was modified at a very early stage into a fourfold shape of taking, blessing, breaking the bread, and sharing;
  

• that the meal as such disappeared from the rite at this same stage to become a separate institution called the agape; and
  

• that instead the Eucharist was appended to a morning service of the word inherited from the Jewish synagogue.

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