It is tempting to assume that the worship practices of the earliest churches are reflected in the more developed liturgical traditions that emerged in the fourth century. A resulting view has been that Christian celebration has exhibited essentially the same shape since the apostolic period. This entry challenges that assumption and suggests that the most ancient forms of Christian worship were not uniform but quite diverse.
The basic problem we encounter in the search for the origins of Christian worship is that evidence for liturgical practices during the first three centuries of the church’s history is simply too meager, and fragmentary to enable us to paint a clear picture of it.
Liturgical historians, however, have not been content with this limitation, but have attempted to bridge the chasm of ignorance that stretches between the beginnings of Christianity and the fourth-century church. In order to do this, they have had to make a number of assumptions: (a) that we in fact know what Jewish worship in the first century was like, and therefore have a good idea of the starting point of the worship of the first Christians; (b) that early Christian communities would have wanted to remain faithful in their liturgical customs to the traditions laid down by Jesus and the apostles, and thus would not have differed much in their ways of worship from one another or changed those practices vary substantially in the course of time; (c) that the remarkable similarity that we can observe in many fourth-century Christian worship practices in widely different geographical regions is a sign that these practices go back to the very beginning of the church’s history; and (d) that the pieces of evidence that we do have from the second and third centuries will all fit into the line of development that we can thereby trace from the Jewish roots to the fourth-century church. Today, however, in the light of modern scholarship, those assumptions are all open to question.
First, it is not at all clear that we do know what Jewish worship was like in the first century. Although there are some contemporary sources, they do not tell us all that we would like to know. Therefore Jewish scholars, like their Christian counterparts, have attempted to reconstruct first-century worship on the basis of much later sources, assuming that Judaism did not change much and that most of what they found there would faithfully reflect what Jews of earlier times had done in their worship. More recently, however, Jewish scholars have challenged this method of reconstruction in two ways. Joseph Heinemann, in the 1960s, argued that Jewish liturgy was not standardized from the first, that there was no such thing as a single original form of worship. On the contrary, a large number of different forms of prayer and ways of worshiping were practiced, and only later, beginning in the second and third centuries of the Christian era, did the rabbis gradually attempt to reduce this variety and impose an increasing uniformity on it. Furthermore, Jacob Neusner has subsequently brought into existence a new school of scholarship that views rabbinical literature in a way quite different from that of earlier generations. Formerly, scholars had regarded this later literature as an accurate record of the sayings of individual rabbis that had been carefully handed down over the centuries. Neusner, however, has argued that those who compiled the literature were not simply trying to chronicle the past but also to promote and justify their own worldview, and for that reason were inevitably selective in their approach and exercised a high measure of editorial freedom in their work. Treating this later rabbinical literature, therefore, as though it were a completely reliable guide to Jewish thought and practice in the first century is rather like attempting to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus from the statements made in fourth-century Christian homilies. The material may certainly contain some valuable evidence for the events of Jesus’ life, but it is extremely difficult to distinguish such evidence from the speculations, interpretations, and accretions that surround it.
Secondly, the supposition that early Christian communities would not have differed much in their ways of worship from one another or changed those practices vary substantially in the course of time is challenged by recent New Testament scholarship. This scholarship has demonstrated that primitive Christianity was not a single uniform entity nor a single theology, but was essentially pluriform from as far back as we can trace it. Since the idea of one single apostolic faith is not confirmed by the sources, except in the broadest terms, it seems extremely unlikely that the worship of the earliest Christian communities—with all their geographic, linguistic, cultural, and theological differences—would have been essentially the same everywhere. Descriptions of worship practices in one New Testament book or in some other early Christian writing, therefore, cannot automatically be assumed to hold true for other Christian communities of the same period, or for earlier or later generations of believers.
Thirdly, what of the remarkable similarity that we can observe in many fourth-century Christian worship practices in different parts of the world? Is that not a sign that they go back to the very beginning of the church’s history? Two responses may be made to this. First, the overall similarity is by no means as great as scholars have tended to suppose. By concentrating on aspects and details that do resemble one another and by ignoring or glossing over differences, it is certainly possible to paint a harmonized picture. However, if one notes more carefully the differences that exist between practices that superficially appear to be similar, a somewhat different picture emerges. Second, there is another possible explanation for the similarities than the claim that they are proof of the great antiquity of the practices in question. While it is probable that some of the likenesses we can observe are certainly the result of continuity of practice from very early times, in other cases the standardization may well be a new development, a consequence of the changed situation of the church in the fourth century. As the church expanded, as communication—and hence awareness of differences—between different regional centers increased, and above all, as orthodox Christianity tried to define itself over against what were perceived as heretical movements, any tendency to persist in what appeared to be idiosyncratic liturgical observances was likely to have been interpreted as a mark of heterodoxy, and hence would have caused local churches to scramble to bring their customs into line with others.
Recent scholarship indeed has begun to point to instances where it appears that this is exactly what happened, among them the emergence of the season of Lent, the spread of the custom of pre-baptismal exorcism and post-baptismal anointing, and the universal choice of Easter as the preferred season for baptism.
Even the classical shape of the eucharistic prayer appears to be more a fourth-century creation than the result of the preservation of a primitive pattern. We need to be more cautious, therefore, in assuming that uniformity is always a sign of antiquity and diversity a sign of later evolution; the exact opposite may frequently be the case.
Finally, there is the claim that the pieces of evidence we do have from the second and third centuries will all fit into a single line of development. This scholarly position has always had to struggle to argue its case and has often been able to do so only by conveniently ignoring, or attempting to explain away, pieces of evidence that cannot be forced to fit. For example, the prayers that occur in chapters 9 and 10 of the early church order known as the Didachē are very similar to Jewish meal prayers but very different from all other known eucharistic prayers of later centuries. While some scholars have ingeniously tried to explain how it was possible for later prayers to have evolved out of this very different pattern, others have rejected them from consideration altogether on the grounds that they are not eucharistic prayers at all—this conclusion being defended by the circular argument that they cannot possibly be eucharistic prayers because they do not resemble other known eucharistic prayers! Similarly, eucharistic prayers found in the apocryphal literature of the period have generally been eliminated from any serious attempts at reconstruction of the line of development because they too fail to conform to expectations of what a eucharistic prayer should look like. In other words, the theory has been given priority over the evidence itself and allowed to determine what should and should not be regarded as legitimate material for inclusion. We know that one can prove almost any hypothesis as long as one disregards anything that might constitute evidence to the contrary. When, however, the evidence is viewed more dispassionately, what is revealed suggests the evidence of quite varied forms of worship in the early church rather than one homogenous line of development.
The conclusion to be drawn from this more recent scholarship, therefore, is that we simply do not know anywhere near as much about early Christian worship as we once thought we did, nor are we ever likely to know as much as we would wish. We must learn to remain content with a measure of “liturgical agnosticism.” Moreover, we must learn to allow our conclusions to be shaped by the evidence itself, rather than by some predetermined theory of how it “must have happened.” We should neither give undue weight to the limited and scattered sources that we do possess nor eliminate or play down pieces of evidence that prove inconvenient to our favorite hypothesis. Above all, we must be open to the possibility of a much wider diversity of primitive Christian liturgical practice than we have tended to recognize hitherto and be willing to admit that the single normative pattern that some liturgical enthusiasts of today often imagine does not seem to have existed in early Christian worship.