Explore the building blocks of early Christian worship and the Church’s earliest orders.
This concise study surveys key sources like the Didache, Apostolic Constitutions, and various Church Orders, revealing how the liturgy and church governance took shape in the first four centuries.
Delving into the relationships between these texts, the book explains how later liturgical forms grew from earlier materials, and why scholars debate their dates and sources. It highlights the differences between the Didache, the Church Orders, and the later liturgical traditions, offering a clear map of how ritual practice evolved across regions and centuries.
- Clear explanations of major sources: Didache, Apostolic Constitutions, Egyptian Hexateuch, Canons of Hippolytus, and more.
- Discussion of liturgical elements such as the Proanaphora, Anaphora, and the institution narrative.
- Guided look at how bishops, priests, deacons, and other roles were described and ordained.
- Context for how ancient rites relate to later Christian worship and how scholars date these texts.
Ideal for readers interested in early Christian history, liturgy, and the puzzle of how worship practices formed in the ancient church. This edition offers accessible, focused insight without assuming prior specialized knowledge.
Originally published in 1910, this book contains a study of the Eucharistic liturgy used by the Church in the first three hundred years of its existence. Woolley carefully examines the origins and development of the proanaphora and anaphora, and includes in an appendix the original Greek, Coptic, Ethiopic or Latin texts of many of the ancient witnesses of liturgical practice.