Received by virtue of membership of the Acluin Club
This is one of the more esoteric of the Joint Liturgical Studies series - what interested me about it was not some much the precise content of the two texts examined but the consideration of it as a case study of the type of 'archaeological' liturgical research which during the twentieth century had a profound impact in the revision of the liturgy across almost all denominations.
The examination here serves to challenge some assumptions about the development of the liturgy in Egypt in the first few centuries of the Church, and the alarming thing that this shows is how shaky the foundations of those assumptions are.
The common revision of the liturgy, in the Roman Catholic Church through Vatican II and in the Church of England in the experimental liturgies that lead to the ASB, was sold as a purification of the liturgy which took us back to a liturgical structure (and even words and phrases) that would have been recognised by the Apostles. However more recent research shows that there was greater diversity at this early period and that some key elements of liturgical reform are based on some very idiosyncratic readings of early texts in order to fit them within the personal liturgical preferences of the reformers.
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