year round; the widespread Byzantine rite has two.[1] But when we come to these small sects we find numbers. The Jacobites take the first rank easily in this respect. Brightman gives the titles of sixty-four, besides that of St. James;[2] there are probably many more in manuscript. They are ascribed to all sorts of people: St. John the Evangelist, St. Mark, St. Peter, "the Roman Church" (excerpts from our Mass), Dioscor, Ignatius of Antioch, Severus, Barhebræus, and so on. A theory, once popular, is that originally these were meant to be used on the feasts of certain saints, then by mistake were supposed to have been written by them. This is now abandoned. There is nothing in honour of the saint in the liturgy ascribed to him, and no evidence that it was used on his feast. Many are attributed to people who have no feast. We must put down these wild attributions[3] to the same Syrian genius for apocrypha which produced the Clementine romances and so many other false documents. Most of these alternative anaphoras are based upon a quite foreign tradition, have no connection with the anaphora of St. James. The oldest and most valuable, containing echoes of very ancient Antiochene forms, exists in two recensions ascribed to St. Ignatius[4] and (probably for Syrians in Egypt) St. Athanasius.[5] Some of them do not contain the words of institution at all,[6] others have them in a composite and deficient form.[7] Some (especially the late ones) are very long, inflated and full of bad rhetoric. It should be noted that the alternative liturgies involve not only a special anaphora, but, in many cases, special forms for the prayers of the faithful too.[8]
An interesting question is how far the Jacobites use their multitude of anaphoras. I think that very few occur in actual practice.
- ↑ Not counting the Presanctified liturgy, which is really a quite different service.
- ↑ Op. cit. pp. lviii-lxii.
- ↑ Some of them (to later Jacobite leaders) may be true.
- ↑ Renaudot: Lit. Orient. Coll. ii. 214-226.
- ↑ Cf. Baumstark: Die Messe im Morgenland, p. 44.
- ↑ E.g. St. Sixtus: Renaudot, op. cit. ii. 134-142.
- ↑ Thomas of Heraclea, ib. p. 384. This anaphora also has the peculiarity that its prayers are alphabetical. The first begins with Alaf, the second with Bēth, and so on.
- ↑ Renaudot (op. cit. ii. 126-560) prints thirty-seven of these alternative anaphoras with a note on each.
