Jewish Influence on Early Christian Liturgy: A Reappraisal

Paul Bradshaw

Although right from the beginning of the scientific study of early Christian worship there were some who examined its Jewish background to look for possible antecedents, yet this line of enquiry was relatively slow in becoming widely established. For a very long time many scholars did not look in that direction at all, seemingly out of a dogmatic conviction that the Christian faith would necessarily have involved a radical transformation or even rejection of the former religion.¹ Gerhard Delling, for example, writing in 1952 asserted that 'the Worship which belongs to the kingdom which has come in Jesus is fundamentally and completely detached from that of Israel,'² and Ferdinand Hahn, writing around 1970, believed that the early Christians were originally free from Jewish ritual practices, but then gradually returned to such customs as fasting and Sabbath observance.³ More recently, however, it has become almost axiomatic for liturgical historians to look for a possible link between Jewish and Christian forms — so much so, that there appears to be a tendency sometimes to overstate the case, to claim to find such links where in reality there do not seem to have been any, or at least none as close as is alleged. This lecture, therefore, is an attempt to re-examine some of the claims that have been made in the hope of arriving at a more realistic evaluation and avoiding many of the false conclusions that have been reached.

Part of the problem stems from a propensity among some Christian scholars to continue to utilize outdated Jewish scholarship in order to demonstrate a connection between practices. Thus, it has been natural for Christians to suppose that the weekly Sabbath service might have left marks on the early Christian Sunday liturgy. Indeed, so hard did Louis Bouyer try to establish a link between the two that he came up with an ingenious theory to explain the difference in the two orders of the service — the Christian having readings first and then prayers, and the Jewish having the prayers before the readings. He claimed that it was the Jews who had subsequently reversed the order in their service in order to differentiate themselves from the Christians.⁴ As we shall see later, while there is no evidence whatsoever for this particular action having taken place, he was not so wide of the mark in imagining that some liturgical changes might have been made by Jews rather than always by Christians in order to establish their own identity.

Although many of the Jewish texts with which parallels were sought were known only from sources dating from much later times than the first century, in the past this was not viewed as a problem: older generations of Jewish scholars believed that the Jewish liturgical tradition had exhibited remarkable stability through the ages, and thus a reference to some custom in the Talmud could safely be taken as evidence for its existence many centuries earlier, especially if what was said about it were attributed to some figure from antiquity. This, however, is no longer the case in mainstream Jewish scholarship. It is now recognized that, like Christian liturgy, Jewish practices underwent significant changes and development in the course of their history, and especially after the destruction of the Temple, which brought about such a fundamental transformation to Judaism. The majority now believe that a Sabbath synagogue liturgy as such was entirely a product of the post-Temple period,⁵ when many practices formerly carried out exclusively in the Temple were transferred to the synagogue and other elements were newly created there as substitutes for Temple rituals that could no longer be performed.⁶

This is not to say that there would not have been any synagogue gatherings on the Sabbath prior to this time, but that these assemblies were not liturgies in the sense in which that word is usually understood. They were instead primarily for the purpose of studying the Law (and if Luke 4.16ff. & Acts 13.15 are reliable testimony for Jewish practices of the period, for the reading of the Prophets too). Far from being a liturgical service of a fixed and limited duration, Philo reports that in Alexandria this time of study did not end until the late afternoon (Apol. 7.12-13), although things were no doubt quite different in places that were not major centres of intellectual life. Consequently, it seems highly improbable that there would have been any fixed lectionaries in use at these gatherings in the first century, except possibly in relation to the greater feasts of the year, still less a uniform lectionary observed throughout a whole region. Thus, the many attempts made by a whole range of Christian scholars to find points of contact between such putative Jewish lections and the books of the New Testament, or even later Christian lectionaries, must largely fall to the ground, as also must the claim often made that Jesus would have sung the psalms in the synagogue service week by week and that is why Christians should continue to do the same.⁷ All that can now be said is that Jews studied their scriptures each week, and so did Christians in one way or another.

Even the annual Jewish festivals that we know were being celebrated during Jesus' lifetime almost certainly did not have the form that is described in later rabbinic literature. In particular, there is almost complete consensus among Jewish scholars today that the later Passover seder did not exist during the Second Temple period, and although some have attempted to reconstruct the ritual pattern of the feast prior to the destruction of the Temple, those efforts have also been questioned.⁸ Thus, cautious scholars would now hesitate to draw any direct parallels between the Last Supper and the rabbinic seder.

Equally doomed are the frequent attempts that have been made to find close verbal similarities between later Jewish prayer texts and those of the early Christians. For instance, generations of scholars have searched for parallels between Christian texts and what became the standard form of Jewish daily prayer, the 'Amidah or Shemoneh 'Esreh, 'The Eighteen Benedictions.' Similarly, what appear to be the earliest extant Christian meal prayers in the church order known as the Didache have also been a particular focus of attention in efforts to find parallels. Bouyer, for example, made the astonishing claim that here no more than a few words and phrases had been changed from the alleged Jewish original, the Birkat ha-mazon or grace after meals.⁹ This assertion is patently untrue, but other scholars have come up with alternative theories in order to try to demonstrate some connection between the two prayers. The conclusion reached by the Jewish scholar Louis Finkelstein nearly eighty years ago, that the first and second of the three units of the Jewish prayer had been inverted in the Christian version,¹⁰ has been repeated by many Christian scholars in the years in between, although Louis Ligier preferred to speak of the first unit being integrated into the second and absorbed by it,¹¹ and Enrico Mazza argued that the Didache had instead eliminated the first unit altogether and substituted a quite different beginning.¹²

The earliest text of the Birkat ha-mazon known to us, however, dates only from the ninth century of the Common Era, and so we have no way of knowing what form it might have taken many centuries earlier. It is true that in the Book of Jubilees, usually thought to have been written in the middle of the second century BCE, there is a form of grace put into the mouth of Abraham that displays a somewhat similar tripartite structure to the Birkat ha-mazon: a blessing of God for creation and the gift of food; a thanksgiving for the long life granted to Abraham; and a supplication for God's mercy and peace.¹³ The Mishnah too speaks of a grace after meals composed of three blessings (Ber. 6.8), but does not indicate their contents, presumably because they were expected already to be familiar to its readers. Nevertheless, we should beware of drawing too straight a line from these sources to the text first known hundreds of years later. What they do show is the existence of a tripartite prayer after meals with a defined pattern. But they do not suggest that the detailed contents were already fixed or that it was the only form in use at the time. Similarly, most extant early forms of Christian intercession are quite different in style from the later texts used in the 'Amidah, the Jewish daily prayer. Hence those desperate to find parallels between the two have generally been reduced to pointing out similarities merely in their general themes, and not in their particular linguistic style or vocabulary nor even in their order, resemblances that are simply too vague to support a theory of direct dependency.¹⁴

In any case, once again most recent Jewish scholars have grave doubts that any Jewish prayers existed in a standardized form in the first century. Thus Joseph Heinemann, one of the pioneers of the revolution in Jewish scholarship in this area in the 1960s, wrote:

Heinemann argued that the process of standardization took place only gradually. By the second century CE 'only the number of the benedictions, their order of recitation, and their general content had been fixed, as well as the occasions of their recitation and the rules which governed them, but not their exact wording.'¹⁶ While some of his conclusions have been challenged by more recent Jewish scholars — for instance, that a direct evolutionary line could be traced from what he called 'the creations of the common people' to the later rabbinic prayer texts¹⁷ — yet much of what he wrote has become generally accepted, and especially the view that there was never a single original standard text of Jewish prayers, but rather a wide range of variants in existence among different Jewish groups. Some of these earlier variants can in fact be detected in the later prescriptions. Thus, for example, the same passage of the Mishnah that prescribes a grace composed of three blessings also allows a single blessing composed of the substance of the three to be said instead. Similarly, while the prayer composed of eighteen blessings came to be required to be said three times every weekday, a variant form composed of only seven blessings was to be used on Sabbaths and festivals. In both these cases and others, it seems probable that there had been a rival tradition that was simply too well established in some circles for it to be entirely suppressed by the one favoured by the legislators and so a compromise was reached of retaining both in some way.

Indeed, even the conservative Jewish scholar Ezra Fleischer lent his support to the view that the three times of daily prayer only became obligatory for all Jews after the destruction of the Temple. Where he seemed to be mistaken, however, was in supposing that once the Rabbis came to prescribe the practice, the people would immediately have adopted it, and that not only the specific times for praying but also the content of the prayers would have sprung fully formed ex nihilo at the time.¹⁸ As Ruth Langer remarked in a critique of his work, he assumed that 'Rabban Gamliel could decree that everyone must pray a new complex set of prayers three times a day, and people simply rearranged their lives to accommodate this.'¹⁹ And he ignored the strong probability that the specific times chosen for prayer and at least the outlines of what was then to be prayed would have had existing antecedents among some groups of pious Jews prior to this time, rather than the much less likely possibility that they were invented on the spot as a complete innovation.²⁰

This raises another aspect of the question — the tendency of many Christian scholars, like many earlier Jewish scholars, to restrict their investigation of Jewish antecedents exclusively to rabbinic Jewish traditions found in the Mishnah, Talmud, and other writings. While it was these traditions that subsequently formed later Jewish orthodoxy and consequently created the impression that they had also formed the dominant mainstream of Jewish practice earlier in the first century, we should beware of taking that impression at face value. Indeed, a recent, though controversial, school of Jewish scholarship has argued that the rabbinic movement remained peripheral in Jewish society until at least the third or fourth centuries of the Common Era, and that even then it gained influence very gradually and only became socially and religiously dominant in the sixth century or even later.²¹ We can form a similar misleading impression of primitive Christianity if we assume that the Gentile, and especially Pauline, version of the faith which fills so much of the New Testament and eventually formed the mainstream of later orthodoxy was already in this position in the first generation or two of the movement. This would make us relegate Jewish Christianity to the sidelines in looking at the earliest roots, whereas in reality it appears to have been Paul and his Gentile movement that constituted the breakaway from what had been the heart of the nascent religious tradition. We have no reason to suppose that the first Christian converts were drawn from the Pharisaic party, and every reason to expect the opposite to have been the case from the controversies documented in the New Testament, and hence we need to look at what we know about other forms of Jewish belief and practice in the first century for possible influences on the earliest traditions of Christian worship.

One simple example will illustrate this point. We know that a custom emerged in early Christianity of facing in the direction of the east in order to pray, whether a believer was alone or in a group. Earlier generations of scholars assumed that the Christians chose to do this in order to differentiate themselves from Jews, who would have faced towards Jerusalem. In other words, they saw it as the result of Jewish influence, but an influence that led the early Christians to do the opposite of the prevailing tradition, and this naturally appealed to those who wanted to see Christianity as a rejection of Judaism. More recent scholarship, however, suggests that the Christian practice may in truth be the continuation of an earlier custom of facing east to pray that was observed by some groups of Jews, and especially the Essenes.²²

Something similar may also be the case with regard to the Christian choice of Wednesday and Friday as regular days of fasting. The Didache, which mentions these days, has often been understood to mean that they too were a Christian innovation intended to distinguish Jewish Christians from other Jews who fasted on Mondays and Thursdays. But other scholars have raised the question, why were these particular days selected? Moving a Monday fast to Tuesday and a Thursday fast to Friday might make some sense, but why Wednesday and Friday? As the French biblical scholar Annie Jaubert pointed out, religious movements do not usually make simply random choices in such matters.²³ This has led to the hypothesis that it may have been the prominence of these days in the solar calendar used by the Essenes (and perhaps other Jews) that accounts for their adoption by Christians.²⁴

Thus, far from being innovations to mark out their identity from that of other Jews, a number of Christian customs may well be the perpetuation of older traditions practised in certain Jewish sects that did not survive in Judaism after its transformation following the destruction of the Temple. It is thus important that, when looking for antecedents and parallels, what we know about all the practices of all the varieties of Jewish groups that were in existence in the first century should be taken into account. Although such material may not be in as great an abundance as we might wish, quite a number of texts do exist,²⁵ not least those from Qumran that are eventually being published and analysed for the light they can shed on early Jewish liturgy in general as well as upon the practices of that particular sect. The recent literature in this field will well repay careful attention, especially with regard to possible antecedents of patterns of Christian daily prayer.²⁶ We can also discern references to variant worship practices in other sources, including rabbinic literature itself, which occasionally mentions disparagingly the ritual activities of the common people.

At this point in our survey, however, we need to ask the fundamentally important question as to whether Jewish influence on Christian liturgy was restricted to the first century or whether it continued in later times. It is obvious that the primary influence must have been exerted at the historical roots of the Christian movement while it was still very much part of the broader Jewish culture. But were there also influences that were felt after that period? Here there is a division within both Jewish and Christian scholarship. The traditional position has been to see a sharp separation between church and synagogue as having taken place at a quite early date, as a result of which all communication between the two then ceased and so influence came to an end. The point at which the ways parted has been variously fixed, between a date in the middle of the first century all the way up to 135 CE, but not usually beyond.²⁷ However, this has been challenged in recent years by some scholars, who have argued instead for a slower process of separation and a continuing, if diminishing, influence of the two on each other for at least several centuries longer.²⁸ It is well known that at least in Antioch and probably elsewhere some Christians attended both synagogue and church in the late fourth century, as they were severely criticized by John Chrysostom in his sermons for doing so,²⁹ but it is perhaps less well-known that canons from several fourth-century councils prohibit clergy and laity from keeping fasts or festivals with Jews or accepting gifts of food sent from their festivals — regulations that would hardly have been necessary had there not been a real risk of them doing so.³⁰ And recently Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra has argued for the continuation of a tradition of some Christians keeping Jewish autumn festivals, and specifically Yom Kippur, for several centuries.³¹

Moreover, the notion of some continuing cross-fertilization helps explain the emergence in the fourth century of two Christian liturgical texts with a strongly Jewish appearance that do not seem to have been part of the tradition from its earliest inception. The first of these is a collection of prayers in Book 7 of the late-fourth-century church order known as Apostolic Constitutions that really do have some striking resemblances to the Jewish 'Amidah, especially in its shorter Sabbath form. This particular liturgical material is quite exceptional in character among Christian texts both earlier and later, and so it seems likely that it was introduced at a fairly late date, perhaps the third century, from a deviant Jewish group.³² While this text appears not to have had any wide influence on Christian liturgy but merely within a limited group, it was otherwise with the emergence of the Sanctus in some fourth-century eucharistic prayers. As the question of how the Sanctus came to find a place in Christian usage has been extensively examined by others, I do not intend to pursue that subject in any further detail here, except to say that it is more likely to have been a late borrowing from Judaism than something that had enjoyed a continuous existence in Christian worship from early times while simultaneously remaining completely invisible in the extant sources.³³

Obviously influences such as these would have directly affected only certain Christian groups and not all, even if in the case of the Sanctus the practice was later copied more widely. In most places church authorities were anxious to distance themselves and their practices from those of Jews. Such phenomena as the efforts to abolish the Quartodeciman observance of Easter and the need felt by some Christians to compile their own tables to predict the date of Easter each year, rather than face the embarrassment of having to go down the road to the neighbouring synagogue to ask when Passover would fall, that are found even in the third century are signs of the struggle that was going on in the new religious movement to establish its own independent identity and abolish as far as possible the more obvious signs of any connection to Jewish customs.³⁴

However, a similar diversity in the degree of Jewish influence on different Christian communities should also be recognised for the first century too. In the past we liturgical historians have tended to expect to find roughly the same effect, or lack of effect, of Judaism everywhere in primitive Christianity, and credit should be given in particular to Gerard Rouwhorst for attempting to persuade us to look differently at Christian liturgical traditions on the basis of their particular point of origin, and thus correct our misapprehensions. Those searching for Jewish antecedents to Christian liturgical practices need to recognize that there will probably be significant differences between churches that emerged out of a predominantly Gentile background and those that have stronger roots in Jewish Christianity. Indeed, Rouwhorst has rightly argued that even making a distinction between churches with Jewish roots and those with Gentile origin is too simplistic a categorization: there are likely to have been intermediate forms, as for example, churches that were Gentile in origin but having hardly any affinity to Pauline theology and for one reason or another still being open to Jewish influences.³⁵

Rouwhorst has shown how such an approach helps to explain a number of divergent phenomena in early Christian liturgical practice. It explains why there is so much polemic in early Christian writings over some Christians following Jewish observances, and in particular the keeping of the Sabbath. While their opponents may have characterized this as 'Judaizing' — falling back into unreformed ways — for those groups it was nothing of the kind but simply the continuation of their traditional practices. It also explains the honour accorded to Saturdays in some churches in fourth-century sources, so that it was not a day on which the Christians fasted but was a day on which they regularly celebrated the eucharist, alongside the opposite treatment in other churches. It explains why in some churches the eucharistic ministry of the word regularly included an Old Testament reading, or even two — from the Law and from the Prophets — while in others it did not. It explains why in some churches the celebration of Easter is known to us at an early date as a Christianized Passover held on 14 Nisan, while in other churches the feast is not observed at all until it is adopted at a later date as a Saturday night—Sunday celebration with a thoroughly Christianized meaning. And it explains why the eucharistic prayers of some churches have a strong Semitic flavour in their vocabulary and style, while in others it is hard to show any connection with a Jewish grace after meals, as the prayers seem to belong to an entirely different cultural milieu. We may contrast, on the one hand, the anaphora of Addai and Mari with, on the other, the eucharistic canon of the Roman church.³⁶

Although all the examples cited so far are of instances where Christians have derived liturgical customs from Jews, we should not automatically assume that the traffic was all one-way. Israel Yuval has opened up an interesting line of possible research by suggesting that sometimes it may have been Jews who changed their customs in order to differentiate themselves from Christians, rather than always the other way round. He claimed:

He then went on to expand on this idea in detail in relation to the development of the Passover. Seth Schwartz has suggested that something similar may be true with regard to the emergence of elaborate synagogue buildings in the fourth century, as being a direct response to the Christian church-building programme that was taking place at the time.³⁸ To this we may add the rabbinic demand that every prayer text should be conformed to the berakah pattern, incorporating the phrase, 'Blessed are you, Lord God,' etc. that we see being imposed even on traditional prayer material in the codification of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple. Any prayers that did not already begin in this way were modified by appending this formula to the end of the prayer as a seal or chatimah rather than by re-writing the entire text from the beginning. Why did the authorities choose this berakah pattern as normative and discard all other possible constructions? Could it have been because the early Christians were already showing a preference for using prayers cast in the eucharistia form, 'We give thanks to you, O Lord', etc. which previously had been a quite acceptable variant of the berakah form in Jewish praying? Rather than this being a Christian deviation from an already established norm, could it be that the imposition of the berakah on Jewish liturgy was a reaction to the Christian trend as a further marker of orthodox Jewish identity over against it?

On the other hand, we cannot completely discount the possibility that all these may simply be cases of quite independent parallel developments rather than the reaction of one to the other.³⁹ Whatever may be the truth of that, there are certainly instances where scholars have too rashly jumped to the conclusion of a direct literary dependency when they have encountered similarities in phrases and expressions in later Jewish and Christian prayers. Frequently, on closer examination, these turn out to not to be due to direct borrowing by one from the other — whether by Jews from Christians, or by Christians from Jews — but to be the result of the use of a common source, their shared scriptures, which the Christians came to call the Old Testament. It is now also being recognized that some of the commonalities that exist between certain practices from Qumran and those in later rabbinic liturgy may also be explained in the same way.⁴⁰

The Christian use of Temple imagery presents a particular case in point. It is tempting to imagine that Christian references to Temple practices are based upon authentic historical recollections of what went on in the Jerusalem Temple, handed down from the earliest converts through succeeding generations of believers; and quite a number of Christian scholars have all too easily fallen into that very temptation.⁴¹ But even in the case of later Jewish traditions about Temple customs, some Jewish scholars suspect that what may sometimes be happening is a projecting back of what later generations thought should have happened rather than what actually was the case. For example, the material in the Mishnah tractate Middot seems at times to be more closely related to biblical projections of the Temple than to what is now known through archaeological research to have been true of the actual Temple site. Similarly, the liturgical descriptions in the tractate Tamid do not yield a single consistent picture such as one might expect if its purpose had really been to record accurately the daily ritual. So much more so, then, in the case of Christian traditions concerning Jewish cultic practices, which seem to be based on Old Testament descriptions and prescriptions rather than any independent source. This is as applicable at the earliest point in the two traditions — anti-Jewish polemic among the Apostolic Fathers — as it is in the appropriation of cultic language and imagery in reference to Christian worship practices in the fourth century.

In conclusion, therefore, what can we say about Jewish influence on early Christian liturgy? Evidence of it certainly exists, but not to the extent that former generations of scholars imagined. We cannot expect to find precise parallels in the wording of texts or the details of ceremonial. Nor can we expect to see the same degree of influence in every part of the ancient Christian world. And sometimes the influence was not in Christians adopting the same customs as Jews, but doing the opposite in order to distinguish themselves from Jews, while at other times it may have been Jews who needed to differentiate their practices from those of Christians. More often than not the influences seem to have come out of the traditions of first-century Jewish movements that disappeared from view in the shake-up in the culture after the destruction of the Temple rather than from the rabbinic traditions that became codified as orthodox Judaism in later centuries. And it is possible that further discoveries are yet to be made in research in this area.

No, Christianity was not a new religion that owed little or nothing to the Jewish roots from which it emerged, but its relationship with those roots and with the orthodox Judaism that was gradually being formed alongside it is rather more complex than a simple parent-child association. The connection is rather that of two estranged siblings, siblings who are today finally beginning to discover their common ancestors, and for that we should give thanks.

1. See, for example, the critical comments on such scholars made by Louis Bouyer, Eucharist (Notre Dame 1968), pp. 15ff.
2. Gerhard Delling, Der Gottesdienst im Neuen Testament (Göttingen 1952); English translation, Worship in the New Testament (London/Philadephia 1962), p. 6.
3. Ferdinand Hahn, Der urchristliche Gottesdienst (Stuttgart 1970); English translation, The Worship of the Early Church (Philadelphia 1973), pp. 32ff. 50-52.
4. Bouyer, Eucharist, p. 60.
5. See for example the studies by Lee Levine, The Ancient Synagogue (New Haven/ London 2000), pp. 134-59; Heather A. McKay, Sabbath and Synagogue: The Question of Sabbath Worship in Ancient Judaism (Leiden 1994); and the briefer survey by Daniel K. Falk, 'Jewish Prayer Literature and the Jerusalem Church in Acts', in Richard Bauckham, ed., The Book of Acts in its Palestinian Setting (Carlisle/Grand Rapids 1995), pp. 267-301, here at pp. 277-85. McKay has been rightly criticized by Pieter W. van der Horst, 'Was the synagogue a place of Sabbath worship before 70 C.E.?', in Steven Fine, ed., Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue (London/New York 1999), pp. 18-43, for defining 'worship' too narrowly and ignoring the probability that study included some prayer.
6. See further Richard S. Sarason, 'Religion and Worship: The Case of Judaism', in Jacob Neusner, ed., Take Judaism, For Example: Studies toward the Comparison of Religions (Chicago 1983), pp. 49-65; Ruth Langer, To Worship God Properly: Tensions between Liturgical Custom and Halakhah in Judaism (Cincinnati 1998).
7. See the critical observations of James McKinnon, 'On the Question of Psalmody in the Ancient Synagogue', Early Music History 6 (1986), pp. 159-91, here at pp. 170-80 = idem, The Temple, the Church Fathers and Early Western Chant (Aldershot 1998) VIII.
8. See Joshua Kulp, 'The Origins of the Seder and the Haggadah', Currents in Biblical Research 4 (2005-2006), pp. 109-34, especially 114ff.
9. Bouyer, Eucharist, p. 115
Ha-Mazon', Jewish Quarterly Review 19 (1928/9), pp. 211-62.
10. Louis Finkelstein, 'The Birkat Ha-Mazon', Jewish Quarterly Review 19 (1928/9), pp. 211-62.
11. Louis Ligier, 'The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer: From the Last Supper to the Eucharist', Studia Liturgica 9 (1973), pp. 161-85, here at p. 177.
12. Enrico Mazza, The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer (Collegeville 1995), pp. 18ff. See also H. van der Sandt & E. Flusser, The Didache: Its Jewish sources and its place in early Judaism and Christianity (Assen/Minneapolis 2002), pp. 310-29.
13. Jubilees 22.6-9; for an English translation, see James H. Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha II (Garden City, New York 1985/London 1986), p. 97.
14. For examples, see Bouyer, Eucharist, pp. 197-9, 213-14, 233-4, 303; Stéphane Verhelst, 'La “kéryxie catholiqueâ€� de la liturgie de Jérusalem et le Shemoneh 'Esreh', Questions Liturgiques 81 (2000), pp. 5-47.
15. Joseph Heinemann, Prayer in the Period of the Tanna'im and the Amora'im: Its Nature and its Patterns (in Hebrew, Jerusalem 1964; 2nd edn 1966); English translation, Prayer in the Talmud: Forms and Patterns (Berlin 1977), p. 37.
16. Ibid., p. 26.
17. See Richard S. Sarason, 'On the Use of Method in the Modern Study of Jewish Liturgy', in W. S. Green, ed., Approaches to Ancient Judaism: Theory and Practice (Missoula, Montana 1978), pp. 97-172, here at p. 146 = Jacob Neusner, ed., The Study of Ancient Judaism I (New York 1981), pp. 107-79, here at p. 161.
18. Ezra Fleischer, 'On the Beginnings of Obligatory Jewish Prayer', Tarbiz 59 (1990), pp. 397-441 (in Hebrew; English summary, pp. iii-v); idem, 'The Shemone Esre — Its Character, Internal Order, Contents and Goals', Tarbiz 62 (1993), pp. 179-223 (in Hebrew; English summary, pp. vi-vii).
19. Ruth Langer, 'Revisiting Early Rabbinic Liturgy: The Recent Contributions of Ezra Fleischer', Prooftexts 19 (1999), pp. 179-94, here at p. 190; see also their subsequent correspondence, 'Controversy', Prooftexts 20 (2000), pp. 380-87.
20. See the comments by Stefan Reif, 'On the Earliest Development of Jewish Prayer', Tarbiz 60 (1991), pp. 677-81 (in Hebrew; English summary, p. viii), and Fleischer's response, 'Rejoinder to Dr. Reif's Remarks', ibid., pp. 683-88 (in Hebrew; English summary, pp. viii-ix). For evidence of the existence of regular daily prayer within the Qumran community, see the works cited in n. 26 below.
21. See for example Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton 2001).
22. See Paul F. Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church (London 1981/New York 1982), pp.10-11, 58-59.
23. Annie Jaubert, 'Jésus et le calendrier de Qumrân', New Testament Studies 7 (1960), pp. 1-30, here at p. 27: 'Ces vues superficielles ne tiennent aucum compte de la profondeur d'enracinement des usages liturgiques'.
24. See Annie Jaubert, The Date of the Last Supper (Staten Island, New York 1965); Thomas J. Talley, 'The Eucharistic Prayer of the Ancient Church According to Recent Research: Results and Reflections', Studia Liturgica 11 (1976), pp. 138-58, here at p. 149.
25. See James H. Charlesworth, 'Jewish Hymns, Odes, and Prayers (ca. 167 B.C.E — 135 C.E.)', in Robert A.Kraft & George W. E. Nickelsburg, eds, Early Judaism and its Modern Interpreters (Atlanta/Philadelphia 1986), pp. 411-36; David Flusser, 'Psalms, Hymns and Prayers', in Michael E. Stone, ed., Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period (Assen, The Netherlands/Philadelphia 1984), pp. 551-77.
26. See James R. Davila, Liturgical Works (Grand Rapids, Michigan 2000); Daniel Falk, Daily, Sabbath, and Festival Prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden 1998); Bilhah Nitzan, Qumran Prayer and Religious Poetry (Leiden 1994); eadem, 'The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish Liturgy', in  James R. Davila, ed., The Dead Sea Scrolls as Background to Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden 2003), pp. 195-219; Stefan C. Reif, 'The Second Temple Period, Qumran Research, and Rabbinic Liturgy: Some Contextual and Linguistic Comparisons', in Esther G. Chazon, ed., Liturgical Perspectives: Prayer and Poetry in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden 2003), pp. 133-49; and especially the cautions expressed by Richard S. Sarason, 'Communal Prayer at Qumran and Among the Rabbis: Certainties and Uncertainties', in ibid., pp. 151-72.
27. See for example James D. G. Dunn, ed., Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135 (Tübingen 1992).
28. See for example Adam H. Becker & Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds, The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen 2003).
29. English translation in John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians, translated by Paul W. Harkins; The Fathers of the Church 68 (Washington, DC 1979). See also Marcel Simon, Verus Israel. A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (AD 135-425) (London 1996).
30. Council of Elvira (c. 306), canons 49 & 50; Council of Laodicea (c. 363), canons 29, 37, & 38; canon 70 of “The Ecclesiastical Canons of the Holy Apostles� in Apostolic Constitutions 8.47.
31. See Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, '“Christiansâ€� observing “Jewishâ€� festivals of Autumn', in Peter J. Thomson & Doris Lambers Petry, eds, The Image of the Judaeo-Christians in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature (Tübingen 2003), pp. 53-73; idem, 'Whose Fast Is It? The Ember Day of September and Yom Kippur', in The Ways that Never Parted, pp. 259-81.
32. See David A. Fiensy, Prayers Alleged to be Jewish: An Examination of the Constitutiones Apostolorum, Brown Judaic Studies 65 (Chico, California 1985); Pieter W. van der Horst, 'The Greek Synagogue Prayers in the Apostolic Constitutions, Book VII', in Joseph Tabory, ed., From Qumran to Cairo: Studies in the History of Prayer (Jerusalem 1999), pp. 32-36.
33. See Bryan Spinks, The Sanctus in the Eucharistic Prayer (Cambridge 1991), pp. 1-121; Robert F. Taft, 'The Interpolation of the Sanctus into the Anaphora: When and Where? A Review of the Dossier', Orientalia Christiana Periodica 57 (1991), pp. 281-308; 58 (1992), pp. 83-121; Gabriele Winkler, 'Nochmals zu den Anfängen der Epiklese und des Sanctus im Eucharistischen Hochgebet', Theologische Quartalschrift 74 (1994), pp. 214-31, esp. 216-19; eadem, 'Weitere Beobachtungen zur frühen Epiklese (den Doxologien und dem Sanctus). Über die Bedeutung der Apokryphen für die Erforschung der Entwicklung der Riten', Oriens Christianus 80 (1996), pp. 177-200; eadem, Das Sanctus. Über den Ursprung und die Anfänge des Sanctus und sein Fortwirken, Rome 2002; Maxwell E. Johnson, 'The Origins of the Anaphoral Sanctus and Epiclesis Revisited: The Contribution of Gabriele Winkler', in Hans-Jürgen Feulner et al., eds, Crossroad of Culture: Studies in Liturgy and Patristics in Honor of Gabriele Winkler (Rome 2000), pp. 405-42.
34. See T. C. G. Thornton, 'Problematical Passovers. Difficulties for Diaspora Jews and Early Christians in Determining Passover Dates during the First Three Centuries A.D.', Studia Patristica 20 (1989), pp. 402-8; Anscar Chupungco, Shaping the Easter Feast (Washington, DC 1992), pp. 43ff. & 61ff.
35. See Gerard Rouwhorst, 'Liturgical Time and Space in early Christianity in Light of their Jewish Background', in A. Houtman, M. Poorthuis, & J. Schwartz, eds, Sanctity of Time and Space in Tradition and Modernity (Leiden 1998), pp. 265-84, here at p. 267. On the difficulties in classifying 'Jewish Christians', see Matt A. Jackson-MacCabe, ed., Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking ancient groups and texts (Minneapolis 2007).
36. On all these, see further Rouwhorst as in the above note, and also his 'Continuity and Discontinuity between Jewish and Christian Liturgy', Bijdragen 54 (1993), pp. 72-83; 'Jewish Liturgical Traditions in Early Syriac Christianity', Vigiliae Christianae 51 (1997), pp. 72-93; 'The reception of the Jewish Sabbath in early Christianity', in Paul Post et al., eds, Christian Feast and Festival (Leuven 2001), pp. 223-66; 'The Reading of Scripture in Early Christian Liturgy', in Leonard V. Rutgers, ed., What Athens has to do with Jerusalem (Leuven 2002), pp. 305-31.
37. Israel J. Yuval, 'Easter and Passover as Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue', in Paul F. Bradshaw & Lawrence A. Hoffman, eds, Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times (Notre Dame 1999), pp. 98-124, here at pp. 103-4.
38. Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, chapters 8-9.
39. See Kulp, 'The Origins of the Seder and the Haggadah', pp. 118ff.
40. See for example Reif, 'The Second Temple Period, Qumran Research, and Rabbinic Liturgy', p. 139; Sarason, 'Communal Prayer at Qumran and Among the Rabbis', p. 171.
41. A recent example is Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (London 2003).

2008-07-01