Jewish Influence on Early Christian Liturgy: A Reappraisal

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scholars to continue to utilize outdated Jewish scholarship in order to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 catholique” 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, '“Christians” observing “Jewish” 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).