The Syriac Version of the Liturgy of St James

Joint Liturgical Studies 49

A brief History for Students. The anaphora of St James is perhaps the most widely circulated Eastern anaphora in the whole history of Christianity. Being the liturgy of Jerusalem, its authorship has traditionally been attributed to ‘Saint James, the first bishop of Jerusalem and the brother of the Lord’. Though the present structure belongs to a later period, the core of the anaphora undoubtedly goes back to the fourth or early fifth century? Recently John Fenwick has suggested that the Jerusalem redaction is in fact a conflation of Palestinian sources with an early form of the anaphora of Saint Basil.

Dr Baby Varghese