The “Missing” Oblation and the Problem of Sacrifice in Early Antiochene Anaphoras: A Reconsideration of John Fenwick and Stefano Parenti

Abstract

There is a wrinkle in the story of common features in West Syrian anaphoras, which John Fenwick called “the Missing Oblation.” In this article, I argue that the importance of the “missing oblation” highlighted by Fenwick, Robert Taft, Stefano Parenti and others needs to be balanced against the verbs of oblation that are present. The emphasis on the missing oblation, combined with the tendency to summarize the Antiochene structure with little reference to the importance of these verbs, results in an inaccurate and unbalanced sense of the degree to which the anaphora expresses the belief that the action of offering bread and wine is constitutive of the eucharistic action. This should lead to a caution with the unhelpful heuristic about the spiritualization of sacrifice in contemporary scholarship and the underemphasis of the belief in the materiality of the eucharistic sacrifice in writers such as John Chrysostom and earlier anaphoras.

Introduction

The structure of the West Syrian or Antiochene anaphoras is “often considered by modern liturgical reformers as the classic anaphoral structure” and is the form that ends up dominating among Eastern Christians via the Byzantine version of the Anaphora of St. Basil (ByzBASIL) and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (CHR). ¹ More than eighty anaphoras fit this structure, most of them stemming from the patriarchate of Antioch, sometimes referred to as Syrian Antioch. ² The Anaphora of St. James (JAMES) was the liturgy of Jerusalem, and so we might have expected an anaphora from this time and region to be composed in Greek. However, many of these were composed in, or at least translated into, Syriac, such as the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles (ATA) ³ and the Testamentum Domini. ⁴ While both Apostolic Tradition and Apostolic Constitutions (ApCon) are Church Order documents, they fit within the broad West Syrian framework, as do the following: Egyptian Anaphora of St. Basil (extant in both Bohairic and Sahidic Coptic) ⁵ the Anaphora of Gregory Nazianzus; ⁶ the two principal Byzantine anaphoras, ByzBASIL (which is an expansion of the Egyptian recension of EgBASIL) ⁷ and CHR; ⁸ as well as the Armenian Anaphora of St. Athansius (ArmATHANASIUS). ⁹ The logic of the West Syrian/Antiochene structure has been praised by contemporary liturgical scholars for its trinitarian shape, which is nearly always as follows: it begins with an address to the Father ¹⁰ that culminates in praise for the Son and his institution of the Eucharist, followed by an anamnetic offering of the gifts, after which the Spirit is asked specifically to act upon the offered gifts in the first of many petitions. ¹¹ In comparison with other widely-used anaphoras such as the Roman Canon Missae and the East Syrian Liturgy of the Apostles Addai and Mari, eastern anaphoras have also been commended by modern liturgists for the considerable place they give to explicit verbal praise and thanksgiving and for their emphasis on creation in the opening section.

There is an important wrinkle in the story of widespread common features among the West Syrian anaphoras, an enigma first noted by Kenneth Stevenson and later named by John Fenwick, in a 1989 booklet, “the Missing Oblation.” ¹² There, he took up a thesis that has since garnered rather wide support—namely, that ATA, CHR, and ApCon “are all independent derivatives of a single prayer”—and concluded that this proto-anaphora (what Robert Taft calls “the Greek Urtext”) “lack[ed] any oblation or offering of the eucharistic elements to God.” ¹³ Bryan Spinks also finds this proposal “to be the most plausible,” though he posits that there may also have been “a Syriac Urtext.” But until any of these texts surface, “this must remain speculation.” ¹⁴

In this article, I intend to explore the idea a “missing” oblation from a number of vantage points. To explore the presence and use of sacrificial language in early Christian anaphoras is to run into the larger question of what constitutes sacrifice, offering, oblation, and so forth, and what (if anything) distinguishes each from the other in the early Christian texts themselves. In light of this challenge, I begin with a look at some of the serious deficiencies in the way contemporary scholarship (both liturgists and beyond) tends to talk about the application of sacrificial terms to the Eucharist in early Christian texts. I next turn to a brief discussion of the Antiochene or West Syrian anaphoras, whose structure is the basis by which ATA is said to be missing a verb of offering. Part III looks in some detail at seven anaphoras from the epiclesis through the intercessions: ATA, the Greek and Syriac versions of JAMES, CHR, Greek and Egyptian BASIL, and ApCon. In Part IV, I probe a number of aspects of the claims of Taft and Fenwick, as well as a provocative further contribution to this line of inquiry by Stefano Parenti. ¹⁵

Modern Interpretations of Eucharistic Sacrifice

A common argument is that earlier Christians interpreted sacrifice in a spiritual sense, by which the interpreters usually mean a sense that is non-material. In other words, a “spiritual” sacrifice is verbal and an orientation of the heart as opposed to an approach where sacrifice necessarily includes the material offering of bread and wine. But what is really the impetus for making such a distinction? Is this based in the texts themselves?

The “spiritualization thesis” often includes a rather sweeping historical view of a slow process of “spiritualization” in Judaism away from material to immaterial concepts of sacrifice. ¹⁶ This process, according to the narrative, began in Second Temple Judaism, was adopted by early Christians, but then, in the fourth and fifth centuries, underwent a rather significant change—a reversal—to a more material notion of sacrifice. ¹⁷ Despite Robert Daly’s acknowledgment that the common category of “spiritualization” is “so broad in potential meaning that it can hardly be defined in a few words,” he nonetheless uses the term repeatedly. A reconsideration of his discussion of sacrifice in Didache reveals just how far away from the text the heuristic of “spiritualization” takes him.

For example, in his discussion of the meaning of the term θυσία in Didache 9, 10, and 14, Daly inexplicably concludes, without providing any evidence, “that the sacrifice of Did 14 apparently has primarily the spiritualized meaning of a prayer of praise and thanksgiving recited over the elements of bread and wine.” ¹⁸ Everett Ferguson gives a similar interpretation of Didache, “since the sacrifice is not identified with the material elements.” ¹⁹ But what neither admits is that the text does not provide a specific explanation in either direction. Didache simply assumes the propriety of the term “sacrifice” to be self-evident. Furthermore, neither Daly nor Ferguson give any indication that the sacrificial categories “material” and “spiritual” may be a profound, conceptual imposition on Ancient Near Eastern writers. Andrew McGowan, in contrast, argues that not only can the term “Eucharist” “only artificially be restricted to prayer, or meal, or gathering” in Didache, “[i]t is anachronistic to ask whether θυσία refers strictly to the food and drink of the meal, as opposed to the Eucharistic prayers accompanying it, or to other elements of the whole. We should assume rather that it refers to all of them together,” unless we have evidence to the contrary. ²⁰ McGowan has demonstrated quite clearly that when we look at the concepts of “Eucharist” and “sacrifice” in early Christianity, “there is no Archimedean point on which to stand so that one of these can be taken as a stable entity influencing the other. Rather these are two closely related traditions, or sets of theory and practice, whose developments require description and interpretation rather than mutual deconstruction.” ²¹

There were two technical terms that underwent significant development in early Christianity and which would have a significant effect on its conceptualization of sacrifice. The first of these is the term “spiritual” (λογική/rationabilis), which was explored in detail by the great scholar of ecclesiastical Latin, Christine Mohrmann. In Rom 12:1, the Christian recipients of the letter in Rome are enjoined to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship [τὴν λογικὴν λατρείαν ὑμῶν].” Rom 12:1 is the likely source for a number of terms that became technical terminology in Christians anaphoras: the notion of a “living sacrifice” comes to be expressed with the term “unbloody” beginning with Athenagoras (ca. 130–190 CE), and the term λογικός becomes fixed in both Greek liturgies and in the Roman Canon with rationabilis. ²² Mohrmann explains that at least through the time of Ambrose and Ambrosiaster (late fourth century), rationabilis shared its definition with its Greek derivative, λογικός, meaning “spiritual” in the sense that the sacrifice has been elevated to the sphere of the divine, but not necessarily to the exclusion of the material. But by the time of Leo the Great (440–461 CE), its meaning has narrowed and “signified merely what was suited to reason or the nature of things.” ²³ What is important is that in neither case did the term carry with it a clear distinction between material and non-material. Thus, the writers of the first few centuries are working with a concept where matter has varying degrees of relation to the divine, to religious cult, and thus to sacrifice. This is rightly described with the adjective λογικός/rationabilis, not because it is or is not material, but because it has been raised to the level of the divine. In the words of Josef Jungmann, λογικὴ θυσία “is an exact description of the spiritual sacrifice proper to Christianity, a sacrifice lifted high above the realm of [only] matter.” ²⁴

The other term that underwent a significant development is θυσία. One of McGowan’s important insights is the collapse, in the Septuagint, of various types of Hebrew Bible sacrifices under one Greek terminological category, such that cereal offerings, animal sacrifices, and so on could alike be described by θυσία. ²⁵ Thus, unbeknownst to them, both Jews and early Christians read the Scriptures through a linguistic prism that had embedded within itself a conceptual transformation about all that is intended by the term “sacrifice.” This simple insight alone reveals the degree to which so many modern discussions of sacrifice make assumptions that the Ancient Near Eastern world would find completely perplexing and unrecognizable. Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson point out that it is “important to understand that there is no question but that the Eucharist was widely understood theologically as the Church’s sacrifice and, as such, the burden of proof to the contrary has always been (and remains) on those who wish somehow to deny this interpretation and who seek to avoid using sacrificial terminology altogether in their eucharistic practice and theology.” ²⁶

In addition to McGowan, other leading scholars have shown just how misleading the spiritualization thesis is. Jonathan Klawans, for example, writes, “as I have been arguing all along, it is high time to abandon the term ‘spiritual sacrifice’ altogether” and instead “speak more neutrally of metaphorical uses of sacrifice language—a phenomenon that we can see in Paul, Philo, the rabbis, and even the Last Supper traditions.” ²⁷ In Harold Attridge’s challenging review of Daly’s monograph, he explains that what is infinitely more useful is “to differentiate symbolic interpretations of traditional cult, metaphorical application of cultic terms to non-cultic activity, and the application of cultic terms to non-traditional ritual activity. These three uses of the language of cult and sacrifice operate in the material surveyed, often at the same time, but to describe them all as ‘spiritualization’ is really not very helpful.” ²⁸ McGowan agrees that what is sometimes called “spiritualization” is better described as “the application of sacrificial understandings and interpretations to a wider range of practices than was previously seen as cultic.” This is different, he argues, from the tendency toward the interiorization of sacrifice that some have identified in a figure such Philo (though even he is not the advocate for spiritualization that many claim). ²⁹ “Practices such as prayer and communal meals were already closely-related to sacrificial rituals, and in these cases to recast the relationships as organic rather than as merely adjacent is a subtle but important one.” ³⁰

Thus, writes McGowan, “[i]f we relinquish the notion that “sacrifice” must refer to animal offerings, or must have a propitiatory character”—or (I would add) that it must involve death—or “that ‘sacrifice’ is an essential and stable object” and not a complex idea that begins to be applied by Christians and Jews “to a wider range of practices than were previously seen as cultic,” then we can immediately see that so many of the objections that a person might raise to calling the Eucharist a sacrifice begin to fade away. ³¹ Sacrifice was not, in fact, a stable or fixed concept in this period, which makes the distinction between material and non-material a wooden hermeneutic and an anachronistic lens through which to misinterpret early Christians. These insights will be very helpful as we turn to the claims of Fenwick, Taft, and Parenti.

The Structure of Antiochene Anaphoras

Proper attention to the whole of particular anaphoras, in all their attending complexities, means reading a given anaphora carefully and entirely, consciously aware that scholarly heuristics about anaphoral structural families (such as West Syrian and East Syrian) can just as easily obscure an anaphora’s particularities as reveal them. So, in order for the significance of the “disappearing” offering to be understood, it is necessary to be clear about what has been understood as the normative structure of Antiochene anaphoras. The Greek version of JAMES will serve as the representative example in this essay for a number of reasons, but especially because the various versions of JAMES play a major role in the “missing” oblation thesis. ³²

Like nearly all of the Syrian and Byzantine anaphoras, JAMES introduces the opening dialogue with the “Grace” adapted from 2 Cor 13:13. ³³ It then moves to an effusive paragraph of praise for creation and the glory that is God’s by nature, followed by the pre-Sanctus, which ties the praise offered by mortals to that of the myriad of heavenly beings and saints and the Sanctus to the song they forever sing. Next, in a move distinctive of the West Syrian prayers, the introduction of the post-Sanctus begins with an affirmation of God’s holiness that explicitly links the post-Sanctus terminologically to the first word of the Sanctus itself (such as “holy indeed” in JAMES), after which it continues the praise begun in the preface. These anaphoras move to a recollection of salvation history and conclude with the coming of Jesus for the salvation of the world. ³⁴ The transition to the institution narrative follows naturally upon the summary of Christ’s saving actions. Dominic Serra points out that “the supper narrative appears within the anamnetic thanksgiving of all anaphoras belonging to the Antiochene Family,” not as a structurally distinct feature. ³⁵ In other words, the summary of God’s work of salvation in history culminates with a narrative description of the night that Christ told his disciples to “do this.” In JAMES, the people respond “Amen” to the institution narrative and then verbalize a brief anamnetic acclamation (“Your death, Lord, we proclaim and your resurrection we confess”), which introduces and amplifies the common anamnesis-offering-epiclesis triad that follows. It is important to note that summaries of the West Syrian structure fail to mention the verb of oblation just as often as they include it in the summary of the structure: two entries in the same reference work (The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship) disagree about whether to include the oblation as one of the structural features of West Syrian anaphoras. ³⁶ The same divergence can be seen in other oft-cited works for students. ³⁷

The transition from oblation to epiclesis in JAMES is lengthy and characterized by an emphasis on the mercy of God: the effectual reception of mercy by means of the sacrament is joined to the epicletic request by couching the Father’s mission of the Spirit both on the people and on the gifts (sometimes called a double epiclesis) as itself an act of mercy. ³⁸ The intercessions then follow the epiclesis. In JAMES, the intercessions begin “We offer to you, Master, for.. . .” The intercessions are lengthy and usually begin with the phrase, “remember, Lord” (μνήσθητι). The anaphora concludes, as nearly all West Syrian anaphoras do, with a trinitarian doxology.

The “Missing Oblation”

There is an important wrinkle in the story of widespread common features among the West Syrian anaphoras, an enigma that John Fenwick called “the Missing Oblation.” Almost all complete Eastern anaphoras contain an explicit oblation of the bread and wine as the conclusion to the anamnesis that follows the institution narrative, such as this in JAMES. A few anaphoras, such as SyJAMES and CHR, contain two distinct verbs of offering, and still more verbs of offering are incorporated within the intercessions (“we offer for…”). ³⁹ ATA, which shares much in common with CHR, is particularly noteworthy because there is no expected verb of oblation within the transition from anamnesis to epiclesis, ⁴⁰ hence, Fenwick’s “missing” oblation.

At this point, it is important to note that to speak of an oblation as “missing” is to assume a normative standard from which a deviation has occurred. ATA is normally dated quite early (usually no later than 350 CE) and as we have already seen, one reason why so many anaphoras have remarkably similar structures, even across wide geographic lines, is that there was so much cross-pollination. Thus, we should take care not to draw conclusions that are too far reaching from the fact than an earlier anaphora had less time to be influenced by other anaphoras and does not contain a feature found in other, later anaphoras.

We should pause here to note that I have described what is present in ATA rather than identify what it lacks according to some Archimedean standard. What sets ATA apart most from other Antiochene anaphoral structures is that its only verb of offering is located within the intercessions: “Therefore we offer you (ܡܩܪܒܝܢܢ mqarbeynan; offerimus), O Lord Almighty, this divine sacrifice (ܠܕܒܚܬܐ ܗܕܐ ܐܠܗܝܬܐ ledbaḥāṭā haḍa alāhayāṭā; sacrificium hoc divinum) on behalf of all humanity, on behalf of your entire Church.” ⁴¹ Robert Taft argues that both ATA and CHR “are but two later, expanded redactions of a no longer extant Greek Urtext,” which he named “the Liturgy of the Apostles.” These “divergences in the presanctus of APSyr/CHR,” he explains, “must be attributed to theological elaborations of the Greek Urtext at the turn of the fourth-fifth centuries.” ⁴² But the situation is a bit more complex: after the introduction to the saving events of Christ’s life, ATA no longer parallels CHR. Instead, it begins to share a set of features with a single anaphora: JAMES and its Syriac recession, SyJAMES. In their respective discussions, both Fenwick and Taft consider the wider range of anaphoras that are related to each other: not just ATA, CHR, and SyJAMES, but also ByBASIL, EgBASIL, and ApCon. In the next section, a series of tables put all of these anaphoras in parallel in English, divided into discrete sections so that they can be seen most easily alongside the commentary that follows each section. In the discussion that follows each unit, the relevant terms in the original languages will be identified. Since seven anaphoras are being compared, these discussions will be limited to those items most relevant to this inquiry.

The Anamnesis through the Intercessions in Seven Historic Anaphoras

A. Table 1: The Anamnesis ⁴³

Each of the seven anaphoras follow the institution narrative with the classic anamnetic structure: an adverbial participle of recollection (such as, “remembering”), followed by a recounting of the central, saving deeds of Christ; and each agree about what constitutes these actions: passion and death (expressed variously with “[life-giving] cross,” “death,” “the tomb,” “saving passion,” and “holy sufferings”), resurrection (often clarified “on the third day”), ascension, seating at the Father’s right hand, and second coming (the purpose of which, in four of them, is to bring requisite or reward for earthly actions). In all the anaphoras save for ATA, this list is followed by a first-person plural verb of oblation in the Antiochene anaphoras. Again, Fenwick’s “missing oblation.”

Table 1: The Anamnesis

At this point, ATA, SyJAMES and JAMES diverge from the other three anaphoras with the following section:

B. Table 2: Unique Unit in ATA, JAMES, and SyJAMES

One expects a verb of oblation in the first-person plural to follow directly on the anamnesis in Antiochene anaphoras. But it turns out that there are a number of more unexpected features than just a missing oblation in ATA (which instead moves straight to intercession). SyJAMES and JAMES contain the expected verb of oblation with the phrase, “this fearful and bloodless sacrifice” ⁴⁴ followed by a request for pardon and acceptance, then picking up with intercessions for the church, joinging up with ATA and SyJAMES. This is followed in all three anaphoras by a request for mercy, plus (in ATA and SyJAMES) a verb of thanksgiving.

Table 2: Unique Unit in ATA, JAMES, and SyJAMES

At this point, ATA and SyJAMES begin to track with the other four, though with further variations from the expected structure.

C. Table 3: The Oblation

This table in particular allows the reader to see clearly the “oblation” that Fenwick identified as “missing” in ATA when set beside these related anaphoras. The table also shows the further anomaly in JAMES, namely, that the oblation in the previous is that anaphora’s only verb of oblation after the anamnesis and moves directly to the epiclesis. SyJAMES, on the other hand, repeats the verb of offering in the present tense ⁴⁵ with a structure nearly identical to what is found in CHR, ByBASIL, EgBASIL, and ApCon (plus ATA, minus the verb of oblation). Why JAMES does not reflect the older ATA anaphora while SyJAMES does remains a mystery.

Table 3: The Oblation

There are a number of other noteworthy features. First, the tense of the oblation verb varies: SyJAMES and ApCon are in the first-person, plural, present tense (ܡܩܪܒܝܢܢ mqarrabinan and offerimus in the longer reception of SyJAMES; προσφέρομεν in ApCon) ⁴⁶ while CHR and ByBASIL use the present participle (προσφέροντες; “offering you”). ⁴⁷ EgBASIL, however, uses the “famous” aorist tense ⁴⁸ (ϣⲣⲡ︦ⲕⲱ ⲉϩⲣⲁï ϩï [ⲑ]ⲏ ⲙ︦ⲙⲟⲕ ⲁⲩⲱ ⲙ︦ ⲡⲉⲕⲙⲧⲟ ⲉ[ⲃⲟⲗ] ⲛ︦ⲛⲉⲧⲉⲛⲟⲩⲕ ⲛⲉ ⲉⲃⲟⲗ ϩⲛ︦ⲛⲉⲕⲇⲱⲣⲟ︦; proposuimus tibi et coram te tua de tuis donis), ⁴⁹ which would seem to imply that the offering of the gifts had already taken place. We should be careful not to make too much of the verb tenses, at least in CHR, since there, the intercessions later in the anaphora include three petitions that begin with a present tense verb of offering: “we offer you this service for.. . .” This would indicate that when offering occurs in the anaphora is secondary to the fact that the act of offering is constitutive of the anaphora. Furthermore, the various verb tenses would seem to indicate that it might be wise not to be overly literal about the sequence within the anaphora (A then B then C, etc.). ByBASIL and EgBASIL, on the other hand, do not contain any verbs of offering as part of the intercessions.

There are a few other noteworthy features in this section. SyJAMES, CHR, ByBASIL, and EgBASIL all refer to the bread and wine as “gifts,” whether implicitly (the first three using some version of “your own from your own”) or explicitly in EgBASIL (“your own from your own gifts”). The offering in ApCon, on the other hand, is more literal: “We offer. . . this bread and this cup.” The formula “in all and for all” in ATA, SyJAMES, CHR, and ByBASIL seems to be based on LXX 1 Chr 29:14 (ὅτι σὰ τὰ πάντα, καὶ ἐκ τῶν σῶν δεδώκαμέν σοι) and forms an essential part of Parenti’s argument, which we will explore in a later section. ⁵⁰

Another feature of ATA, SyJAMES, CHR, and ByBASIL is the insertion of an acclamation by the people, “We praise you,” which then is expanded later into “We praise you, we bless you, we give thanks to you,” with further slight differences in ATA and SyJAMES. ApCon reveals a different version of this that incorporates the later “we give you thanks” into a different verb form, identifying the offering of the bread and wine as an act of thanksgiving: “We offer you, King and God according to his commandment, this bread and this cup, giving you thanks through him.. . .”

At this point, CHR, ByBASIL, and ApCon have a transition section not found in the other four anaphoras.

D. Table 4: Unique Interjection in CHR, ByBASIL, and ApCon

ByBASIL and ApCon (quite briefly) both refer to God’s action in making the faithful “worthy” to minister or stand at the altar, to which ByBASIL adds a longer description of our unworthiness and God’s mercy. CHR does not contain any of this material, but then begins to parallel ByBASIL with another verb of oblation: CHR in present-tense (the second of five repetitions of προσφέρομεν) while ByBASIL uses an aorist participle (προθέντες). In ByBASIL, “the likeness of the holy body and blood of your Christ” is offered, while in CHR it is “this reasonable and bloodless service” (τὴν λογικὴν καὶ ἀναίμακτον λατρείαν). ⁵¹ We saw earlier that both JAMES and SyJAMES, in the unique intervening section where another verb of offering is included just after the anamnesis, describe what is offered as “this fearful and bloodless sacrifice” (προσφέρομέν σοι, δέσποτα, τὴν φοβερὰν ταύτην και ἀναίμακτον θυσίαν). ⁵² Τhe closest to this phrase is what we find in CHR, which calls the sacrificial offering “this spiritual and bloodless service” (προσφέροντές σοι τὴν λογικὴν καὶ ἀναίμακτον λατρείαν). ⁵³ JAMES and its Syriac variant is the only West Syrian anaphora to use precisely this phraseology, though all of those terms are found in the Catecheses mystagogicae of Cyril of Jerusalem. ⁵⁴ There are a number of parallels to the slightly different language in CHR, namely, in Sarapion, Ambrose’s De sacramentis 4.6.27, The Strasbourg Papyrus, and The Anaphora of St. Mark. ⁵⁵

Table 4: Unique Interjection in CHR, ByBASIL, and ApCon

E. Table 5: The Epiclesis

All seven anaphoras have an explicit epiclesis, though there is some variation in the particulars of the epicletic request. Both versions of JAMES (though not the shorter recension of SyJAMES ⁵⁶ ) and both version of BASIL first ask the Spirit to be sent down “upon us” and then on the gifts, a feature sometimes referred to as a double epiclesis. ⁵⁷ All seven anaphoras request that the Holy Spirit come down upon the bread and wine, referred to as “offerings” or gifts: ATA (ܩܪܒܢܐ qurbānā; oblationem), JAMES (δῶρα; dona), SyJAMES (ܩܪܒ̈ܢܐ qurābānā; oblationes), CHR (δῶρα; dona), ByBASIL (δῶρα; dona), EgBASIL (ⲇⲱⲣⲟⲛ; dona), and ApCon (δῶρα) ⁵⁸ — which all except for ApCon describe as being “set forth” in some fashion. Both JAMES anaphoras then add a long relative clause that describes the Holy Spirit. All of the anaphoras describe in some fashion the affects they hope that the epiclesis will confer upon the bread and wine.

Table 5: The Epiclesis

F. Table 6: The Requested Effects of the Epiclesis on the Gifts

In each of the anaphoras, the epiclesis is followed by at least two sorts of requests: 1) for its effect on the offered bread and wine, and 2) on those who receive the offered bread and wine. A clear pattern is found in all seven anaphoras in the first of these requests: “that they may” followed by a verb (or two) of action upon “this bread [to be] the body of Christ and this cup [to be] the blood of Christ.” JAMES, SyJAMES, CHR, and EgBASIL all request that the Holy Spirit “make” the bread and wine Christ’s body and blood, while the other three ask that the Spirit “show” this bread to be Christ’s body and blood (thawwe in ATA, ⁵⁹ ἀναδεῖξαι in ByBASIL, and ἀποφήνη in ApCon). CHR alone, after naming the body and blood of Christ respectively, adds the phrase, “changing it by your Holy Spirit.”

Table 6: Requested Effects of the Epiclesis on the Gifts

G. Table 7: The Request for Fruitful Communion that Follows the Epiclesis ⁶⁰

The second type of request that follows the epiclesis in all seven anaphoras begins with a purpose clause that directly connects a divine action to “those who receive it” (the eucharistic gifts), that is, a request for the fruit of the reception of the sacrament, such as forgiveness of sins or sanctification (except in EgBASIL), the work of the Holy Spirit (CHR, BASIL, EgBASIL, and ApCon), and ecclesial unity of some sort. It is difficult to make a sharp distinction between these requests and the requests that follow, since the structure seems to imply that the eucharistic action along with the reception of the sacrament are intimately related to the fittingness of making intercession for a whole range of needs.

Table 7: The Request for Fruitful Communion that Follows the Epiclesis

H. Table 8: The Intercessions

All the anaphoras move quite smoothly into more general intercessions. ATA, JAMES, SyJAMES, CHR, and ApCon all begin those intercessions with a verb that connects the oblational character of the eucharist with the intercession: in ATA, it begins, “Therefore we offer you (ܡܩܪܒܝܢܢ mqarbeynan; offerimus), O Lord Almighty, this divine sacrifice (ܠܕܒܚܬܐ ܗܕܐ ܐܠܗܝܬܐ ledbaḥāṭā haḍa alāhayāṭā; sacrificium hoc divinum).. . .” ⁶¹ Neither BASIL nor EgBASIL use any form of a “we offer” verb in the intercessions, but the rest do. SyJAMES repeats the earlier language: “We offer you this fearful and bloodless sacrifice for. . .” (emphasis added); ATA and CHR describe the offering with the adjective λογικὴν (ATA calls it a sacrifice while CHR refers to it as λατρείαν); JAMES and ApCon move quite simply from verb to request: “we offer for. . .”; ATA (ܡܩܪܒܝܢܢ mqarbeynan; offerimus), JAMES (προσφέρομεν), and SyJAMES (ܡܩܪܒܝܢܢ mqarbeynan; offerimus) only use the offering verb once, to begin the intercessions, while CHR and ApCon repeat the verb “we offer” (προσφέρομεν) two additional times in the intercessions. ⁶²

Table 8: The Intercession

Now that these anaphoras have been examined in relation to each other in some detail, the matter of Stevenson and Fenwick’s “missing” oblation is clearer. However, as I have intimated, the situation is a bit more complex, which can be seen if we return to the anamnesis-oblation-epiclesis section. As I noted earlier, ATA shares some features with only SyJAMES and JAMES, and only at this point in the prayer. In the Table 9 below, units A and C are found in all seven of the anaphoras except for JAMES, while the material in unit B is unique to just ATA, SyJAMES, and JAMES:

Table 9: The Anamnesis-Oblation-Epiclesis Unit in ATA, JAMES, and SyJAMES

I. Table 9: The Anamnesis-Oblation-Epiclesis Unit in ATA, JAMES, and SyJAMES

After the anamnesis, SyJAMES and JAMES begin the next unit with a verb of oblation in the expected first-person plural form (προσφέρομεν). Especially noteworthy, given the focus on this study, is that both also frame the offering in terms of sacrifice: “we offer you this fearful and bloodless sacrifice” (SyJAMES: ܠܗܕܐ ܕܒܚܬܐ ܕܚܝܠܬܐ ܘܕܠ ܕܡܐ lehadda dabāḥāṭā dhaylāṭā weddel dmā; idem sacrificium hoc tremendum et incruentum; JAMES: προσφέρομεν σοι, δέσποτα, τὴν φοβερὰν ταύτην και ἀναίμακτον θυσίαν); in ATA, “this divine sacrifice” (ATA: ܠܕܒܚܬܐ ܗܕܐ ܐܠܗܝܬܐ ledbaḥāṭā haḍa alāhayāṭā; sacrificium hoc divinum). ⁶³ All three anaphoras reflect a different sequence than we see in most other Antiochene anaphoras with the presence of this peculiar sequence: oblation (except in ATA); supplication to the Father; request for mercy (JAMES stop here); giving thanks in all and for all; doxology that begins with “We praise.”

While ATA does not have a parallel verb of oblation, ATA and SyJAMES clearly share a set of source material that appears to be unique to the two of them. JAMES, however, is missing the combination of a verb of oblation and the prepositional phrases “in all and for all” found in all the others (except for the missing verb of oblation in ATA). This seems to suggest that at this point in the anaphora, Greek JAMES (at least as it has come down to us) represents the earliest strata after ATA, into which SyJAMES interjects the oblation in the form found in CHR, ByBASIL, EgBASIL, and ApCon, after which it moves smoothly into the epiclesis (though some include an acclamation by the people). At this point, all of the anaphoras pick up with the oblation that we have come to expect directly after the anamnesis, all save for ATA, who again is “missing” an oblation but retains the materials found in all the others save JAMES. The next table puts together all the possible structural parts that could exist in these anaphoras so that we can see more easily what is shared and how they differ from each other (note that at the end, there is a summary of verbs of oblation for each anaphora). ⁶⁴

J. Table 10: Summary of the Anamnesis-Oblation-Epiclesis Unit

A temptation that often accompanies a judgment such as Fenwick’s—along with some interpretations of eucharistic sacrifice in early Christian texts—is to treat a verb of oblation between the anamnesis and epiclesis as the offering verb that really “counts,” namely, the indication of whether or not a particular anaphora understands the Eucharist as a sacrifice. But as we have seen, first-person plural verbs of oblation (usually προσφέροντες) appear in other places in anaphoras, and not always in the expected link from anamnesis to epiclesis. This overly-narrow focus on a specific location of the oblation within the typical West Syrian structure not only leads to observations that an oblation is “missing” but also a more general narrowing of what allows an interpreter to identify if an anaphora reflects a view of the eucharistic action as sacrificial. While noting the missing oblation, Fenwick and Taft could have strengthened their analysis considerably if they had also explored what to make of the oblation that is present: not before the epiclesis, but right after it. An oblation in this location is found in JAMES, SyJAMES, and also in both CHR and ApCon as a way to introduce the intercessions at least once, and sometimes more than once. Furthermore, CHR and ByzBASIL both contain a second oblation just before the epiclesis: CHR in present-tense (προσφέρομεν) while ByzBASIL again uses an aorist participle (προθέντες). Thus, EgBASIL and ATA each have just one verb of offering, JAMES and ByzBASIL have two, SyJAMES and has three, ApCon has four, and CHR contains five.

Table10: Summary of the Anamnesis-Oblation-Epiclesis Unit

To his credit, Stevenson does point out that “[i]t is only at the start of the intercessions that we come across this formula” of offering in ATA. But then the spiritualization thesis rears its head: he claims that the sacrificial language that is present is “a reference to the whole eucharist, along the lines of the ‘living sacrifice’ of the whole congregation, in offering their concerns to God.”⁶⁵ But does the anaphora make such a distinction? Stevenson’s presupposition seems to be that for an anaphora to understand the bread and wine as offered in sacrifice, there must be a verb of offering in the anamnesis. Again, this is another reminder that the heuristic of the so-called “families” of anaphoral structure (West Syrian, East Syrian, and so forth) can just as easily obscure by concealing the particulars of this or that “Antiochene” anaphora. As we have seen, several of the influential representatives of this family contain more than one verb of offering. In fact, most contain more than one! Thus, there is a greater emphasis on the sacrificial and oblationary character of the Eucharist in these prayers than an assumption about the structure of the typical Antiochene anaphora might lead one to conclude.

The Contribution of Stefano Parenti

In a 2020 article, Stefano Parenti makes a proposal about the origin of verbs of oblation in the anamnetic unit of Antiochene anaphoras which builds on the work of three key articles by Robert Taft.⁶⁶ By drawing on a range of sources—Theodoret of Cyrus, the Catechesis in Verses of the Monk Hyperichios, Firmus of Caesarea in Cappadocia, the Pseudo-Chrysostom Text: “Sermon I on Penitence,” and some inscriptions from the period—Parenti proposes that the language of offering in Antiochene anaphoras originates in dedicatory formulas “associated with objects, therefore to buildings, to material realities” that began “to circulate in the middle of the fifth century.” Instead of arising from a euchological theology of sacrifice, he suggests, “I would rather be directed to see in the formula τὰ σὰ ἐκ τῶν σῶν an extension to the eucharistic gifts of a dedicatory formula that was becoming increasingly widespread and popular” within the orbit of the church. These formulae seem to be based (as I noted earlier) on LXX 1 Chr 29:14 (ὅτι σὰ τὰ πάντα, καὶ ἐκ τῶν σῶν δεδώκαμέν σοι) and were used in dedicatory language for “objects offered as gifts to the churches.”⁶⁷ In other words, he wishes “to discard sacrificial declinations of the formula τὰ σὰ ἐκ τῶν σῶν,” which was the basis of Montminy’s suggestion that this was the original expression of the notion of a eucharistic “sacrificial offering” within early anaphoras. ⁶⁸ Instead, he follows the approach of René-Georges Coquin in his 1969 study of the Anaphora of St. Mark, where he “posed a simple and immediate question: what does the Greek τὰ σά mean? The response was equally straightforward: they are the gifts of bread and wine for the Eucharist taken in their materiality, and previously placed on the altar, as the aorist προεθήκαμεν of the Alexandrian tradition states.” ⁶⁹ In accepting Coquin’s proposal, Parenti concludes that “simple observation leads us to discard sacrificial declinations of the formula τὰ σὰ ἐκ τῶν σῶν.” This raises, of course, the immediate question: what does Parenti understand to be the distinction between something offered to God and something that is a “sacrificial offering”? This is a question that Parenti does not answer.

The first piece of historical evidence to support his view that there was a development in early Christianity from a more interior or spiritual concept of sacrifice to an understanding that the Eucharist is a material sacrifice is a sermon from Theodoret of Cyrus on Heb 8:4–5. There, Theodoret speaks of Christian priests “keeping memory” of the one sacrifice of Christ, and Parenti suggests that John Chrysostom says the same thing in a sermon on a similar passage. From this, Parenti then concludes that this sermonic evidence, along with ATA’s missing oblation preceding the epiclesis, indicates “that in the ‘mystical liturgy’ the ministers do not offer sacrifice.” In his view, both Theodoret and John Chrysostom have a “typological interpretation,” which he explains in this way: “The Last Supper is the τύπος, the image/model to which the liturgical celebration must conform.” ⁷⁰

There are a number of problems with Parenti’s argumentation. The first of these has to do with the interpretation of the evidence of Theodoret and John Chrysostom. The text that Parenti cites from Theodoret actually does not connect the Eucharist to the Last Supper as “the image/model to which the liturgical celebration must conform.”

While Theodoret does use the term τύπος (as does Chrysostom), he connects the response to the Lord’s command to “do this” with a memorial of Christ’s actions on our behalf, namely, his suffering, not the Last Supper. ⁷² The Eucharist itself is directly related to the Last Supper as a response is related to the command that instigated it. But the typological connection is between the Eucharist and Christ’s saving actions outside the Eucharist. Parenti claims that John Chrysostom’s interpretation is “the same typological perception” as Theodoret’s. Chrysostom makes a nearly identical interpretation in a homily on Heb 9:24–26, but then goes much further than Theodoret:

Chrysostom’s explanation is richer and broader. Like Theodoret, Chrysostom is clear that we do not offer a sacrifice that is in addition to Christ’s. But, Chrysostom adds, Christians do offer something, and that which is offered is rightly called a sacrifice. What Christians offer, he explains, is the offering that was already made, namely, Christ’s own self-offering of himself. Robert Louis Wilken thinks it is self-evident that this is an expression of belief in material sacrifice, whereby the action of the Eucharist is joined to and makes present the one sacrifice of Christ and thus has some sort of continuity with Hebrew Bible priests, even though they offered something quite distinct. Both Theodoret and Chrysostom agree that Christian priests do not offer a sacrifice that is in addition to Christ’s. But since Chrysostom is clear that we can also say that Christian priests do offer a sacrifice, there is no reason to think that Theodoret would not agree with Chrysostom. Thus, the conclusion by Parenti “that in the ‘mystical liturgy’ the ministers do not offer sacrifice” is doubtful, at least if these two witnesses are the basis for the claim.

Another aspect of Parenti’s argument concerns the formula τὰ σὰ ἐκ τῶν σῶν. He argues that we can “discard sacrificial declinations of the formula τὰ σὰ ἐκ τῶν σῶν” because this is dedicatory and not sacrificial. This too deserves to be questioned. The passage he cites from Firmus of Caesarea in Cappadocia (St. Basil’s successor) is remarkable and makes it clear that this formula is definitely attached to the dedication of objects as an act of religious piety. It seems less clear, however, that we can definitely conclude, as Parenti does, that “the formula did not sound familiar either to Firmo or to Evandrius” and thus that the “anaphora in use there (BAS?) did not possess an oblation formula inspired by the scriptural passage” and that the “dedicatory formula is independent of liturgical use in the anaphora and precedes it.” ⁷⁵ Both of these seem like possibilities but not certainties. Even if the anaphora in use at the time did not contain an oblation that was inspired by LXX 1 Chron 29:14, it quite possibly had an oblationary formula. Thus, the fact that the scriptural language has its origin in the anaphora by way of broader dedicatory formulas is less consequential of a discovery than his claim that the oblation is introduced to these anaphoras because of the dedication language. The way Parenti presents the data also seems to imply that the sacrificial understanding of the Eucharist may have been an unintended consequence of the introduction of these verbs of offering that originate in dedicatory formulas. Even more so, given the next piece of evidence that he presents (the Pseudo-Chrysostom text: Sermon 1 on Penitence), it is clear that verbs of oblation are present in at least some Greek anaphoras by at least the end of the fourth century. Oddly, this does not seem to strengthen the claim that the origin of verbs of oblation come by way of dedicatory formulas, but instead indicate the presence of such sacrificial language in anaphoras before the fifth century whose origin is elsewhere.

Parenti explains that, “[i]n the end we find ourselves with only two traditions, the Alexandrian (MK) [Anaphora of St. Mark] and the Constantinopolitan (BAS), both using the formula τὰ σὰ ἐκ τῶν σῶν inspired by 1 Chr 29:14.” It is very clear that the Greek τὰ σὰ that is offered is none other than “the gifts of bread and wine for the Eucharist taken in their materiality, and previously placed on the altar, as the aorist προεθήκαμεν of the Alexandrian traditions states.” ⁷⁶ This clarity is extremely helpful, especially because it takes the linguistic evidence at face value, namely, that the reference of the participle προσφέροντες must include the material offering of bread and wine.

But we must ask nonetheless whether Parenti also engages in the all-too-common misreading of the evidence in favor of the view that material offering in the Eucharist is a latter addition. Parenti is quite clear that he rejects Jean-Paul Montminy’s interpretation that verb of oblation in Strasbourg, the earliest evidence of the Alexandrian rite (προσφέρο[μ]εν [τ]ὴν θυ[σί]αν τὴν λογικήν, τὴν ἀναί[μακτ]ον λατρε[ίαν] ⁷⁷ ), is evidence of “the emergence of the anaphora of ‘sacrificial offering.’ ” In fact, he argues that in Strasburg (in contrast to MARK and BASIL), where the oblation is early in the prayer (“in the initial thanksgiving” section, like in MARK), “the oblation coincides with the offering of spiritual and bloodless worship, that is, of the Eucharistic Prayer itself,” not the material offering of bread and wine. ⁷⁸ He contrasts this with possibly the next oldest witness, the Anaphora of Barcelona, where the oblation is also early in the prayer (in the post-Sanctus). “But,” Parenti claims, “the object is no longer the anaphora but ‘these creatures, the bread and the chalice.’ ” ⁷⁹ But is this distinction between the offering of the anaphora and the bread and wine a distinction that is warranted by the texts in question? Thus, I think it is fair to conclude that even if Parenti is correct that the formula τὰ σὰ ἐκ τῶν σῶν has its origins in dedicatory formulas, the evidence he uses does not demonstrate that earlier anaphoras did not express a eucharistic theology that precludes material sacrifice, a fact that is especially clear in his discussion of Theodoret and John Chrysostom.

Conclusion

This study has afforded a number of key insights. First, the importance of the “missing oblation” that has been highlighted by Fenwick, Taft, Parenti and others needs to be balanced against the oblation that is present in ATA. Second, the emphasis on the missing oblation, combined with the tendency to summarize the Antiochene structure with little reference to the importance of verbs of oblation, results in an inaccurate sense of the degree to which the anaphora expresses the belief that the action of offering bread and wine is constitutive of the eucharistic action. Third, Parenti’s invaluable contributions about the linguistic overlap between religious dedicatory formulas and the phrase τὰ σὰ ἐκ τῶν σῶν, found in SyJAMES, CHR, ByzBASIL, and EgBASIL among others and inspired by 1 Chron 29:14 LXX, should be balanced against his tendency to perpetuate the unhelpful heuristic about the spiritualization of sacrifice and his underemphasis of the belief in the materiality of the eucharistic sacrifice in writers such as John Chrysostom and earlier anaphoras. Fifth, future research on the application of sacrificial language to the Eucharist in early Christianity must avoid distinctions such as spiritual versus material and instead attend to the complexity and polyphony of ways that “sacrifice” is applied to Christian ritual actions, as well as in Judaism and Greek religious rituals. Furthermore, we would do well to replace a developmental view of sacrifice from spiritual to material with a view of the development of precision, clarity, and specification as to the ways that sacrifice is a proper adjective for the Christian Eucharist. Finally, we must allow the actual texts of Antiochene anaphoras and the centrality of sacrificial language and verbs of oblation to guide our discussions of these influential eucharistic prayers and allow the parallel patristic evidence to be fully heard.