Lection and Liturgy

The third and final vignette in this little series of glimpses at public reading in the past comes from around the year 150AD. (The previous two glimpses were  here , and  here .) In the pages of the New Testament (and some other early Christian literature) we get various instructions about what Christians should do when they meet for worship, and various glimpses of special gatherings. However, we don’t get a full description of an ordinary Christian worship assembly. For such a description we have to wait till the middle of the second century, for a writer called Justin, a Greek-speaking immigrant to Rome from the Palestinian Samaritan city now known as Nablus. Justin was a philosopher who appears to have made his living as a teacher, both before and after he became a Christian. He’s famous as the first Christian apologist – a word which means someone who mounted reasoned public defences and commendations of Christianity to outsiders. We have different writings from him whic...

Yesterday I looked at public reading in Nehemiah 8. Today we’re jumping forward to the gospels, and Jesus being invited to read the lesson. At the beginning of his account of Jesus’ ministry, Luke chooses to emphasise and elaborate the story of Jesus preaching at Nazareth. The first part of the story (before it all turns a bit sour) goes like this. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then h...

I want to look at the tradition of public reading through three different texts that show different aspects of it. Today’s text is a story comes from one of the lesser read books of the Old Testament, Nehemiah. It’s the only passage from Nehemiah that crops up in the Sunday lectionary for the main service. Parts of this story, from Nehemiah 8, crop up on the third Sunday of Epiphany (or the third Sunday in Ordinary Time) in Year C. (If any of the words I’ve just used (lectionary, Epiphany, Ordinary Time or Year C) phase you, then you can find them all defined in the Glossary.) Gustave Doré’s woodcut of the scene (1843: Public Domain) He imagines Ezra as a second Moses with stone tablets, rather than the scroll described in the story Here’s the text. (The reason for putting the word LORD in capitals is a long-standing convention inherited from Judaism. It signifies that the Hebrew text is not the word Lord, but the four-consonant name of God – YHWH.) "The priest Ezra brought the la...

I’m never quite sure whether to be astonished at how much of value survives from the ancient world, or regretful that there are so many things we don’t know. But all our descriptions of the ancient world, including the world(s) of the early Christians, are a mix of things we know, and our best (often very well educated) guesses. But there’s also an awful lot of knowledge that, frankly, is simply missing.  A lot of that has to do with culture. It’s a slippery word and people write books trying to describe it, but one way to think of culture is “the things everyone knows but no-one bothers to explain”.  Culture: the things everyone knows but no-one explains A trivial example might help. When someone says “Can you pass the salt, please?”, we instinctively reach for the container with one hole in the lid. But almost certainly, someone describing the scene would simply say: “She passed the salt.” They would not think to write: “Emily looked at the table. There were two containers t...