Lection and Liturgy

This follows on from the post Reading the right books: memory . It’s quite clear that the majority of the texts in what is now the Jewish bible and Christian Old Testament were regarded by the earliest Christians as scripture, even while some are used much more extensively than others. It’s less certain where they thought the boundaries were, or how clear a listing they carried in their heads. Jesus, like other Jews of his time, seems most commonly to refer to two broad categories of scripture “the law and the prophets” 1 While we can’t be certain, it seems likely that synagogue liturgy already included a pattern that reflects that: a reading from the law, followed by a reading from the prophets. We saw this pattern a couple of days ago when we looked at Jesus reading at Nazareth . Something like that may be reflected in one of the stories in the Acts of the Apostles: “After the reading of the law and the prophets, the officials of the synagogue sent them a message,...