Divine Liturgies - Human Problems in Byzantium, Armenia, Syria and Palestine (Hardcover, New Ed)

A study of liturgy in Byzantium, Armenia, Syria and Palestine. The author shows how the central Christian liturgy, the Eucharist, poses all-too human problems of structure, text, history, context and meaning. For humankind's unfailing, incessant ritual repetition of the Lord's Supper down through the ages and across multiple Christian cultures in the liturgies of east and west, in obedience to Jesus' Last Supper mandate, Do this in remembrance of me, has, inevitably, given rise within the same recognizably common framework to innumerable diversities of shape, text, cultural context and theological interpretation. It has also given rise to debates, sometimes heated, among modern experts about the most suitable methods for resolving the problems arising from these differences. The work explores the theories of Anton Baumstark, Dom Gregory Dix and Josef Andreas Jungmann, and what we can derive from their insights. Their way of working, applied to the problems of cultural history, structural, historical and textual reconstruction, theological interpretation, and method involved in the modern scholarly debate on these issues, are the object of the author's studies in this volume.