Lectionary Studies

What do Jews think scripture is? How do Jews view the anthology they variously call Tanakh, Miqra or “the Bible? Until now, no book has surveyed the answers Jews through the ages have given to these questions. This is the more surprising, since one would think that the conception of the Book among the People of the Book would be a topic of interest. The way Jews construct scripture, after all, is one way Jews construct themselves. The purpose of this anthology is to fill this gap. The seventeen essays in this collection explore how various figures, movements, or texts conceptualize scripture. Issues they address include:
- Ways in which the Tanakh is and is not thought to be authoritative
- The  relationship between Tanakh and tradition (in rabbinic parlance: between the Oral and Written Torahs)
- The question of who has the authority to interpret scripture
- The special status of the Bible’s language, or the ways its use of language differs from that of other texts
- The relationship of scripture to God and/or heavenly intermediaries
- The place of the Tanakh in the life of Jewish communities"

This public lecture was the first occasion of introducing byzantine lectionary in Hong Kong.  It briefly depicted the origins and evolution of byzantine lectionaries up till 10th century.  The contents and terminologies of the  liturgical Gospel book were briefly examined.  A particular lection [Luke 19.1-10] was cited as an example to appreciate the rationale behind the lection arrangement in the byzantine worship.

The last General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, of July 2018, has approved the measure A068 Plan for the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer.

The General Convention has given green light to a project that had been simmering over all on the basis level of the Church. Unlike other propositions of BCP revision, my prospect is thoroughly ecumenical. I know from experience that for many people inside or outside the Episcopal Church, ecumenism is irrelevant ; for some, the Episcopal Church has crossed too many lines : women’s ordination, same-gender marriage, a few controversial clergy-persons etc. ; some others do not understand why the Episcopalians would still compromise with misogynist, homophobic, and other lesser enlightened Christians. For these groups, as opposite as they seem to be,  ecumenism and liturgy are first-world problems.

In spite of this, I believe that the love of God goes hand in hand with the love for the neighbour, and our Lord Jesus Christ seems to have accepted one-year salary’s worth of perfume on his body from a friend, although others argued that it could have been put to better use. As for the ecumenism, Christian unity has been under inner attack almost since the Pentecost, but notwithstanding the “ecumenical winter” which we see now, there is reason to believe that opportunities such as the BCP revision may be open doors to an ecumenical spring.

Therefore, my objective is to offer to the public an informed opinion about additional guidelines to follow for the BCP revision, bearing in mind the unity of the Christians.

My strategy is to take the 1979 BCP, analyse thematically its parts, describe its ecumenical flaws and strengths – how did this change distance the Episcopal Church from other Churches ? how did that change help the Christian unity ? how does that element manifest the one faith of the Church catholic ? – and prospect a better way of correcting the errors in the future, and of preserving what is good.
The proposed changes are not merely theoretical. Most of them have been tried in practice. The General Convention calls for experimentation at the basis level, under the supervision of the bishops. However, long before the call, many congregations have already had experiments of their own. Other people may share different kinds of experimental liturgies ; the ones which are shown here have followed, as I have said, an ecumenical approach.

Many factors have contributed to the precipitous decline of Catholics' knowledge of and adherence to the Church's Magisterium on marriage and the family—including powerful forces of liberalism, secularism, hedonistic materialism, and individualism, the failure of the clergy to articulate and defend sexual ethics, the counterwitness of dissenting Catholic politicians and Church leaders, and the continuing effects of deficiencies in religious education and school curricula. A neglected factor, however, may turn out to be the sacred liturgy, which is where Catholics most commonly encounter the Church and her teaching. It is worth asking whether tremendous changes in the form of the liturgy itself, taken together with prevailing customs of celebration, may have contributed to confusion, uncertainty, ignorance, laxity, and heterodoxy in the realm of marriage and family. This essay tests the hypothesis in five areas: the suppression or marginalization of key Scripture texts in the reformed lectionary; the advance of feminism and egalitarianism in liturgical ministries; the serious doctrinal and spiritual deficiencies of much contemporary church music and other sacred arts; the disconnect between the Church's exalted doctrine and the horizontal, anthropocentric ars celebrandi of wedding ceremonies; and the almost total loss of asceticism in connection with the reception of Holy Communion. If the argumentation is cogent, it follows that the Church today must take much more seriously the urgent need for a " reform of the reform " as well as the promotion of the traditional form of the Roman Rite, which is unencumbered with the foregoing difficulties.

L'éminent chercheur Charles-Athanase Renoux travaille depuis de longues années à mettre au jour des documents dont la valeur est inestimable pour la connaissance des usages liturgiques anciens de Jérusalem. Sa générosité et son rayonnement ont suscité beaucoup de publications dans des domaines liturgiques dont l'étendue reflète la richesse de leur initiateur. En reconnaissance au Père Renoux pour le service ainsi rendu, ses collègues et ses disciples ont pris l'initiative d'offrir ce volume rassemblant des études dans des domaines diversifiés, mais dont la source et le point commun reste la région des lieux saints, terrain d'élaboration d'une liturgie riche dont se réclament la plupart des traditions locales postérieures. Puissent ces pages susciter la poursuite de travaux scientifiques en faveur d'une connaissance accrue de traditions inspirées qu'il est indispensable de continuer à arracher à l'oubli.

This is the Foreword I contributed to Matthew Hazell's magnificent book "Index Lectionum: A Comparative Table of Readings for the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite." If you are going to do any serious study of the use of Scripture in the Mass (old or new rite), and of the startling manner in which passages that ARE included in the old lectionary were OMITTED in the new, this book is a must-have.
http://www.amazon.com/Index-Lectionum-Comparative-Extraordinary-Lectionary/dp/1530230721

This paper takes the relation of the Ember Days of September (Quattuor tempora) to Yom Kippur as a test for the question as to how useful is the tree/model of the ‘parting of the ways’ of Judaism and Christianity.
Passages in Leo the Great and the choice of readings in the oldest Roman lectionaries for the Ember Days of September can best be explained on the background that Roman Christians adopted and “Christianized” Jewish practices of Yom Kippur long after a supposed “parting of the ways.” Leo’s description of contemporary Jewish practices shows acquaintance with Mishna Yoma. In addition, the Lectionary readings are exceptional from a source-internal view (the Minor Prophets are usually not read in the Roman lectionaries). On the other hand, the readings are very close to readings attested in Jewish traditions from Palestine and Babylonia or even in medieval sources for the festivals of Tishri, especially Yom Kippur. Most probably, the Christian readings were adopted from Judaism. This interaction took place after Constantine and in an area where such influence is usually not expected (in contrast to e.g. Syria). The tree model for the development of Judaism and Christianity according to which rituals or ideology of one system did not pass to the other system has to be abandoned as too great a simplification.

The object of this study is to investigate how and why the collects in Swedish lectionaries between 1562 and 2003 (lectionaries used in the Church of Sweden include both lessons and collects) have been changed. It focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as the transformation of the collects really starts with the lectionary issued in 1921. Collects from a number of editions of the lectionary, as well as preparatory works and regulations by the Church Assembly, are analysed.

The version of the Bible known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) and also designated Palestinian Syriac is the Palestinian Aramaic dialect of Judea and Sinai. This dialect was most prevalent between the fifth and eighth centuries, but it continued to serve as a liturgical language for the Christian Melkite community into the thirteenth century. The written dialect is transmitted through the translation of Greek literature such as the Old and New Testament as well as patristic texts. Furthermore, some inscriptional relics that have been preserved in churches and monasteries (mosaics, stones, graffiti). The inscriptional testimonies are helpful for the localization of CPA’s geographical distribution. What makes the CPA Bible material unique and important is that it comprises textual witnesses of the first (fifth to eighth centuries) and the second (tenth to thirteenth centuries) periods for the Old Testament. They were transmitted in their original manuscripts without ever being copied, thus reflecting the original fourth-century written dialect. The reading and publication of the early period manuscripts has been partially hindered by the fact that they are only extant in the form of palimpsests, overwritten in Arabic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac. It has been less helpful that Syriac lexemes, forms, and syntactical constructions have been read into the first palimpsest publications, disguising important textual variants for Bible critics.

In 1967, as part of their work on the post-Vatican II reform of the lectionary, Coetus XI of the Consilium published a draft lectionary, covering Sundays, weekdays and certain feasts. This volume was sent out to all Bishops’ conferences as well as around 800 experts for consultation. Various changes to this draft lectionary were made before the final version was promulgated in 1969, and this document is designed to facilitate research in this area of the liturgical reform.

The document covers the Sundays after Epiphany and after Pentecost, which are labelled as "per annum" ("Ordinary Time") in the Ordinary Form of the Mass.

This paper explores the connections between artistic expressions and liturgical action in a newly published Armenian lectionary of KingHetoum dating the 13th century. As the extensive research on the subject is only to launch, the present paper acts rather as a catalyst, than a comprehensive analysis. The paper will begin by exploring the social-cultural matrix of the work. The cultural horizon of
Armenian Christianity is the Gospel illumination practice that imagines the Scripture in flexible artistic forms. The methodology used is a mixed one combining historical-cultural and theological perspectives. This paper frames the lectionary's aesthetic vision into a theological register based on the purposes these images serve and the meanings they communicate. This framing, in turn, shows how visual forms can operate in a liturgical matrix. In an age of mechanical reproduction, the illuminated lectionary acts as an imaginative space mapping and shaping a specific liturgical perception. Hence the lectionary both in a script and an image presents to be a sacred space, an incarnation of the divine logos as it was illustrated by the Armenian medieval theologians. The paper concludes with the aftermath of the Lectionary indicating that the artistically crafted liturgical manuscript was also charged with eschatological motives.

The so-called Caucasian Albanian Palimpsest kept in St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai for the first time allows to draw a comprehensive picture of one of the languages (probably the state language) of the third medieval Christian kingdom in Transcaucasia, namely (Caucasian) Albania. The relevant parts of the two palimpsest manuscripts (Sin. N 13 and N 55) covering roughly 120 pages (that is two thirds of the two manuscripts) have been deciphered, interpreted, and translated in the course of an international project running since 2003. The Caucasian Albanian texts comprise a) fragments of a Lectionary, and b) parts of the Gospel of John, written by a different hand in a different style. A number of both text-internal and text-external arguments suggest that the original manuscripts were produced in the 7th century A.D. The analysis of the texts clearly argues in favour of the assumption that the translators relied upon corresponding Old Armenian sources. Nevertheless, it can...

LEXEGETE™ was the first lectionary software for both Apple Macintosh and PC-compatible computers. It was introduced in Atlanta, GA, in April of 1987 at the CAMCON (Computer-assisted Ministry Conference), where it was awarded The CAMCON Prize for the most innovative new Bible Software. Lexegete was originally published in 1987 (Year A, Matthew), 1988 (Year B, Mark), and 1988 (Year C, Luke), and available in a print-on-demand format. Since 2006, pericopes from LEXEGETE™ have been available online as a weblog [http: www. yourobdtsvt.blogspot.com] and now as part of Facebook's "The Text This Week" page. Tischrede Press plans a "1517" Edition online in time for the 500th Celebration of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 2017, possibly on Kindle for iPad and iPhone.