Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2017)
On the Question of the Epiclesis in the ‘Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ’
Abstract
The author analyses the fragment of the anaphora of the ‘Testament of our Lord’ which opens its petitionary section and is considered by many scholars as an epiclesis. The Syriac text of the fragment contains a petition addressed to the Holy Trinity which can be translated as ‘bring this drink and this food of Your sanctification’. It is shown that this fragment cannot be an invocation of the Holy Spirit upon oblation as had been stated by B. Botte and C. Richardson. The statement by N. Uspenskiy and archpriest L. Voronov that it is an ‘ascending epiclesis’ cannot be accepted either. It is shown that the Syriac imperative ʾaytāy (‘bring’) can be a misreading of the perfect form ʾaytīn (‘we have brought’), which can be confirmed by one of the manuscripts used by the first editor of the ‘Testament’ cardinal Rahmani as well as by the Ethiopic version of the text. The whole fragment can be a reduplication of the oblation of bread and wine in the Anamnesis, the element which usually binds together the anamnetic and petitionary sections of ancient anaphoras. Such reduplication could become necessary because the Testament’s compiler had restructured the eucharistic prayer of the so called ‘Apostolic Tradition’ and made interpolations into its text which resulted in that the Anamnesis had become separated from the petitionary section. At the same time, the fragment can reflect the intermediary stage in the development of the epiclesis, the transition from the petitition to sanctify the community via the eucharistic oblation to the explicit petition to sanctify the oblation itself. The unusual order of mentioning the eucharistic elements (first ‘drink’, then ‘food’) can indicate that the fragment had been taken from some ancient (no later than the 3rd century) liturgical source.
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