Gregory Tucker: The Holy Friday Idiomelon Σήμερον κρεμᾶται ἐπὶ ξύλου and Liturgical Exchange Between Constantinople & Jerusalem

The ancient hymn Σήμερον κρεμᾶται ἐπὶ ξύλου is among the most widely-disseminated and enduringly-popular poetic compositions for the commemoration of Christ’s Passion. One of the twelve hagiopolite Holy Friday troparia idiomela, it appears for the first time in the old Georgian Lectionary and subsequently in witnesses to various liturgical traditions of the Christian East. Sebastià Janeras’s groundbreaking study, Le Vendredi-Saint dans la tradition liturgique byzantine(1988), indicates one significant variant in the text: the absence in the earliest witnesses of two hemistichs, mentioning the nails and lance of the Passion, that are found in the received Greek text. This short communication claims that these hemistichs were added to the text when it was transferred to the cathedral liturgy of Constantinople, where the veneration of the relic of the lance was enacted at the end of Holy Week, rather than that of a relic of the cross, as happened in Jerusalem. This thesis is bolstered by the absence in many manuscripts of the corresponding hemistichs in the parallel hymn for the feast of the Lord’s Nativity, Σήμερον γεννᾶται ἐκ παρθένου. Thus, the Holy Friday idiomelon should be accepted not only as relatively early evidence for the exchange of hymnody between liturgical traditions but also of the conscious reworking of such texts for new contexts.