Ágnes T. Mihálykó: The Earliest Euchologia on Papyrus: Bishops, Orthodoxy, and the Regulation of Liturgical Prayer

Fourth and fifth-century papyri from Egypt preserve a number of prayers, which demonstrate the variety of practices in this formative period of Christianity. Some are liturgical prayers for the Eucharist and other church celebrations, whereas others appear to belong to private or domestic devotional practices and express beliefs that were becoming suspect in the eyes of a church hierarchy supporting an orthodoxy in formation. The papyri preserving liturgical prayers exhibit some remarkable patterns when compared with the private prayers, with later copies of prayers and with manuscripts of other liturgical texts. In contrast with these other texts, which have a tendency to be informal copies on single sheets and sometimes rolls, liturgical prayers are written down as part of carefully prepared collections in codices, the earliest euchologia preserved. How can we explain this material evidence? In my paper I will present the hypothesis that liturgical prayers, mainly oral until the fourth century, were not noted down, as previous research has suggested, in a spontaneous and gradual process. Instead, the earliest euchologia were results of a conscious effort by ecclesiastical authorities to edit and circulate respectable prayer texts that corresponded to their exigencies of orthodoxy and rhetorical quality of the priests’ praying. I will furthermore explore the agency of the Alexandrian patriarch and the local bishops behind these regulatory efforts and point to the prayer tradition that emerged as a result to the detriment of alternative models.