THE  DIFFERENT  STRUCTURES  OF  THE 
CHRISTIAN  EUCHARIST

Before concluding this chapter, we must make one further
observation which will appear as the utmost importance for the rest
of our study.  It involves the respective structure of the two groups
of berakah which have just been studied: that of the Synagogue
service and that of the meals. In this latter case we have three
berakoth.  The first concerns creation, and more especially the
creation of life.  The second refers to redemption ,brought to mind
by the promised land whose fruits have just been eaten.  The third
develops the berakah, which is most precisely a praise of God for
his mirabilia that have already been accomplished, into a
supplication for the eschatological fulfillment of the people of God
in that Kingdom where He will ever be praised for the definitive
building of Jerusalem.

     It is obvious that the two berakoth before the Shemah and the
following Tefillah present a development that is closely connected
with the latter.  The first of these other berakoth  is also a
"blessing" for creation, and in this case for the creation of light
whether visible or invisible ("knowledge").  In turn, the second is a
"blessing" for redemption which this time is concertized in the gift
of the Torah.  The totality of the "eighteen" blessing similarly
represents, although this time by a series of detailed intercessions, a
development of the berakah for past gifts into an entreaty for future
gifts, considered as the continuation and the fulfillment of the
mirabilia commemorated in praise.  But here, just as in the third
meal berakah, despite the multiplicity of objects which it now
includes, the prayer is still unified in the dominant idea of the
building of Jerusalem which is to be fully accomplished in the
eschatological kingdom.  And it is this light that the prayer of
supplications returns once again to a prayer of praise in the final
doxology.

     For simplicity's sake, we may use letters for each of these
prayers.  A for the first berakah before the Shema, B for the second
and C for the whole Tefillah.  In the same way we shall call there
final meal berakoth respectively D,E,. and F.  The point we are
going to make then, is that A is parallel to D, B to E and C to F,
while the development ABC constitutes an organic whole by itself
parallel to what happens with DEF.

     If, as we shall see, the development of the primitive Christian
Liturgy seems to have come about within a framework inherited
from the Jewish Liturgy, we can expect to find a schema that
closely follows DEF in the most ancient prayers of the Christian
Eucharistic Liturgy.  From the moment that the Christian
Eucharistic meal was no longer celebrated after a service of
readings and prayers, where the early Christians still continued to
be associated with the Jews in the synagogue, but on the contrary
after such a service, still more or less analogous to that of the
Synagogue but now proper to the Church, we may also expect to
see a Christian prayer develop where a DEF schema appears
following the ABC schema.  But this interconnection, which never
happened in Judaism since the meals were never immediately tied to
the Synagogue service, will give rise to a problem that has yet to be
posed.  The parallelism between ADC and DEF will be all the more
noticeable since the disappearance of the Shema (whose place was
taken by the Eucharistic meal) will bring ABC into immediate
proximity with DEF.  We may then expect to witness a more or less
successful and more or less forced fusion between ABC and DEF.

     All of this, as we shall point out, corresponds exactly to the
history of the Eucharistic Liturgy.  The oldest formulas of the
Eucharist we have contain exclusively a prayer (or rather a series of
three prayers) of the DEF type.  Form the moment that the
Christian service of reading and prayer and the Eucharistic meal 
became soldered together, we see the appearance of a Eucharistic
Prayer where an ABC schema becomes more or less easily fused
with a DEF schema.

     But quite soon more or less important modifications can be
observed that synthesize the two groups so that doublets or too
evident repetitions might be avoided.  Once this remodeling
produced a completely new mold, a new schema was arrived at,
which we characterize by the formula AD-BE-CF.

     It is now time to see how the Christian Eucharistic Prayer was in
fact to be born from the Jewish berakoth, which were first simply
re-used with few sight modifications, and then progressively
transfigured.





























                               CHAPTER  FOUR

                        FROM  THE  JEWISH  BERAKAH
                       TO  THE  CHRISTIAN  EUCHARIST


     Cardinal Schuster said that in the Psalter Christ had found a
ready made sacerdotal book in which He has only to read the
Liturgy of His sacrifice. It would be even more exact to say this
about the Jewish Liturgy and its berakoth, even though it is true
that they merely express what has remained latent in the psalter.  As
has been often pointed out, Christ's words suppose an unequaled
knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, with the absolute understanding
that it was His function, and His alone, to interpret it.  Nor is Jesus
any less the predestined heir of synagogal piety.  It can be said that
it was reserved to Him to reveal to the whole world everything that
it contained germinally and to bring it to flower in His own piety. 
But it is in the context of the Jewish piety of the Son of Mary that
the piety of the Son of God was to be humanly expressed.

                       JESUS'  USE  OF  THE  BERAKAH

Just as it can be said that Jesus of Nazareth is the Word made flesh,
it could also be said of His humanity that in it man has come to
pronounce the perfect "blessing", the blessing in which everything
human gives itself over as a perfect  response to the God who
speaks.  In the human life of Jesus the Divine Word finds its perfect
creative and salvific fulfillment.  The perfect blessing that Jesus
pronounces will be fulfilled in the supreme act of His existence, the
Cross.

     With the exception of a few short invocations, the Synoptic
Gospels give us only one prayer as Jesus' own and the same is true
of St. John.

     It is worthy of note that the prayer mentioned  by Matthew and
Luke after the first mission of the Twelve is a typical berakah.  It is
all the more so since its theme is the one which we have seen grow
into the major and ultimately the dominant theme of the berakoth:
the "knowledge of God" in us, responding to the knowledge He has
of us, in the blessing which His own Word provokes in response.

     The berakah for knowledge reaches its completion in this text
since in Jesus God reveals himself perfectly to man and elicits man's
perfect response.  At the same time this berakah for the knowledge
that the Father has of the Son and the knowledge that the Son
receives from the Father open out into a berakah for the
communication of this singular intimacy to the "poor", in the sense
that Israel understood the term, that is, those who live by faith
alone.

     Here is the text that we find in St. Luke which is undoubtedly
the form closet to the formulas that Jesus must actually have used:
        In that same hour He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I
thank  Thee, Father, Lord      of Heaven and earth, that Thou hast
hidden these things fr om the  wise and understanding   and
revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was Th y gracious
will.  All things have been delivered to Me by My Father; and no
one knows who the Son is except the Father or who the Father is
except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal
Him.  

     There is not a detail in this text which is not filled with meaning. 
To begin with, Jesus' rejoicing expresses the joy which is the soul of
every berakah.  It is the rejoicing of one who through divine
revelation is discovering the meaning of all things, and of the very
life of man.  Indeed, everything takes on its meaning in our
knowledge of God as the one who first knows us.  Before we have
any consciousness of anything, before we exist, He knows us.  He
knows us with a knowledge that is love.  Once we discover it, all
things become resolved in His love.

     But Jesus' own exultation infinitely surpasses that of every Old
Covenant believer.  His prayer is the prayer of one who knows not
only that He is known by God, but that He is in some way the
unique object of Divine Knowledge: the one in whom the
knowledge proper to God (not only as sovereign Lord of Heaven
and earth, as Father) takes perfect delight.  God began to reveal
Himself to and for Israel.  But now, Jesus the Only-Begotten Son,
the "beloved" Son, in whom all Israel reaches fulfillment, is summed
up, and also surpasses itself.

     Yet the recognition by Jesus of this unicity of "knowledge" of
which He is the object, far from being restrictive, actually flows out
into the world and into men.  This is why, when He pronounces the
berakah, it is a confession and a proclamation par excellence of the
divine wonder works.  But it shows above all the communication of
that unique wonder work which is both the basis and the entirety of
divine knowledge.  And, reciprocally, this communication is but a
radiation of the permanent "Eucharist" which is at the very root of
the soul of Christ.

     In this regard let us note how the sense of this inseparability of 
Gospel proclamation and "Eucharist" remained very much alive in
early liturgical tradition.  With the Syrian Fathers, the homily
spontaneously took the form of a Eucharistic hymn.

     Nevertheless, this communication of the supreme Wisdom
presupposes the humiliation of all human wisdom, as St. Paul was
to explain in his First Epistle to the Corinthians.  It is accessible
only to the little ones, to those who have been touched by the spirit
of supernatural childlikeness which is the Spirit of the Father in
whom alone Jesus Himself can rejoice in knowing the Father as the
Father knows Him.  These are the people whom the piety of the last
psalmists called the poor", those who have nothing but faith which
unreservedly surrenders them to this Spirit.  Such is the Father's
plan of gratuitous love, His "good pleasure", which will find its
revelation in all men in and through the Son.

     Indeed, it is to the Son alone that all things are "handed over";
He is the source for everyone else, and at the same time the content
of the supreme tradition.  In this tradition the knowledge that God
has eternally of His work is revealed as contained in a unique
knowledge.  His entire good pleasure rests in the Son as the one
"beloved" of the Father.  For the Father finds in Him alone His
reciprocal knowledge, which is the perfect "acknowledgement" of
His love.  Yet, this knowledge which He also has of the Father is
given to us by the Son in accordance with the Father's plan.  He
reveals it to us in glorifying the Father by His "confession" in which
both God's Word and man's response to it are accomplished.

     Harnack had a very good point when he said that this text in the
synoptics stands out like a Johannine meteorite. Not only do we
sense here a surprising foretaste of the tone and atmosphere proper
to St. John: we already have the announcement of the theme whose
development will be the core of the Fourth Gospel: the unique
intimacy between the Father and the Son, and the Gospel, the
"Good News", directed towards bringing us into this intimacy. It is
astonishing, however, that Harnack and his contemporaries in
general, were so little capable of understanding the reverse of this
analogy.  Better than any other argument this text of Luke and
Matthew alone shows the error that has been with us for such a
long time and which searched for the secret of Johannine
christology in a supposed Hellenization of the primitive Gospel. 
Indeed, there is nothing which is more primitive, more Semitic,
more specifically Jewish in the sense of the Synagogue Judaism,
that all the terms and even form of this prayer. The theme it unfolds
is perhaps the most central theme of the Bible, and it arrives at its
final realization here following its most autonomous line:
knowledge which is also love, the knowledge one has of God,
which is always the fruit of the knowledge of God has of us.  The
modes of expression are just as completely biblical as the thought,
with their antithetical parallelism, an absolute assertion which is
immediately shaded by a corrective that seems to contradict it while
actually extending its meaning.  Finally, the framework in which it is
written is precisely that of a prayer shaped in the mold of a
synagogue berakoth.

     What Matthew adds to the text which is substantially the same
as Luke's is no less Jewish in its form and basic sense.

     Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden,
     and I will give you rest.
     Take My yoke upon you ...
     For My yoke is easy
     and My burden is light.
     
     This yoke which is a light burden is the very expression that
designated the acceptance  of the Torah for the Rabbis, as we saw
in regard to the berakah for light and knowledge.  Similarly for
them, the Sabbath rest was a figure of the entry into the Promised
Land, likened to an entry into God's rest which terminated the work
of creation.  The new Torah, the Eternal Covenant which it its
consequence, beings us into the true Sabbath: this rest filled with
joy that follows upon the full completion of God's work, the work,
as St. John tells us, which is that we should believe.

     For his part, St. John, places a great prayer on Jesus' lips after
the Last Supper at the moment when He is about to give Himself
over to His Passion. It merely resumes and explicates what already
was there germinally for His followers in the berakah in the St.
Matthew and St. Luke where Christ told of the meaning of His
mission which the Apostles were to continue.

     It is true that in the 17th chapter of St. John, following a
tendency we have already pointed out in the Jewish berakoth, the
supplication flows back somewhat over the act of thanksgiving. 
But the thanksgiving, the"confession" in praise, is underlying
throughout.  This whole "sacerdotal prayer", as it has been called,
arises out of a contemplation of the glorification of God which was
the earthly work of Jesus, in order to ask for His own glorification,
in which the Father's glorification will be achieved in the salvation 
of  believers.

     If the Matthew-Luke prayer was set in a berakah for the
communicated divine "knowledge", the communication of the
divine life is asked for here, as the supreme glorification of God.
Christ will be glorified in His resurrection which will perfect the
divine glory by becoming the source of life for His People.  But
from the very first words this life is defined: "And this is eternal life,
that they know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom
Thou has sent."  This will be expressed in the unity of love among
the faithful, flowing from the unity between the Father and the Son
a unity of reciprocal "knowledge" rooted in the unity of life.  In
them it will be the effect of their "sanctification", i.e., their
consecration, in the "sanctification" of Christ which is about to be
fulfilled - in other words His sacrifice. This sanctification will be
fulfilled in them as it is fulfilled in Him: in "truth", i.e., the
communication of the "knowledge" of God in a communion in His
life.

     The object of the knowledge of life which is shared with His
People by the Son is expressly the Divine Name.  This Name was
given to the Son in the substantial communication that the Father
makes of Himself in giving existence to the Son, and through the
Cross it will be extended to men.  Hence the final convergence of
all these themes in the dominant theme of the divine glory, radiating
in the Savior's own glorification by His Cross: knowledge of God,
sanctification of His People, communicated life, a union in love in
which is expressed the outpouring of this incomparable life which is
God's life.

     These are the thoughts which the Last Supper was to convey to
the first Christians, and which were to impregnate their later
Eucharistic celebrations.

                THE  MEAL  BERAKOTH  AND  THE 
INSTITUTION
                            OF  THE   EUCHARIST

The undoubtedly insoluble argument whether the last meal Jesus
took with His followers was the Passover meal or not need not
delay us too much at this juncture, since it focuses on a secondary
point.  While the majority of modern exegetes have been inclined to
answer negatively, Jeremias,  in extraordinary ingenious way, seems
for the moment to have reversed the tide. Nevertheless the fact
remains that St. John expressly tells us that the Passover was to be
celebrated on the very evening of Jesus' death which implies, it
seems, a negative answer. At first sight, the Synoptics seem to
suggest the contrary, since they describe the evening meal after
having stressed the preparation of the Cenacle for Passover.  But it
is at least curious that they tell us nothing about this meal that
would allow us to conclude that we are actually dealing with a
Passover Supper.  The phrase quoted  by St. Luke: "I have 
earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you ..." seems at first
sight to remove any ambiguity. But, it actually carries the problem
to its most difficult stage, since it may just as well express the idea
of sorrow at not being able to eat the Passover as it can the
satisfaction of leaving them at the time of this celebration.  And the
vow of abstinence that Jeremias himself very well acknowledged in
the following words: "For I tell you I shall not eat it until it is
fulfilled in the Kingdom of God ..." and somewhat further on: ...
I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God
comes," becomes practically unthinkable if it should imply an
abstention of Jesus' pat with regard to Passover over which he
would reside nevertheless!  On the other hand, among the details,
cited by the Synoptics themselves that the very day that Jesus died
(the Passover coincided with having taken place on the preceding
night), the fact that Simon of Cyrene had come in from the fields -
to mention it only - resists Jeremias' explanations. It is quite
unlikely that by these words the Evangelists meant not that he had
returned from his morning's work, but that he was simply returning
from a lawful outing, even on a Holy day, to one of those rural
enclaves near the city.  Everything which precedes the meal
however, if not all that follows in the first three Gospels, still makes
us think of a Passover celebration, even though very little in the
meal itself  leads us to this conclusion.

     Mademoiselle Jaubert's attempt at harmonizing all of the
divergences and thereby preserving the Passover character of the
Last Supper is so ingenious that it has delighted many a troubled
exegete, but the consequences of her hypothesis makes it unlikely. 
The disciples, she believes, merely followed a different calendar
from the Jews as a whole.  But, supposing that they actually did use
this other way of reckoning that she mentions, they would have had
their last evening with their master not on thursday but on tuesday.
Both from the point of view of the Gospel accounts and unanimous
tradition, this displacement which is without a trace in either of
these sources would appear impossible.  And especially, we do not
see how in Jerusalem itself, where all the Passover lambs had to be
immolated together in the Temple, one or several descendant
groups could have celebrated the feast on any other day with out
causing a riot.

     But all of these arguments, however, interesting they might be
form the viewpoint of the Gospel story,  are of no importance for
the interpretation of the Last Supper and the Eucharist to which it
was to give rise.   Actually, people usually are so concerned about
them because they suppose that the Paschal references of the Cross
and the Eucharist are all dependent upon the Paschal character that
may or my not be attributed to the Supper.  Now this a priori is
totally foreign to the reality.   In the first place, the Passover setting
is no less relevant to the Last Supper whether it preceded Passover
(the immolation of the lambs coinciding in time with the death of
the Savior in this last case), or was actually the Passover meal.  But
- and this of special importance - the Paschal references were
present not only in the prayers of this one night but in all the meal
prayers.  And in fact, whether the Supper was this special meal or
another, there is no doubt that Jesus did not connect the Eucharist
institution of the New Covenant to any of the details that are proper
to the Passover meal alone.  The connection is solely with what the
Passover meal had in common with every meal.  That is, the
breaking of bread in the beginning and the rite of thanksgiving over
the cup of wine mixed with water at the end.  And, we may add,
this is what made it possible for the Christian Eucharist to be
celebrated without any problem, as often as one might wish, and
not only once a year.

     However interesting the significance of the Paschal Lamb may
be for an understanding of Christ's death, we must not look to the
rite of the eating of this Lamb, and even less to the secondary rites
like the unleavened bread for the bitter herbs, for the source of the
Christian Eucharistic Prayer.  For an understanding of this prayer
our starting point is with the broken bread at the beginning of the
meal, the shared cup at the end, and the blessings which were
traditionally connected with them.

     According to the Rabbis, the bread whose blessing as it was
broken began the ritual, represented the supreme food, the life that
is given and sustained by the Creator. The blessing of the Didache,
about which we shall soon be speaking and whose Jewish origin is
incontestable, manifests the fact that certain Jewish communities of
the time already looked upon the breaking of this one bread and its
being eaten in common as a figure of the diaspora of Israel and of
their reunion in this resurrected body mentioned in the vision of
Ezekiel

     The association of the cup and the wine that filled it seems to
have been still more meaningful and especially more explicit.  The
Johnnanine simile develops the new meaning that the wine is to take
on in the atmosphere of a Eucharistic interpretation of the Passion.
But since the time of the Prophet Isaiah, and undoubtedly long
before him, it had already been for Israel the symbol of the People
of God which had been uprooted in Egypt in order to be replanted
in Zion by David. the meaning of the vine of gold which Herod had
represented on the front of the Temple was evident to all who
looked upon it.  The shared cup implied further the ideas of the
Covenant as in the 23rd Psalm, of a libation of thanksgiving as in
Psalm 116, and of affliction accepted from the hand of God  as in
Psalm 80 (which is echoed in the discussion with the sons of
Zebedee).

     More generally along with the remembrance of Passover and the
Exodus, behind the whole meal and its blessings there lie the
prophetic promises of the messianic banquet. Jesus alluded to them
when He spoke of the banquet in which the righteous who have
come from all corners of the earth would be sitting at table in the
Kingdom along with Abraham, Isaac and all the Prophets. The
accounts of the multiplication of the loaves in reality are based on
the anticipation of the messianic banquet more than on the
wondrous aspect of the miracle.  Jesus, through His blessing of the
bread that was broken and distributed among His hearers, was to
begin to shape the community of the New Covenant from the
crowd attracted  by His word.  Even if the discourse given by the
Fourth Gospel after one of these meals did bring together and
develop later teachings. It is at least likely that such meals were
connected with a sermon of Jesus that had been a primary
preparation for what He was to announce at the Last Supper.

     All of this, and no doubt many other acts and words, which we
do not know, all of the meals which he had taken with the small
group of his disciples, coming in the wake of practices in more or
less similar communities such as Qumran, seem to flow into the
preliminaries of this last meal.  When Jesus takes the first cup, His
words mentioned by St. Luke portend what is to follow. Having
repeated the blessing which we have quoted, a blessing which
already calls the vine of David to mind, that vine which is the
People of Israel, He proclaims in barely disguised words the end of
the old order which was only preparatory, and the imminent
renewal of Israel in the Kingdom (or Reign) that His death was to
establish: "I tell you that I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine
until the Kingdom of God comes."
     
     Prepared undoubtedly by the teachings of the sermon on Bread
of Life, His words after the blessing and breaking of the bread will
announce the sacrificial meaning of His death and also define how
He will give His flesh, not for the life of the world (on the Cross)
but as the Food of Life for His People (in their Eucharistic
banquets).

     There is no room for supposing that Jesus otherwise modified
the traditional blessing of the bread, as we have quoted it according
to the Seder of Amram Gaon, who again gives it as it was in the
Mishnah:

     Blessed be Thou, jhwh, King of the universe
     who bringest forth bread form the earth.

     The disciples answered their Amen, and then He broke the bread
and passed it to them, saying most probably:

     Take, this is My flesh,
     (or perhaps,) Take, here is My flesh.

     Jeremias, analysis concerning the various New Testament
formulas seems to demonstrate conclusively that they are all
liturgical formulas that had become consecrated by various local
usages.  They all have an Aramaic or Hebrew formula behind them,
and John 6 almost certainly, is alone in retaining the exact term
used by Jesus. As a parallelism with the blood, for a Semite, it is
flesh (bashar-bisra) and not body that seems to be required both by
rabbinical traditional and by properly biblical tradition.  "This is My
Body: is a kind of Hellenizating  targum made necessary by the
transition to a Liturgy in Greek.

     Similarly, at the end of the meal, Jesus took the prepared cup in
His hands and pronounced the three customary blessings.  A
Finkelstien has established, at that time they must have included at
least the following elements, although the formula that was actually
pronounced was probably still close to the liturgical eloquence of
Amram Gaon's formularies if not in every detail at least its religious
totality:

     1. Blessed be Thou, jhwh, our God, King of the universe, who
feedest the world with       (Thy) goodness, (Thy) grace and (Thy)
mercy.

     2.  We thank Thee, jhwh, our God, for a good and ample land
which Thou wast pleased       to give (us).

     3. Have mercy, jhwh, our God, upon Thy People Israel, 
          upon Thy city Jerusalem,
          upon Zion, the abiding place of Thy glory,
          upon Thy Altar and Thy Temple.
          Blessed by Thou, jhwh, who rebuildest Jerusalem.

     While passing around the cup, Jesus (still according to Jeremias,
to whose analyses we would refer the reader) would have used the
Hebrew expression dam b'rithi, or in Aramaic, adam k'yami (literally
blood of My covenant).  They are the only expression possible in
the Semitic languages.  Greek correctly translates them as: This is
My Blood, of the Covenant, shed for you.

                     THE  MEANING  OF  THE  'MEMORIAL"

The words that follow are generally translated:

     Do this in memory of Me.

They have been the object of endless discussions among modern
exegetes, depending on whether they did or did not admit the
likelihood that Jesus could have instituted a ceremony that was to
be repeated, in such an explicit formula.  Dom Gregory Dix
deserves the credit for showing that the question is badly out. The
repetition of the religious meal could cause no problem, since for
Jews the Eucharist was not a novelty in its ritual form (which they
would have kept in any case after Jesus' death as before) but in its
content.  The stress then is laid not on prescription: "Do this" but
on the specification: "Do it (from now on is understood) in memory
of Me." More exactly, as Jeremias has shown 

     do  this  as  my  memorial,

and this word must be given the sense that it always has in the
rabbinical  literature and especially the liturgical literature of the
period.  It in no way means a subjective, human psychological act
of returning to the past, but an objective reality destined to make
some thing or some on perpetually present before God and for God
Himself.  As Max Thurian so well showed, this notion of
"memorial" is not only an essential ritual element of certain
sacrifices, but one that gives ultimate significance to every sacrifice,
and eminently to the Passover sacrifice. It is an institution, we may
say, established by God, given to His People and imposed on them
by Him, in order to perpetuate effectiveness, but above all it will
assure this very effectiveness through a pledge which they can and
must represent to Him, a pledge of His own fidelity.

     We have pointed out how the Feast Day interpolations in the
third berakah at the end of the meal, precisely multiply the use of
this word zikkaron, "memorial", with certainty the meaning we
have just mentioned.  We have assurance that these interpolations,
focusing on the "memorial", were already the practice before the
beginning of our era.  We may then rightly suppose that they
suggested His formula to Jesus directly.  And in the case where the
Last Supper would not have been the Passover meal, we may well
ask whether in the third berakah Jesus may not have improvised an
explicit memorial of His Blood shed for the New Covenant.

     Let us repeat that the fact that the expression of this "memorial"
is found in the same terms both in the Abodah prayer for the
consecration of the Temple sacrifices and in the third berakah
underlines it sacrificial character.

     It is in this way above all that the sense of a sacrifice was
decidedly attached to the Cross which would sum up all previous
sacrifices in itself and abolish them. This sense is given by the
berakah of the bread and wine, as His Body and Blood, which are
forever to be the substance of the "Memorial" left by Jesus to His
followers, to be represented to God by them, as the definitive
pledge of His redeeming love.  It may be said that at the Last
Supper the Cross of Christ and the Christian Eucharist he
inseparably received a sacrificial character from Jesus - the Cross of
Christ because He handed Himself over to it at the Last Supper as
an immolate oblation, like that of the Passover lamb, in order to
effect the New and Eternal Covenant, conforming to the Divine
Plan "acknowledged" in His Eucharist, - the Christian Eucharist,
because it becomes at the same moment the "memorial" of Jesus
and of His salvific act.  Every time Christians celebrate it,  as St.
Paul says, they "announce" or ""proclaim" this death, not first to
the world, but to God, and the recalling" of Christ's death is for
God the pledge of His fidelity in saving them.

     It seems that we must follow Jeremias one step further and add
with him that the hoped for fruit of this representation to God of
the"memorial" of the redemptive death is, in Jesus' own intention,
the ultimate accomplishment of His work in His parousia. The
invocation, which in the Jewish Liturgy is connected with the
recalling of the memorial, is always actually the realization of the
eschatological experience.  This is surely what St. Paul has in mind
when he says: "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup,
you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes," this later phrase
most certainly implying "so that He will come".

     It is understandable then how the juxtaposition of the traditional
hope focusing on the fulfillment of the definitive People of God in
the definitive "building" of Jerusalem, and the hope of the parousia
produced in the early Church the invocation of the fulfillment of
Christ in us.  Will not this fulfillment be not only promised but also
prefigured in the Eucharistic celebration in which we become the
"body" of Christ by being nourished with His "Flesh" and His
"Blood", believing in the resurrection?

                  THE  JEWISH  BERAKAH  AND  THE  PRAYER
                        OF  THE  FIRST  CHRISTIANS

From this point on we can understand that we must place what we
call today the "Words of Institution" of the Eucharist back into their
own context which is that of the ritual berakoth of the Jewish meal,
so that we may perceive the sense and the whole import of their
expression.  The words announcing everything that was to follow in
the Last Supper, as preserved for us by St. Luke, are connected
with the preparatory berakah over the first cup.  The blessing over
the Body (or Flesh) of Christ is connected it the initial berakah of
the breaking of bread, and that over the Blood of the New
Covenant with the second and the third final berakoth.  Finally the
sentence about the "memorial" corresponds to the Feast Day
interpolations in the third berakah. 

     We must go further.  These words of Christ which were to give
rise to the Christian Eucharist arise form a whole structure
underlying the Gospels, the Jewish Liturgy in which they were
inserted.  If we separate them from it, we misunderstand the whole
movement which inspired them. Reciprocally, their exact meaning
risks being lost once we no longer perceive all that they accomplish
and complete.  Early Christianity was preserved from ever
committing such an error by the fact that Christian prayer continued
to develop within the forms of the Jewish berakah  and he tefillah,
i.e., the prayer of petition which evolves without ever becoming
actually detached from it.  The first formulas of the Christian
Eucharist, in imitation of what Christ Himself had done, are but
Jewish formulas applied by means of a few added words to anew
content, which however was already prepared for by them.

     That the expression of the first Christian prayers was molded
spontaneously on the Jewish berakah and their own developments is
shown in a particularly striking way by the Pauline Epistles. 
Practically every one opens with a berakah and passes in to the
tefillah, to the supplication that the gift which is the object of the
act of thanksgiving be perfectly fulfilled.  The teaching and the
exhortation which make up by body of the Epistles remain
dominated by his preamble. They are merely the explication of what
the preamble includes.  They therefore retain the imprint of this
exultant contemplation, and are replete with the supplicant yearning
for the accomplishment of this acknowledged and confessed
Mystery.

     In the First Epistle to the Thessalonians we have:

        We give thanks to God always for you all, constantly
mentioning you in our prayers,    remembering before our God and
Father your work of faith and labor of love and  steadfastness of
hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

And in the second we have similarly:

        We ar e bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren
, as is fitting, because    your faith is growing abundantly, and the
love of eve ry o ne of you for one another is     increasing ... To this
end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of
His call, and may fulfill every good resolve and work of faith by His
power, so that the Name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you,
and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord
Jesus Christ ...

     That this initial formula was telescoped int he case of the Epistle
to the Galatians shows how vehement were the anxiety and
indignation that cause St. Paul to write them.  But the spontaneous
impulse still remains like a watermark beneath his salutation:

        Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord
Jesus Christ, who gave    Himself for our sins to deliver us from the
present evil age, according to the will of our     God and Father; to
whom be the glory for ever and ever.  Amen.

     But to the Romans, even though he does not yet know those to
whom he is writing, and therefore his salutation loses some of its
customary warmth, he says formally:

              First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all  of you,
because your faith is  proclaimed in all the world.  For God is my
witness, whom I serve (a pre-eminently   liturgical term) with my
spirit in the Gospel of His Son, that without ceasing I mention all of
you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God's will I may
now at last succeed in coming to you.

     In the introduction to the two Epistles to the Corinthians it is
only the thanks that is formally expressed, although the prayers
remembering them before God underlies it at least at the end of the
first.

        I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of
God which was given you    i  n Christ Jesus, that in every way your
were enriched in Him with  all speech and all      knowledge - even
as the testimony to Christ was confirmed  among you - so that you
are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of
our Lord Jesus Christ; who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in
the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful, by whom you
were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

And in the second, we have:

        Blessed  be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Father of mercies and      God of all comfort, who comforts us all in
all our affliction, so that we may be able to  comfort those who are
in any affliction, with the comfort with which we are comforted by
God

     To the Philippians he says with that note of peaceful and joy
trust that is so characteristic of his relations with this Church:

        I thank  my God in all my remembrances of you, always in
every pr ayer of mine for  you all making  my prayer with joy,
thankful for your partner ship in the Gospel from      the  first day
until now.  An I am sure that He who began a g ood work in you
will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ ... And it is my
prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge
and all discernment, so that you approve what is excellent, and may
be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruits of
righteousness which come through Jesus Christ, to the glory and
praise of God.

     In the Epistle to the Colossians, the blessing the accompanying
prayer burst out into great exposition of the whole Plan of God and
its accomplishment, not only in the case of the Apostle and those to
whom he is writing, but in the entire world:

        We always thank God, the Father our Lord Jesus Chit, when
we p  ray for you, because     we have heard of your faith in Christ
Jesus and of the  love which you have for all the    saints, because
of the hope laid up for you in Hea ven.   Of this you have heard
before in the Word of Truth, the Gospel which has come to you, as
indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing - so
among yourselves, form the day you heard and understood the
grace of God in truth, you learned it from Epaphras our beloved
fellow servant.  He is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf and
has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

       And     so, from the day we heard of it, we have not ceased  to
pray for you , asking that    you may be filled with the knowledge of
His will in all spi ritual wisdom and     understanding, to lead a life
worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him,  bearing fruit in every
good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.  May you be
strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for
all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father,
who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.
He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred
us to the Kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have
redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

        He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all cre
ation;  for in him all things      were created, in Heaven and on
earth, visible and invis ible , whether thrones or dominions                
                                                            or principalities or
authorities - all things were created through Him and for Him.  He
is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.  He is the
Head of the Body, the Church; He is the beginning, the first-born
from the dead, that in everything He might be pre-eminent.  For in
Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him
to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in Heaven,
making peace by the Blood of His Cross.

        And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing
evil deeds, He has now     reconciled in His Body of flesh by His
death, in order to present you holy and blameless  and
irreproachable before Him, provided that you     continue in the
Faith stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the Gospel
which you heard, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.
     
     Finally, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, this same initial
"Eucharist" is repeated, aimed at the perspective of building the
Church as the fullness of christ.  It thus becomes a hymn to the
whole Divine Plan and its accomplishment in us, with a particularly
liturgical color.

         Ble   ssed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, wh
o  has blessed us in Christ   with every spiritual blessing in the
heavenly places, even as   He chose us in him before   the
foundation of the world, that we should be holy  and blameless
before Him.  He destined us in love to be His sons through Jesus
Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His
glorious grace which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.  In
Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our
trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished
upon us.  For He has made known to us in all wisdom and insight
the mystery of His will, according to His purpose which He set
forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in
Him, things in Heaven and things on earth

        In Him, according to the purpose of Him who accomplished
all thin gs according to the   counsel of His will, we who first hoped
in Christ have been destined a nd appointed to live     for the praise
of his glory.  In Him you also, who  have heard the word of truth,
the Gospel of your salvation, and have believed in Him, were sealed
with the promised Holy Spirit, which is the guarantee of our
inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His
glory.

        For thi s reason, because I have heard o f your faith in th e
Lord J esus and your love    toward all the saints, I do not cease  to
give thanks fo r you, r emembering you in my  prayers, that the God
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of g  lory, may give you a spirit
of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him, having the
eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the
hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of His glorious
inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of
His power in us who believe, according to the working of His great
might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised Him from
the dead and made Him sit at His right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above
every name that is named, not only in this age but in that which is to
come; and He has put all things under His feet and has made Him
the head over all things for the Church, which is His Body, the
fullness of Him who fills all in all.
     
        And you  He made alive, when you were dead t hrough the
trespasse s  and sins in which     you once walked, following the
course o f the world, following t he  Prince of the Power     of the
Air, the spirit that is no w at work in the so ns of dis obedience.
Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh,
following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature
children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.  But God who is rich in
mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we
were dead though our trespasses, made us alive together with
Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raise us up with Him
and made us sit with Him in the heavenly place in Christ Jesus, that
in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His
grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.  For by grace you have
been saved through faith; and this is not our own doing, it is the gift
of God - not because of works, lest any man should boast.  For we
are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

     Here more than ever, the instructions and the exhortations that
follow immediately, form one body with the berakah to the extent
that its echoes are felt practically to the end of the Epistle.  The
account of the Mystery of Christ seems to be borne on the waves of
the Eucharist, which in turn seems to be developed for the sole
purpose of explaining that Mystery.

     The parallelism of these texts, with their progression leading to
the ultimate expansiveness of the great christological epistles, is no
less indicative of  St. Paul's theology than of his prayer.  It becomes
manifest here that his theology is basically Eucharistic in the sense
that it is only a meditation on what comprises the substance of the
Christian Eucharist.  For this reason proceeding from the
thanksgiving, into the prayer for the realization of the Mystery, its
tendency is only to doxology, to the ultimate glorification of God in
all things.  It is a theologia, in the sense that this word had in
Hellenistic antiquity: an encomium, a glorification in praise of the
God about whom we are speaking.   It can be said that the Greek
Fathers, especially the Cappadocians and eminently St. Gregory of
Nazianzum, who above all has received the title of theologian,
never lost sight of this direction, this primary orientation of
theology even in their most extreme speculative developments.   It
is permissible to think that the working out of the Anaphoras,
which were in the process of  being completed at that time, and
were destined to become classic, contributed in no small way
toward their  authors' keeping alive an "orthodoxy" which is both
right glorification and right doctrine.

     But to return to the Pauline texts, we see how they all are
merely resumptions of the berakah for the knowledge of God,
under this knowledge's twofold aspect of faith and love.  In the
Epistle to the Colossians, within the tefillah for the complete
achievement of this knowledge, its object's definition takes on
prominence.  In the context proper to the Epistle - to counter the
warped Jewish gnoses - the unity between creation and redemption
is therefore affirmed.  There is but one creator and redeemer: Christ
in whom the world, since he created it in the beginning, must be
reconciled with its author in the Mystery of His Cross.  This
Mystery is also that of the Church brought together in His crucified
body in order to become the fullness of his resurrected body.

     This terminal vision in the Epistle to the Ephesians fills the
whole horizon.  It is already present in the berakah proper, the
thanksgiving.  From the very first, the all-embracing plan of God is
recalled, the plan whereby, in the ultimate "recapitulation," He will
resume His impaired and divided work in accordance with the
original plan.  The fullness of the original plan, implied for all time
in Christ, will be made explicit at the end of time in the Church in
which He Himself is fulfilled.  Thus the knowledge, to which all are
predestined and which is given to them by the Gospel, will be the
discovery and the realization of this unique "perfect man" in whom
the dead, risen and ascended Christ is completely fulfilled.

     Here we would be tempted to say we discover the progressive
pressure of the Christian vision that had been prepared by the
Jewish formulas: it pervades them in turn and impregnates them to
the point of remodeling them.  The reorientation is decisive: from
the Torah to Christ, form the first Covenant to the Mystery of the
New Covenant, the Mystery of His Cross which is also the Mystery
of Christ in us, the hope of glory, to borrow a key expression from
the Epistle to the Colossians.

     From the first Christian generations, this continuity and this
metamorphosis are equally in evidence in the prayers which give us
the most glowing witness borne to Christ: the prayers of the
martyrs.  Throughout their authentic acts, at the moment when their
offering is consumed in that of Christ Himself, it is noteworthy that
it is still the Jewish berakah that continues to express it.

     It is Carpus who cried out from the stake at Pergamum, under
Marcus Aurelius:

     Blessed art Thou, Lord, Son of God, for despite my sins Thou
hast judged me worthy of     Thy inheritance.

     It is Theodotus of Ancyra, under Diocletian, whose berakah
leads into a tefillah, like that    of many others:

        Lord Jesus Christ, who hast created Heaven and earth, Thou
dost not abandon those      who put their hope in Thee.  I give Thee
thanks for having made me worthy of becoming     a citizen of the
city of Heaven, and of inheriting Thy Kingdom.

        I give Thee thanks for allowing me to vanquish the dragon and
to crush its head.

        Give rest to Thy servants and turn aside from me the furor of
Thy enemies.

        Give peace to Thy Church, and snatch if from the tyranny of
the demon.  Amen.

     We see the same thing in a certain Irenaeus of Sirmium, also
under Diocletian:

        I give Thee thanks, Lord Jesus Christ, for having given me
endurance in d ifferent trails    and torments, and for having judge
me worthy to share in Thy eterna l glory.  Lord Jesus   Christ, who
hast deigned to suffer for the salvation o f th  e world, open Thine
eyes that the Angels may receive the spirit of Thy servant Irenaeus,
who endureth these torments for Thy Name's sake and for the
people that groweth in the catholic Church of Sirmium.  I pray
Thee and I beseech Thy mercy that Thou designest to gather and
strengthen the others in the faith.

     But of all these prayers, the most interesting and most ancient is
that of Polycarp of Smyrna who died toward the end of the second
century.  The account of his martyrdom shows us this bishop
handing himself over to the fire exactly as if he were going to
celebrate the Eucharist for the last time.  And in this supreme
celebration where he identifies himself with the victim which is
Christ, we can think that his prayer derives from the Eucharist
which he was accustomed to offer.  But it espouses the whole
development of the Jewish berakah: praise of the creator, then of
the redeemer, the presentation of the "memorial" with the
supplication that the offering be accepted, and the final doxology.

        Lord,  Almighty God, Father of Jesus Christ, Thy beloved a nd
blessed Child, through     whom we have known Thee, God of the
Angels and the Powers, G od of all creation and   of the whole
family of the righteous who live in Thy Presence: I beseech Thee
for having judged me worthy of this day and this hour, for being
counted among the number of Thy martyrs and for sharing the cup
of Thy Christ, that I may rise to the everlasting life of the soul and
the body in the incorruptibility of the Holy Spirit.

        May I today, together with them, be received into thy
Presence  as a precious and  acceptable offering: Thou hast
prepared me for it, Thou hast shown i t tome, Thou hast     kept
Thy promise, God of faithfulness and truth.  For this g race and for
all things, I praise Thee, I glorify Thee through thee eternal and
heavenly high priest, Jesus Christ, Thy beloved Child: through Him,
who is with Thee and the Spirit, may glory be to Thee, now and in
the ages to come.   Amen.

             THE  FIRST  EUCHARISTIC  LITURGIES:  THE 
DIDACHE

Yet it still seems that it is the Didache which has preserved for us
the most ancient example of these formulations of the Eucharist
where the Church at the Last Supper, still used the Jewish formulas,
merely giving a new sense to their expressions with the help of a
few insertions.

     We need not argue at this point about the origin of the Didache
which has been placed either at the very beginning of the Church or
else after the year 180 at the time of the Montanist crisis.

     Let us say once again - and this will not be the last time - that
the date and the origin of a Liturgical Prayer must not be confused
with that of the collections in which it is found.  What now interests
us in the Didache for our study is only the prayers themselves.  That
these are of Jewish origin is obvious once we connect them with the
traditional Jewish meal payers.  Let us recall that the synagogue of
Dura-Euopous has given us a fragment of papyrus where we read a
Hebrew prayer which is he central element of the berakah of the
Didache.

     But in the Didache, it is clear that the prayer used by the
Christians has undergone a few additions, not without some
awkwardness, which are intended to specify the renewed sense
given to it.

     Concerning the Eucharist, give thanks in this way.
     First for the cup:

        "We give thanks to Thee, Our Father, for the holy vine of
David Thy servant, which     Thou madest known to us through
Thy servant Jesus.
     To Thee be the glory for ever."
     
     And for the broken bread:
        "We give thanks to Thee, Our Father, for the life and
knowledge, which thou madest     known to us through Thy servant
Jesus.
     As this broken bread was scattered upon the hills, and was
gathered together into Thy     Kingdom from the ends of the earth; 
for Thine is the glory and power through Christ      Jesus for ever."
...

      And after ye are filled, give thanks thus:
        "We give thanks, Holy Father. for Thy Holy Name, which
Thou hast made to     tabernacle in our hearts, and for the
knowledge, faith and immortality which Thou hast    made known
to us through Thy servant Jesus.

     To Thee be the glory for ever.
     Thou, Lord Almighty, didst create all things for Thy Name's
sake, and gavest food and     drink to men for their enjoyment, that
they might give Thee thanks; and to us Thou didst  grant spiritual
food and drink and life eternal, through Thy servant.
     Above all we thank Thee that Thou art mighty.
     To Thee be glory for ever.
     Remember, Lord, Thy Church, to deliver her from all evil and to
make her perfect in Thy   love, and to gather from the four winds
her that is sanctified into Thy Kingdom which     Thou didst prepare
for her; for Thine is the power and the glory for ever.
     Let grace come, and let this world pass away.
     Hosanna to the God of David.
     It any is holy, let him come:
     If any is hot holy, let him repent.
     Maran atha.
     Amen.
          
     We have Italicized the obviously Christian additions.  Their
number and their laconicism will be noted.  It will be noted that we
have not italicized the mentions of the Church.   

     Arguments are still in vogue among Christian critics, who are
ignorant (willingly or not) of the parallel Jewish texts, about
whether we have here a Eucharistic Prayer in the strict sense or a
prayer for the agape meal which they suppose to have already been
separated form the Eucharist, or again two groups of texts to be
used in different celebrations.  They are rendered useless once we
are aware of the Jewish parallels.  The whole is in continuity, and
follows the traditional succession of the meal  berakoth (blessing
over the initial cup).  But, in their final state, they obviously apply
to a sacred meal of a Christian community that is still very close to
Judaism, and it could only be its Eucharist.  It can be all the better
understood that the Christians kept the Jewish prayers practically
intact since this form of those prayers certainly represented a
special form of them proper to the communities dominated by the
expectation of the Messiah.  What particular community was its
author?  This is undoubtedly an unanswerable question.  But from
these texts we can get some idea of what must have been done with
the traditional Jewish prayers, before the first Christians, by Jews
such as those from Qumran or the Zadokite community of
Damascus.

     The mention of the hills where wheat was scattered indicates a
Palestinian origin, or at least a Syrian one. The connection between
life and knowledge, and even the mention of the spiritual food and
drink, can belong just as well to this messianic Judaism as to
primitive Christianity, like the insistence on the revealed Divine
Name and even the title "our Father" given to God.  But for
Christians all of this was so easily charged with a more precise
content that they could hardly have felt the need at the moment to
say anything more.  Jesus, as Danielou has so well shown, was this
revealed Divine Name for them, just as He was spiritual food and
drink as well as life and knowledge, which were found in faith in
Him and procured immortality through participation in His
resurrection.

     Up to the final invocation ("Let grace come, and let this world
pass away") there is nothing which may not have been Jewish
before being taken over by the Christians.  On the other hand,
"Hosanna to the God of David" seems a cryptic expression,typical
of primitive Christianity, of belief in the divinity of Jesus.  It seems
to be an echo, by its correction of the formula repeated by the
Gospels: "Hosanna to the son of David," of the discussion Jesus
had with the Scribes  about the 110th Psalm.
     '
     The following words are an invitation to communion which
seems to be the most ancient expression that we have of the need
for penance on the part of Christians who wish to approach the
Holy Table after having sinned.  But we might also wonder if the
disciples of the Baptist, for example, could not have used them as
well.

     Maran atha, the expression of the expectation of the parousia,
which St. Paul has preserved for us, confirms what he himself has
allowed us to see of the eschatological orientation of  these  first
Christian Eucharists, where they "proclaimed" the death of the
Lord, "until He comes."  As many an appearance of the risen Lord
must have been in relation to the first celebrations, they were done
in the expectation of His return.   But we may indeed wonder,
particularly if we consider that the entreaty for the coming of the
Messiah was already, at least on Feast Days, to be found at the
conclusion of the Jewish berakah over the cup, whether the formula
Maran atha itself was not borrowed by the first Christians from
other earlier groups of pious Jews.

                       THE  APOSTOLIC  CONSTITUTIONS   

We have the opportunity of being able to see in other tests, hardly
less arachic, the transition form this first state of Christian Liturgical
prayers to a more mature form that was destined to continue.  From
a Jewish prayer that was characterized by a few minor insertions we
can follow the transition to a prayer that has been entirely
recomposed in a Christian perspective.   But almost with the
traditional Jewish schema this will always retain literal re-uses of
prechristian formulas.  It is another arachic or anchaizing collection
which is scarcely less difficult to date and to localize that gives that
clue to us: the Apostolic Constitutions.

     The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in certain
Anglican milieus (especially among the Non-Jurors), were
enchanted by them.  As a consequence of their attribution to St.
Clement of Rome, sustained by the text, but untenable historically,
people thought that in the Liturgy of the  8th Book, the Clementine
Liturgy as it was to be called, they had found an almost immediate
trace of the Liturgy of the Apostles.  In fact, as we shall see,
however interesting the text remains, it betrays not only a very
advanced stage of composition but also a systematic remodeling.  It
represented more a final phase in the evolution of the Eucharistic
Prayer than a primitive state.  The totality of the compilation seems
to have been arranged at the end of the fourth century, certainly by
a Syrian, as is shown by the close relationship of the Liturgy of the
8th Book to the Jerusalem Liturgy called the Liturgy of St. James. 
But some divergences in detail in the pseudo-Clementine Liturgy
remain typical of the Antiochene Liturgy.  From what we see of his
Christological and Trinitarian formulas, the author must have
belonged to the semi-Arian milieu of his region.  We shall return at
length to all of this.

     But there is another part of the collection which has an
undeniable and even exceptional interest for our knowledge of the
primitive Eucharist, even though scholars have been very slow to
realize it.  It is the 7th Book.  We find there a series of prayers
which give us not only primitive Christian material but also,
undoubtedly, Jewish material used at a very early period by
Christians.  The way that certain of these elements were taken into
the much later synthesis of the Liturgy of the 8th Book allows us to
have a vivid grasp of the process though which a systematized
Christian Eucharist developed out of elements that came not only
from arachic Christianity but from Christianized Judaism.

     A study of these texts shows that they were composed in Greek
by someone whose knowledge of Hebrew was rather rudimentary. 
But it does how at the same time that the Hellenized Jews who
worked on these texts before the Christians who were to take them
over and remodel them (if only slightly), were working with
Hebrew sources.  It manifests the fact that there never was an
Alexandrian Judaism, no matter how Hellenized, that became which
was truly independent from the Palestinian traditions.

     When we are familiar with the text of the Palestinian or
Babylonian Tefillah, it is enough to read these prayers to realize
immediately that the first three are just a more wordy equivalent of
the its first three blessings.  The following one is a prayer for the
Sabbath which was later (and rather awkwardly) arranged into a
prayer for the Christian Sunday.  The last two of the series are
respectively a payer synthesizing the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th
berakoth of the same Tefillah, and an amplification of the 18th.  It is
therefore very likely that below their  surface there was originally a
Tefillah for the Sabbath, formed of seven prayers, according to a
schema whose existence, as we have seen, is attested at the age of
the beginning of Christianity.  The seventh, connected with the
Aaronic blessing, must have purely and simply disappeared once the
Liturgy was Christianized, along with the blessing itself.

     Here is the first of these prayers which is obviously a
targumizing form of the Aboth blessing, the first of the Eighteen.  It
will be noted that Christians could use it, it seems, without having
to change or add even a word.  The idea, which appears at the end,
that in the vision of the heavenly ladder Jacob had sen the Messiah
in advance was already part of Jewish tradition.

        Our     eternal Savior, King of t he g  o ds: the  onl y Almighty
One   and lord, the God of all   that exist, and God of ou r  h oly
and  irrep roa chable fathers   who were before us, the God    of
Abraham,   Isa ac and Jac o b, merciful  and c ompassion at e,
patient and abounding in mercy, to whom all hearts are open, and
every hidden feeling is revealed: the souls of the righteous cry to
Thee, in Thee the saints have placed their hope.  The Father of the
irreproachable, He who hears those who call upon Him in
righteousness, and who even knows the unspoken supplications for
Thy foreknowledge extends to the bowels of men, and through the
conscience Thou dost probe the thought of each, and every region
of the earth incense goes up to Thee through prayers and words - O
Thou who have set us this present world as the stadium of justice
and who have opened to all the almsgate, Thou who hast shown to
each of men, through a inmate knowledge and a natural judgement,
and in accordance with the expression of (Thy) Law, that the
possession of riches is not eternal and that the beauty of a pleasing
appearance does not last, that physical strength easily disappears,
and that all (that) is but vapor and vanity, while on a consciousness
of an unerring faith passes through the heavens where, rising up
with truth, it receives (from Thy right hand the future delight; at the
same time and even before it receives the promise of the
resurrection, the exultant soul rejoices in it.  Indeed, from the
beginning, while our ancestor Abraham gave himself to the way of
truth, Thou led him by visions, and Thou taught him what this
world is, so that (Thy) knowledge traced out the path for his faith,
and that faith followed knowledge, and the Covenant followed
faith.  Indeed, Thou hast said: "I shall make Thy seed like the stars
of heaven and like the sand on the shore of the sea."  But again,
having given him the gifts of Isaac, and knowing that he would
behave likewise, of him also you called Thyself the God, saying: "I
shall be Thy God and of Thy seed after thee." And as our Father
Jacob went of into Mesopotamia, Thou spoke to him through the
Christ whom Thy showed to him and Thou told him: "Here I am
with thee, and I shall increase thee and multiply thee abundantly".
And to Moses, Thy faithful and holy servant, Thou spoke likewise
int he burning bush: "I am Who I am, this is My eternal Name, and
My memorial for generations unto generations."  O, Defender of
the race of Abraham, Thou art blessed for ever.

     Let us limit ourselves to linking it to the condensed text of the
first of the Eighteen Blessing as found in the Seder Amram Gaon.

        Blessed  be Thou, jhwh, our God and God of our fathers, God
of Abr aham, God of     Isaac and of Jacob, the great mighty and
revered God, the most high God, who bestowed     loving-kindness,
possessest all things and rememberest the pious deeds of the
fathers, and wilt bring a redeemer to their children's children for thy
Name's sake, in love ... Blessed be Thou, jhwh, the Shield of
Abraham.

     The second of the prayers is also an amplification of the second
"blessing," Geburoth.  It should be noted that its development is
influenced by Psalm 104.  As in the Jewish connected prayer that
has remained traditional, we find here two different notions: the
accent on the blessing of the seasons, good weather, assuring the
faithful of their subsistence, the transition from the present life to
the life of resurrection.  This feature which the Jewish
commentators on Geburoth rightly attribute to a Pharisaic
influence, furnished a very natural starting point for the Christian
developments that we are emphasizing.  But this time we shall first
quite the Jewish prayer that has remained within Hebrew tradition,
since might be quite wrongly tempted to see in it merely Christian
interpolations.

     The second prayer of the Gaon says:

   Tho        u art mighty forever, jhwh, Thou quickenest the dead,
Tho u  art might to save, and   Thou causeth the dew to fall (who
causest the wind to b low and the rain to fall), who     sustainest the
living with loving kindness, quickenest  the dead with great mercy,
supportest the falling, healest the sick, looseth them that are bound
and keepest faith to them that sleep in the dust.  Who is like unto
Thee, Lord of mighty acts, and who resembleth Thee, King, who
killest and quickenest and caused salvation to spring forth.  And
faithful art Thou to quicken the dead.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who
quickenest the dead.

     Here now is what became of that prayer in the tradition used by
the 7th Book of the Apostolic Constitutions:

         Bl      essed  a rt Thou, Lord, K ing  of the ages, who, th 
rough  Christ, hast  made  all  things,    and th rough Him, at the be
gi nning, have bro  ught order out  of cha os, Thou  who  hast   
separ ated the water from  the  water by th e f irmament, and who
hast  poured out a spirit of life, Who hast strengthened the hand,
spread out the heavens, and adorned both with appropriate
creatures.  For it is by thy power, O Master, that the world was
established in its beauty, the havens planted as a tent, lit up with
stars as a comfort in darkness: the light and the sun were begotten
to give the day and to bring forth fruit, the moon to mark the
season, according to its wax and wane, thus the night was called
forth and the day named and the firmament appearing in the midst
of the abysses.  Thou hast said also that the waters come together
and dry land appear.  As for the sea, who would describe it? The
sea which ebbs, turbulent with waves but flows out again, pushed
back from the shores by Thy command, for Thou hast said that the
floods would subside.  Moreover, Thou hast made a place for the
animals, great or small, and for ships.  Then, the earth hast made
the many-colored flowers come forth and trees with every
adornment, and, sustained by the variations of the luminaries, they g
row without every varying from Thy prescriptions, but, at Thy
command, they are born or fade away, as a sign of the seasons and
the years, serving alternatively the needs of men.  Then the different
types of animals were established, on the land, in the sea, in the air
and also the amphibians, and the craftsmanlike Wisdom of Thy
foreknowledge gives to each of them what Thou hast foreseen, for
it does not neglect to provide for their divers needs any more than it
failed to produce their diversity.   And, as the final stroke of Thy
work, having disposed in Thy Wisdom an animal endowed with
reason, the citizen of the world, Thou formed him, saying: "Let us
make man in our image and likeness," establishing him as world
within this world, with the help of the four elements, modeling for
him a body out of the elementary bodies and fitting him with a soul
created from nothing, gratifying him with five senses, and placing in
the soul a mind to be the guide of the senses.  And, above all that,
Master, Lord, who will worthily tell of the course of the winds
which bring showers, the glitter of lightning, the rumbling of
thunder, all of which furnishes food for all men, and harmoniously
tempers the atmosphere?  Yet, man disobeyed Thee, and Thou
deprived him of the reward of this life, without annihilating him, but
with the result that after falling asleep for a little while, Thou called
him forth to rebirth by Thy sworn promise. Thou hast abolished the
decree of (our death), Thou who give life to the dead through Jesus
Christ our hope.

     We can notice again in this formula the expression borrowed
from the philosophers.  We shall find still more of these that follow. 
Once again, this a feature that was already noticeable in the
Wisdom writings of the Greek Bible, with which the following
prayers are even more closely related, as it will be shown later.  But
borrowing of this kind, particularly from popularized stoicism, are
also to be found in St. Paul, despite the Palestinian character of his
Judaism.

The third prayer is the most interesting of the series for our study. 
In the third berakah of the Shemoneh Esreh, together with the
Qedushah that preceded it in the public recitation, as we said, it
incorporates the substance of the prayer that introduced the
Qedushah (Keter, "crown"), which is so notable for its stress on the
divine Kingdom.  For the first time we find in the Qedushah in this
text the formula heaven and earth (and not only earth), which will
pass over into all the Christian Liturgies.  It comes evidently from
the Yozer prayer and the anticipated commentary of the Qedushah
which it contains. We must believe that the Alexandrian Jews
incorporated it in the text before the Christians.

     Another significant characteristic of this third prayer of the 7th
Book is the way in which it also includes the recitation, if not of the
Shema, at least of a text which is its equivalent, taken from the
same Book of Deuteronomy.  It seems that here we have a
supplementary confirmation of the thesis common to the Jewish
commentators, maintaining that the original place of the Qedushah
would have been just before the Shema,with the result that
Qedushah of the Tefillah would come form a later transposition of
the Qedushah of Yozer.  Indeed, as we see here, did it not actually
bring the Shema along with it, which would be a proof that it was
originally connected with it?
     In order to facilitate comparison, here once again is the Keter
prayer, the Qedushah which it introduces, and the third berakah as
we find them in the Sedar Amram Gaon to be recited straight
through by the hazan.

        (Keter) U nto Thee shall the multitudes above with all the 
gatherings below give a      crown, all with one accord shall thrice
repeat the ho ly praise unto Thee, according to what    is said
through Thy Prophet: and one cried unto another and said: holy,
holy, holy is jhwh of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory. 
Then with noise of great rushing, mighty and strong, they make
their voices heard, and upraising themselves towards them, they
say: blessed be the glory of jhwh from his place.

        From   Thy place shine forth, our King, and reign over us,  for
we wait upon  Thee.       When wilt Thou reign?  Reign in Zion
speedily, even i n our days and in our lives do  Thou dwell (there). 
Mayest Thou be magnified and sanctif ied in the mi dst of
Jerusalem, Thy city throughout all generations and to all eternity. 
And let our eyes, behold Thy Kingdom, according to the word that
was spoken in the songs of Thy might by David, Thy righteous
anointed: jhwh shall reign for ever, Thy God, Zion, unto all
generations.  Hallelujah.  

        (Qedushat ha-Shem.)  From generation to generation give
homage to God for He alone     is high and holy, and Thy praise,
our God, shall not depart from our mouth for ever, for  a great and
holy king art thou.  Blessed be Thou jhwh, Thou holy God.

     And here now is the synthesized text of the Apostolic
Constitutions.  It will should be noted, preceding the introduction
of the themes that we have just re-read, there are other themes
whose provenance we shall attempt to point out.

       Thou art great, Lord Almighty, and great is Thy might, and
Thy intelligence cannot be   calculated: Creator, Savior, rich in
grace, patient choregos       of mercy, Thou who in no     way
neglect the salvation of Thy creatures, fo r Thou art  good by
nature and even so, Thou sparest sinners, inviting them to penance,
for Thy instruction is compassionate.  Indeed, how would we
subsist, if Thou were to call us suddenly to judgment, while we
have difficulty in catching our breath in our weakness when Thou
hast patience with us?  The heavens have announced Thy power,
and the earth, shaken in its self-assurance, is suspended over the
abyss. The sea,swirling with waves, which nourishes an 
innumerable flock of living beings, is held back by the sand,
dreading Thy will, and forces all to cry out: "How wonderful are
Thy works, O Lord, Thou hast done them all in (Thy) Wisdom; the
earth is filled with Thy creation".  And the zealous Army of Angels,
with the intelligible spirits, says: "One alone is holy (for whoever it
may be)"                          , and the holy six-winged Seraphim, with
the Cherubim, singing to Thee the hymn of victory, crying out with
(their) voices that are never silent: Holy, holy, holy, the Lord
Sabbaoth; the heavens and the earth are full of Thy glory.  And the
multitude of the other orders, the Angels, the Archangels, the
Powers, say in a loud voice: Blessed (be) the glory of the Lord and
of  His place!  Moreover, Israel, Thy earthly Church, taken form
the nations, vying with the heavenly powers, night and day, with all
its heart and with all the desire of its soul, sing: "God's chariot,
through myriads and thousands, rejoices, the Lord is in them, in
Sinai, in the Sanctuary."  The heavens know the One who spread
His Tent without founding it upon anything, like a cube of stone,
who joined the earth and the waters, who diffused the air to foster
life, and who surrounded it with fire to warm (it) and to comfort
(us) in the darkness.  The choir of the stars amazes (us) in telling of
Him who counted them out and in manifesting Him who named
them, like the living creatures (who manifest) Him who gave them
life, and the trees, Him who planted them. Moreover, all things,
made by Thy Word, represent the force of Thy might, wherefore
every man must, in dominating over all of this because of Thee,
from the depth of his heart send up to Thee through Christ the
hymn of all this.  For Thou art good and in Thy benefits and
magnificent in Thy compassion, the one Almighty one, for
whenever Thou wish Thou hast the power, and Thy eternal might
cools the flames, shuts the mouth of lions, tames the sea monsters,
raises the sick, and overturns the powers: when they become too
haughty, it subdues an army of enemies, a numerus people.  Thou
art the one who, in Heaven, on the land or upon the sea, is never
limited by any boundary.  And this does not come from us, Master,
but it is the oracle of Thy servant who said: "And Thou shalt know
in thy heart that the Lord thy God is God on high in Heaven, here
on earth, and there is none other than He."                Indeed, there
is no other God but Thee: no other is Holy but Thou.  Lord God of
(all) knowledge, God of the saints,. Holy above all the saints, for
the sanctified are made so by Thy hands.  Glorious and super
exalted, invisible by nature, unfathomable in Thy judgements, Thou
whose life has need of nothing, immutable and indefectible in (Thy)
continuity, tireless in (Thy) operation, indescribable in (Thy)
greatness. established forever in Thy Tabernacle, Thou whose
knowledge is without beginning, truth without change, work
without intermediary, whose might is incontestable, whose
monarchy inseparable, whose Rule is without end, whose force
unrivaled, whose army in uncountable.  For thou art the Father of
Wisdom, the demiurge of creation made by a mediator, but whose
beginning Thou art, choregos of providence, giver of laws, the
satisfaction of want; (Thou art) the one who punishes the ungodly
and who rewards the righteous, the God and the Father of Christ
and the Lord of those who venerate Him, whose promise is without
deception, whose judgment is incorruptible, whose decision is
impossible to decline, whose piety is unceasing, whose Eucharist is
eternal, through whom there is owed a worship that is worthy of 
Thee, on the part of all holy and rational nature.

     We may wonder from where the initial developments on
penance come from in this text since they are found in the third
blessing neither as we have it in the Gaon nor in the other medieval
or modern prayer books.  We must stress that they correspond to
the respective content of the fourth, and especially to the fifth, as
well as the sixth, seventh and even the eight of the Semoneh Esreh
blessings: on the knowledge of God, repentance, forgiveness,
redemption, and finally the healing of all evils, particularly those
illnesses that are looked upon as a consequence of sin.

     There is nothing among the berakoth of the Shemoneth Esreh
which corresponds to the fourth of our prayers.  Yet it is
nonetheless the most Jewish of all with its stress on the Sabbath, to
the point that the particularly emphatic Christian additions were not
able to apply it to Sunday and it original focus was completely
erased.  At this point we should recall that the Eighteen Blessings,
in their most ancient use, were not recited on the Sabbath, but were
replaced by a formula of seven berakoth, which was to be the
Jewish model of our own prayers.  Because it fell into disuse at an
early date, no text of this special Sabbath formulary has been
preserved for us.  The sequence of the prayers of the 7th Book of
the Apostolic Constitutions gives us an idea of what this shortened
formula may have been, and the following text helps us to conceive
how the praise of the Sabbath must have been its pivotal point.

        Lo rd Almighty, Thou   hast created the world throu gh 
Christ, and   Thou h a st established    a memorial o f  it in the
Sabbath for on that day   Thou hast caused us   t o rest from o ur     
 lab ors in order to meditate upon Thy  l aws, an d Thou  hast 
prescr  ibed festivals for the joy of our souls and that we might
commemorate the Wisdom which Thou hast created: how, on our
behalf, It accepted to be born of a woman, It was manifested in life,
showing Itself in the baptism as God and man; It suffered for us by
Thy leave, It died and was raised by Thy might.  Wherefore, we,
celebrating on Sunday the Feast of the Resurrection, rejoice on
account of Him who has conquered death, and brought life and
incorruption.  Indeed, though Him Thou hast led the nation to
Thee, in order to make them the people Thou hast acquired for
Thyself, the true Israel, the friend of God, the one who sees God. 
For Thou hast caused our fathers, Lord, to come out of the land of
Egypt, Thou delivered them from the fiery furnace, and from the
mud and bricks that they were obliged to make; Thou redeemed
them from the hand of Pharaoh and his subjects, and Thou led them
across the sea on dry land, and Thou made them sojourn in the
desert by virtue of Thy benefits of every kind; Thou gavest them
the Law, the Decalogue, which Thy voice pronounced and Thy
hand wrote, Thou prescribed the Sabbath for them, not as a pretext
for idleness but an occasion for devotion, for the knowledge of Thy
power, to prevent them from doing evil by surrounding them with a
holy barrier, to teach them and to gladden them during the week. 
Wherefore (Thou established) a week, seven weeks, the seventh
month and the seventh year, and upon its seventh return, the
Jubilee, in the fiftieth year, for forgiveness, so that men might have
no excuse to cover up their ignorance: (the Law) prescribed that
they rest each Sabbath, so that no one would dare to utter one
word of anger upon the Sabbath day.  Indeed, the Sabbath is the
repose of creation, the fulfillment of the world, the study of the
Law, the Eucharistic praise to God for the gifts He has made to
men.  But Sunday surpasses all of this in that it manifests the
mediator Himself, the provident one, the law-giver, the principle of
the resurrection, the first born of all creation, God the Word, and
the born of Mary, and the only one (who was so born) without the
help of man, the one who lived in a holy manner, who was crucified
under Pontius Pilate, who died ad who rose form the dead.
wherefore, Sunday, O Master, invites (us) to offer The  Eucharist
for all things: for it is itself the grace that comes from Thee and
whose greatness has hidden beneath it every (other) benefit. 

     In the absence of a more direct expression for comparison, we
may connect this prayer with the insertion that was introduced into
the third berakah for the end of the meats on Sabbath. There we can
see the same sabbatical theology.

        Comfort us, jhwh, our God, in Zion, Thy city, and in
establishing Thy Temple, and      be merciful, jhwh, our God, unto
Thy People and upon Thy city Jerusalem and upon     Zion, the
dwelling place of Thy glory ...

                  Be pleased, jhwh, our God, to fortify Thy commandm
ents, and (especially) by the   commandment of the seventh day.  
This (day) is great and Holy through Thy holiness  and Thy rest,
and we will rest on it in accordance with the commandment of Thy
will, and let there be no trouble and grief in our rest.  And let the
Kingdom of the House of David speedily return to its place ...

     The fifth of our prayers begins by combining the content of the
fourteenth and fifteenth berakoth: the Birkat Yerushalem and the
Birkat David:

        (Birkat Yerushalem)  To Jerusalem, Thy city, return in mercy,
and dwell in it as Thou  hast spoken: and rebuild it as an everlasting
building in our days.  Blessed be Thou,     jhwh, who rebuildest
Jerusalem.

        (Birkat David) Speedily cause the offspring of David to
flourish and let his horn be   exalted by Thy salvation, because we
wait for Thy salvation all the day.  Blessed be      Thou, jhwh, who
causeth the horn of salvation to flourish.

     Here is what we find in the first paragraph of the fifth prayer
given by the Constitutions:

        Thou who hast accomplished the promises of the Prophets,
who hast had mercy on    Zion, who took pity of Jerusalem by
exalting the throne of Thy servant in its midst,      though the birth
of Christ, who is born according to the flesh form the seed of
David, of the one who alone remained a virgin ...

     What follows will similarly combine the 16th berakah (Tefillah)
for the granting of prayers, with the 17th (Abodah), which
according to the Rabbis resumes the prayer that accompanied the
offering of sacrifices in the Temple.

      They are formulated in this way by Amram Gaon:

        (Tefillah)  Hear our voice, jhwh, have mercy upon us and
accept our prayer in mercy    and favor; for Thou art a God who
hearkenest unto our prayers and supplications: from     Thy
Presence, our King, turn us not empty away, for Thou hearkenest
to the prayer of every mouth.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who
harkenest unto prayer.

        (Abodah)  accept, jhwh, our God, Thy People Israel and their
prayer  and restore the    service to the Holy of Holies of Thy
House and receive speedily in love and favor the     fire offerings of
Israel and their prayer, and may the ser vice of Thy People Israel
ever be acceptable unto Thee, and let our eyes behold Thy return to
Zion in mercy.  Blessed be Thou, jhwh, who restoreth Thy Presence
to Zion.

     The prayer of the Apostolic Constitutions synthesizes these two
prayers into one.  It     reintroduces a detailed recall of the fathers,
this time in relation to the sacrifices that the     Bible speaks about.

        ... And Thou, now, Master, O God, accept the prayers which
ar e upon the  lips Thy  people, taken from the nations,  of those
who call upon Thee in trut h, as Thou  hast  accepted the gifts of
the righteous in their generations.  Thou hast look ed in the first
place upon the sacrifice of Abel and Thou hast accepted it, that of
Noah upon leaving the Ark, that of Abraham when he had left the
land of the Chaldeans, that of Isaac at the well of the oath, that of
Jacob at Bethel, that of Moses in the desert, that of Aaron between
the living and the dead, that of Gideon on the rock and the fleece
before his sin, that of Manoah and his wife on the plain, that of
Samson who thirsted before his transgressions, that of Jephtah in
the battle, before his rash promise, that of Barak and           
Deborah in regard to Sisara, that of Samuel at Mishpah, that of
David on the threshing floor of Oran the Jebusite, those of Solomon
at Gibeon and at Jerusalem, that of Elijah on Mount Carmel, that of
Elisha at the dried up spring, that of Jephoshaphat during the war,
those of Hezekiah in his illness and in regard to Sennacherib, that of
Manaseeh in the and of the Chaldeans after his transgression,. that
of Josiah for the Passover, that of Ezra upon his return (from exile),
that of  Daniel in the lion's den, that of Jonah in the belly of the sea
monster, that of the three children in the fiery furnace, that of Anna
in the Tabernacle before the Ark, that of Nehemiah and Zorobabel
at the time of the rebuilding of the walls, that of Mattahias and his
sons in their zeal toward Thee, that of Jael in his blessing.  Now,
also, receive the prayers which Thy People offer Thee, with (their)
knowledge, through Christ in the Spirit.

     Several of these names should be remembered. Abraham and
Abel, particularly, we find mentioned again, and more than once, in
a Christian Eucharistic prayer at the moment that it implores the
acceptance of the sacrifice.

     The last of our prayers, finally, corresponds to the 18th
"blessing", the Hodah, which concludes the whole to the Tefillah in
a classic return to the initial act of thanksgiving.

     Here they are, one after the other:

        (Hod  ah)  We give thanks unto Thee, our God and the God of
o ur fathers: Thou art   the  Rock of our lives, the Shield of our
salvation through every generation.  We will give    thanks unto
Thee and declare Thy praise for our lives which are committed unto
Thy hand, and for our souls which are in Thy charge.  Thou art all
good for Thy mercies fail not, Thou art merciful for Thy loving
kindness never ceases, we have ever hoped in Thee.
     And bring us  not to shame, jhwh, our God, abandon us n ot and 
hide not Thy face from  us, and for all Thy Name be blessed and
exalted, our King, for ever and ever.  Everything      that liveth
should thank Thee, Selah, and praise Thy Name, All good, in truth. 
Blessed be Thou, jhwh, whose Name is all good, and unto whom it
is becoming to give thanks.   

        We give Thee thanks for all thing s, Al m ighty Master, becau
se  Thou  hast not taken  away Thy mercies and Thy compassio n 
from us, b ut in every gener ati on  Thou dost save,      deliver,
assist and protec  t.  For Thou were h elpful in th e days  of  Enos
and Enoch, in the days of Moses and Joshua, in the days of the
Judges, in the days of David and the Kings, in the days of Samuel,
Elijah and the Prophets, in the days of Esther and Mordocai, in the
days of Judith, in the days of Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers. 
In our days, also, help us, through Thy great High Priest Jesus
Christ, Thy Servant.  Indeed, He has delivered Ius) form the sword,
He has snatched us from famine by giving (us) food, of sickness He
has healed us, from the evil tongue He has protected (us). For all
this, through Christ, we give thanks to Thee who hast given us a
voice disposed to confessing (Thee), having fortified us with a
harmonious tongue, as with a plectrum.  (Thou hast also provided
us) with taste for appreciation, with touch for distinguishing, with
eyes to see, with ears to hear, with the sense of smell, with hands
for working, with feet for walking.  and all this, Thou from a
particle in the maternal womb, Thou grant it after it has taken shape
an immortal soul and Thou makest it see the light of day.  This
rational animal, man, Thou hast instructed by (Thy) Laws, Thou
hast enlightened by (Thy) judgments, and, bringing him for a short
time into decomposition, Thou promised him resurrection.  What
life will suffice then, what length of ages will be such that man can
give Thee thanks?  But what is impossible for us to do as we should
do, we must still perform in so far as it is in our power.  For Thou
hast delivered us from the ungodliness of  polytheism, Thou hast
snatched us from the sect of Christ's murderers, Thou hast freed us
from the ig     norance of which we had wandered.  Thou hast sent
Christ as a man among men, the one who is God the Only-Begotten
Son; Thou hast made the Paraclete dwell in us, Thou hast placed us
in the care of Angels, Thou hast reduced the devil to shame; Thou
hast made to be what did not exist, Thou givest life its measure,
Thou procure food for us, Thou hast promised penance.  For all
that, Thou (be) glory and veneration, through Jesus Christ, now and
always and forever and ever. Amen. 

     Once, again the differences bear especially on detailed
enumerations, substituted for the global formulas of the Jewish
prayers which prevailed.  In each case, as we have been able to
observe in the foregoing prayers, these exhaustive encomia (which
are traditional in the Wisdom writings whose kinship with the
Alexandrian Judaism of our formulas is obvious), that are also
found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, furnish for the Christians who
used them a final and ready made place to insert the mention of
Christ and His work.
     
     Jewish as these prayers still are beneath their Christian overlay,
entire portions of them will enter integrally into the Eucharistic
Prayer of the 8th book, which is decidedly Christian as we shall
soon show.  With these prayers, we see the Christian Prayer being
formed within the context of  the Jewish prayer.  When it finally
becomes separated, it will appear naturally that it was composed
not only in a Jewish mold but of its very substance.