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It is in the 4th century that we find definitely constructed liturgies. By that time four types have evolved, that are the parents from which all others have since been derived. These four uses are the Roman, Gallican, Egyptian, and Syrian.^[1] These last two are the original Eastern liturgies.

The story of their development is very like that of the patriarchates that used them. In the first period the rites of the two greatest Eastern sees, Alexandria and Antioch, divide the allegiance of the East; then Constantinople evolves a rite of her own, and this rite gradually drives out the older ones, and becomes practically the only one used by the Orthodox Churches. But the heretics in Egypt and Syria keep the older liturgies.

 

3. The Syrian Rite.

This is the first that we find formally drawn up. The Apostolic Constitutions contain a liturgy that is evidently a form of the one we find soon after used all over Syria. The Apostolic Constitutions are a collection of eight books, purporting to be drawn up by the twelve Apostles, really put together from different sources in Syria in the beginning of the 5th century.^[2] The first six books are an enlargement of another apocryphal work, the Didascalia,^[3] the seventh of the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,^[4] the eighth book contains the liturgy, then follow the eighty-five apocryphal "Canons of the Apostles" that were accepted by the Quinisextum in 692.^[5] Two circumstances about the liturgy have led people to suppose that it is the oldest we have: First, it contains no Memory of the Saints, no names are mentioned, not even that

1. Mgr. Duchesne thinks that these four may be reduced to two. The Gallican use is derived from the Syrian, and the Egyptian one may be taken from Rome. Origines du Culte chrétien, p. 54.
2. Epiphanius († 403) quotes them.
3. Discovered in a Syriac version in 1854.
4. This is the famous Didache (διδαχὴ τῶν δώδεκαι ἀποστόλων) found by Philotheos Bryennios, Metropolitan of Nicomedia, in 1883.
5. Ed. princ. by Fr. Turrianus, Venice, 1563. Cf. Funk, Die Apost. Konstitutionen (Rottenburg, 1891), and Bardenhewer's Patrologie (Freiburg, 1894), pp. 28–31.