of the Blessed Virgin; secondly, it has no Our Father. These two omissions are unique. How far they prove greater antiquity is another question. Undoubtedly after the Council of Ephesus (431) a greater devotion to the holy Mother of God spread throughout the Orthodox Churches, and the invocation of her under this title was a protestation of orthodoxy. But prayers have been added to liturgies continually, and the very oldest now contain later additions, so that a use that has a Memory of Saints, even of late Saints, may be an old one to which this addition was made afterwards. The omission of the Our Father is curious, but proves nothing at all. Christians are told to use it "as the Lord commanded in his Gospel," three times a day, in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Indeed the perpetually fluid state of a liturgy in use makes it impossible to fix its date. They all gradually evolved and became fixed from what were at first extemporary prayers, and after having been written down they still received additions and modifications.[1]
Goar and Renaudot thought that this liturgy had never been in actual use anywhere. On the other hand Probst[2] and Bickell[3] think it was used even in the West during the first three centuries. Connected with this use is the Liturgy of St. James, the original rite from which all the other Syrian ones were derived. It still exists in Greek.[4] It was probably first used in Jerusalem, since it alone contains a reference to that city. The "Intercession," immediately after the prayer of Consecration, begins: "We offer this to thee, O Lord, for thy holy places, which thou hast glorified by the appearance of thy Christ, and by the coming of thy Holy Ghost, chiefly for the holy and glorious Sion, the mother of all Churches, and then for thy holy. Catholic and Apostolic Church throughout the world."[5] As its name says, it was believed to have been composed by St. James the Less, the first Bishop of Jerusalem, and from that city it spread throughout Syria. The order of
