West Syriac Liturgy

English Translation: First Service (Gabriel Bar-Sawme) revised by Robert Kitchen; Second service (Charbel Rizk & Gunay Raheb) revised by Sebastian Brock.
Arabic Translation: First Service (Antonios Gharib); Second service (Zaytoun Sawmi)
General Editor: Roger Akhrass

This paper will try to study the Syriac Liturgical Anaphora of Jacob of Edessa (d.708) from an eschatological perspective. One of the main challenges while studying the massive liturgical corpus of Syriac Anaphoras that we have over 80 texts with various patristic authority names (such as the Cappadocian Fathers in addition to other key names in the Syriac Church theology such as Severus, Jacob Baradeus, Jacob of Serug, Philoxenos of Mabbug, etc..). However, most of these names are attributed possibly for the purpose of gaining credibility in the Syriac liturgical community. The argument of this paper is whether we can find some pieces of evidence inside the liturgical text of Jacob of Edessa’s Anaphora to indicate a sort of a relationship between the author and Jacob of Edessa. After presenting a general introduction about Syriac Anaphoras, I will present the text according to the manuscript Sachau 196 and I will analyse the text by studying how the word “faith” is occurring inside it to reflect a feeling of a community praying in persecution and understanding liturgy in an eschatological dimension; thus, it might be similar to Jacob of Edessa’s circumstances.

From the Introduction:
The Liturgy of the Church, being the primum locus theologicus, must be the main source of any theological reflection. It is not merely an expression of the Christian faith and worship. The Liturgy provides man with the opportunity where he can develop his self-knowledge, i.e. the texts enable him to be fully aware of exactly who he is, and contains guidelines on how he should live his life and how to further enrich his spiritual development.
Therefore in many prayers, especially those being said during the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, one can find a rich set of the anthropological topics. These texts considered together, show the real image of man, encompassing all aspects of his earthly life. It is a result of the genuine desire that the congregation must remain faithful before their Creator, devoid of any masks that human nature so easily attributes to itself.
Among the different Christian Churches the liturgical texts of the Holy Qurbono in the West Syriac tradition seem to contain a particular significance in this field. In fact both, the priestly prayers and those said by the faithful who have gathered together, demonstrate a comprehensive image of man, where he is recognized as a sinner, a being who with great confidence can open his heart and receive the special divine grace and become a true lover of God who is prepared to share the Creator’s love with his co-believers.
In this paper I want to focus my attention on the figure of the Priest–Celebrant of the Holy mysteries and his image, which is reflected in the Pre-Anaphoric texts of the Holy Qurbono. The Indian Periodical “The Harp” published my comments of the idea of the sinfulness of a priest last year. We will refer to that text in today’s presentation.