Older Than the Gospels
Why the Liturgy Matters Before We Even Start, and Why Most Christians Have Never Been Shown the Evidence
Close your eyes and picture this….
Its fifty years ago on a small country farm, Johnny McMasters Place, and its Friday Night… You've just finished ten hot days of back breakin' labor,… and the hay... the hay is finally in. You're sitting around the kitchen table, under the dim light of the kerosene lantern. Everyone is laughing, and joking, and telling storiessssss...about their neighbours. You're half way through a bottle of.…. uh….. moonshine
err STOP, SORRY, wrong article! (ADD brain ran away with me!) I almost gotcha’ though! Were you paying attention? That song is one of my all time favorites, go check it out.
<shifts gears> Ok, Seriously now…..
Close your eyes and picture this in your mind’s eye.
You are sitting in a living room somewhere in the Roman Empire. The year is 155 AD. The Apostle John has been dead for just over fifty years. The Apostle Peter has been dead for just under a hundred. You cannot get a copy of the New Testament, because the New Testament has not yet been formally assembled into a book — the canon will not be settled for another two centuries. But the writings are there. They are circulating. People are copying them and passing them around.
It’s Sunday morning. And because you are curious, because you want to know what the grandchildren of the Apostles are actually doing, you follow a group of people through the streets of Rome, past the temples of Jupiter and Mars, past the shops and the bakeries, and into a private house. The door closes behind you. You have been invited to a Christian worship service.
What do you see?
Most Christians would probably give an answer that sounds like a slightly older version of whatever tradition they grew up with. If they grew up in a low-church Protestant tradition, they picture a sermon with some hymns, maybe some extemporaneous prayer, maybe a shared meal. If they grew up in an Evangelical tradition, they likely picture something loose and informal, a gathering of fellow christians, some teaching, perhaps some singing, perhaps someone sharing a prophecy or a word of encouragement.
Almost nobody pictures an altar.
Almost nobody pictures incense.
Almost nobody pictures vestments.
Almost nobody pictures anything that looks even remotely like Orthodoxy.
And here is the thing! We do not have to guess!
We have a letter. A letter from that exact decade. A letter written by a Christian philosopher named Justin, later called Justin Martyr, because he was martyred, addressed to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius himself.
The letter is an appeal. Justin is trying to explain to the Emperor what Christians actually do on Sunday morning. Why would he need to do that? Because at this time roman pagans are circulating ugly rumors that Christians engage in cannibalism and incest1. Rumors designed to justify the persecution that was busy turning Christians into lion food all over the Empire. Justin writes to the Emperor and says, in effect: *let me tell you what we actually do. Send someone to check if you want. Here is the truth.*
And the description he gives is devastating because the service Justin Martyr describes — written fifty-five years after the death of the last Apostle, to a pagan Emperor who could have had the entire claim verified by a single centurion with a notebook — is not the service that most Western Christians have been shown as the “early Church.”
It is not a sermon with some hymns. It is not an informal gathering. It is something much older, much more structured, much more deliberate, and much more familiar to about three hundred million people living in the world today. Just not the three hundred million you might think.
This series is my attempt to walk you through that evidence. Patiently, carefully, and with as much documentation as I can carry. By the time we are done, my hope is that you will not be able to unsee what I cannot unsee.
Let’s begin.
Why Worship Is Never Just “Style”
Before we get to Justin Martyr’s letter, I need to establish a principle that is going to do some of the heavy lifting for this entire series. It comes from a fifth-century theologian named Prosper of Aquitaine, who was a disciple of Augustine. Prosper coined a Latin phrase that has been the inheritance of serious theology ever since:
Lex orandi, lex credendi2 - loosely translated the way you worship is the way you believe.
Sit with that for a minute. Because it sounds too simple to be important, but it is actually hugely consequential. Here is what Prosper is saying. The way a church worships is not decoration. It is not aesthetic. It is not a style preference that can be swapped out the way you swap out the upholstery on a couch. The way a church worships is the load-bearing structure of what that church actually believes. Worship is doctrine in action. Worship is theology made visible, audible, tangible, incarnate.
Let’s make this concrete.
If you pray directly to the Son of God, you believe the Son of God is God. If you pray directly to the Holy Spirit, you believe the Holy Spirit is God. If you do not do these things, you probably don’t believe these things — or at the very least, you haven’t actualized them in your spiritual life. The doctrine of the Trinity I laid out in an earlier article of this series is not something the Fathers defined at Nicaea and then shelved.
The trinity is something that gets prayed every Sunday in an Orthodox church, dozens of times, with specific addresses to specific hypostases. If you never pray that way, you will eventually drift from believing that way.
If you ask the Saints to pray for you, you believe the communion of the Body of Christ extends across the boundary of physical death. You believe the saints are alive. You believe they can hear you. You believe the bond of love between you and them, the bond of the body of Christ is stronger than demonic forces and the grave. If you do not ask them to pray for you, you probably do not believe those things — or at least, you have not let yourself believe them enough to act on them.
If your worship centers on a pulpit and a sermon, you believe the primary act of Christian gathering is the proclamation of the Word. If your worship centers on an altar and the Eucharist, you believe the primary act of Christian gathering is the offering of the Body and Blood of Christ. Neither of these is a neutral architectural decision. They are theological claims built into the “furniture” of the edifice, so to speak.
Now, let’s run the principle in reverse, because this is where it comes home.
If a church’s worship is radically different from the worship of the ancient undivided Church, then by the same principle of lex orandi, lex credendi that church’s beliefs are probably radically different from the beliefs of the ancient undivided Church. Not maybe, probably, because you cannot worship one way for generations and believe the other way for generations. The worship always wins.
Let that sit, because it is the diagnostic framework for everything that follows.
We are not going to spend the next six articles being antiquarians. We are not going to dig up old Greek texts because old Greek texts are cool. We are going to dig up old Greek texts because if lex orandi, lex credendi is true, then the shape of the worship of the first Christians is evidence, hard, documentary, unfalsifiable evidence, of what the first Christians actually believed. And if their worship has been preserved somewhere, intact, across twenty centuries, then their belief has been preserved with it.
That is a claim worth testing. Let’s Gggggggggooooooooooooooo.
The Question Nobody Asks
This is something that has always struck me as strange. There is an anthropological principle (in the academic discipline of anthropology) called the Narcissism of Small Differences. It describes the phenomenon where communities with adjacent territories and close cultural relationships engage in constant feuds and ridicule because of the hypersensitivity caused by their similarities and small differences.3 i.e. the closer groups of people are in identity, values, norms, the less any disagreement or difference is tolerated. Hence the bitter enmity between Sunni’s and Shiites, between Catholics and Protestants, rivalries between neighboring countries like Canada and the USA, political purity tests within political parties, rivalries between competing technologies due to consumer tribalism (Apple vs Android) sports rivalries, even between teams from the same city (i.e. Manchester City vs. Manchester United or Inter Milan vs. AC Milan.) And as the saying goes, "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small." You could say that this entire publication is in some way motivated by this principle.
This is in nowhere on better display than in Christianity. Christians have a long history of fighting about doctrine (reference all the years since the reformation.) We argue about the canon of Scripture; which books belong and why. We argue about predestination. We argue about sacraments. We argue about eschatology, i.e. the end times. We argue about baptism (how much water, how old, administered by whom). We argue about whether women can be ordained, whether priests can marry, whether the elements of the Eucharist are really the Body and Blood or just a symbol, whether the Pope has universal jurisdiction; I had quite a bit to say about that one in *Why I really Chose Orthodoxy Over Rome* — go read it if you haven’t!)
We argue about all of it. Vigorously. Sometimes bitterly, for centuries.
But here is the question that almost never comes up, and that almost nobody asks with any seriousness: how did the Apostles actually worship?
Isn’t that strange?
When it comes to every other Christian question, we demand evidence. We demand sources. We demand texts and translations and historical context and early witnesses. But when it comes to the question of how we are supposed to worship — how we are supposed to gather as the people of God on the first day of the week and offer to Him the thing He has asked us to offer — the question mostly doesn’t get asked, and when it does, the answer is often some version of: “well, we don’t really know, and anyway the New Testament doesn’t prescribe a liturgy, so probably it doesn’t matter.” and probably the very worst one “it’s a matter of individual choice” Why do I say this is the worst one? because it basically says that worship is whatever I want it to be, whatever I am comfortable, in essence re-orienting worship of Christ and subjugating it to the self, and the ego (the western mind’s true God.) How prideful, and yet, how American!
I want to push back hard on the thought that “we don’t really know, and anyway the New Testament doesn’t prescribe a liturgy, so probably it doesn’t matter.”
The claim that “we don’t really know” how the Apostles worshiped is not true. We know a great deal. The claim that “the New Testament doesn’t prescribe a liturgy” is a claim that needs examining, because the New Testament presupposes a liturgical context so completely that you almost don’t notice it until someone points it out. And the claim that “it doesn’t matter” is, by the principle we just laid out, isn’t just wrong, it’s catastrophically wrong. In fact, it matters more than almost anything else.
Let’s rewind and consider what we actually know so we can set the stage.
Christ Himself worshiped. Luke tells us that He went to the synagogue in Nazareth “as was his custom” on the Sabbath day (Luke 4:16). He did not improvise. He did not go to some new start-up mega-synagogue with a laser light show, a cool new Jewish band and a hip new preacher. He went to the established places of public worship of Israel where he participated in the reading of the Law, the chanting of the Psalms, the fixed prayers that had been prayed for centuries, because that was the worship His Father had given to His people. He sang the Hallel4 psalms (Psalms 113–118) with His disciples at the Last Supper, as every observant Jew did at Passover. He went up to the Temple in Jerusalem for the appointed feast days. He prayed the Psalter, which is why so many of His words from the Cross are quotations from it.
The Apostles worshiped. The book of Acts describes Peter and John going up to the Temple “at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour” (Acts 3:1). That is not a casual reference. That is a technical reference to one of the fixed hours of Jewish daily prayer, what the Temple called the hour of the afternoon sacrifice, and what the Christian Church would eventually call the Ninth Hour. Acts describes the early Christians “breaking bread” on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7) This is in face Eucharistic language that every ancient reader would have recognized. Paul preaches so long at one such gathering that a young man named Eutychus falls asleep in a window, falls out, and has to be miraculously raised. This is, incidentally, the patron story of every parish that runs long.
The early Christians worshiped. A Roman governor named Pliny the Younger, writing to the Emperor Trajan around 112 AD, about a decade after the Apostle John died, describes the Christians in his province as gathering on a fixed day before dawn to sing hymns to Christ “as to a god.” Pliny is a pagan magistrate writing an administrative report to his Emperor. He has no reason to embellish. He is describing what he found when he interrogated Christians who were about to be executed. Don’t just take my word for it though, go read this Epistula (Letter 10.96) for yourself. It’s on the internet (see the 4th paragraph.)
So we have testimony. We have texts. We have sources, pagan sources, Christian sources, apostolic sources, patristic sources. The materials for answering the question are available. They have been available for nearly two thousand years.
The question is not whether the Apostles worshiped, or whether we can know how. The question is why has nobody been showing you the evidence?
Let me show you (keep the narcissism of small differences in mind as we go.)
