The Jewish Roots of Christian Liturgy

I Introduction First Christian communities appeared in Jewish Palestine and Diaspora after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, called the Christ, around 30 CE. Not only Jesus himself was a Jew, but also his followers and very first members of the new growing community were mainly Jews. They all shared the Jewish belief, the Sacred Scripture that Christians later started to call the Old Testament (OT), and were not aware of founding a new religion. A closer examination of Jewish worship will let us understand how it influenced the new Christian worship. We will have a closer look at places of worship, liturgical sources and customs which were common at that time. A last task will be to ask whether there are any significant Jewish elements missing in the later Christian Eucharistic liturgy.

II Early Christian roots in Judaism A. There were three major places of Jewish worship (Foley: 4-9) – the Temple, the synagogues, and home. The Jerusalem Temple was the religious centre. It served as the only place for sacrifices until its destruction in 70 CE. Synagogues were gathering places for local communities where they prayed, read and studied the Scripture on the Sabbath, feast days, and some weekdays. In the first decades of the first century Jewish Christians continued to attend synagogue services until they gradually separated from them after 80 CE (6). Besides, everyone’s home was the main place of daily blessings and prayers. Meals were celebrated as sacred acts. They were a sign of the covenant that God has made with Israel. Foley stresses that the home was especially important as familial and social institution for new Christian communities (8). Thus the question is not about the emergence of Christian liturgy out of Jewish

sources; it is about the absorbed specific elements of the Jewish worship in the Temple, synagogues and homes into Christian liturgy.

B. The main difficulty is the reconstruction of first-century Jewish worship due to the absence of Jewish

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