The Anaphora and Its Author

Basil of Caesarea is one of the few figures of the patristic age whose liturgical attribution scholars treat with genuine respect rather than polite suspicion. The prayer that bears his name survives in a family of versions: a shorter Egyptian form preserved in Coptic and Greek, and longer forms in Syriac, Armenian and the Byzantine books. Comparative study of these texts, one of the classic problems of liturgical science, has led many scholars to conclude that the shorter Egyptian text represents an older core, and that the expanded Byzantine anaphora is a fourth-century Cappadocian reworking, enriched precisely with the scriptural and Trinitarian language characteristic of Basil's certain writings.

Some are prepared to say the bishop reworked the prayer with his own hand; others stop at his circle and his era. Either way, the tradition that connects the liturgy to Basil is doing more than honouring a famous name, which is what makes this case different from most eponymous liturgies. In the Byzantine Rite the Basil liturgy was once the principal Sunday service, and the manuscripts place it first; over the medieval centuries the shorter Chrysostom liturgy displaced it from ordinary use, leaving Basil's the solemn exception it now is. The Coptic church, meanwhile, still uses its own form of the anaphora of Basil as its ordinary liturgy, so the prayer serves both as an everyday and as a festal text, in two churches that parted ways fifteen centuries ago.