Anaphoras carry the names of the great sees and their bishops, and the names record the tradition that used them rather than a claim about who wrote every line. The Byzantine churches use the anaphora of John Chrysostom on most days and that of Basil ten times a year, in Lent and at the great feasts; the anaphora of James belongs to Jerusalem and Antioch, that of Mark to Alexandria and its Coptic descendant to the Egyptian church, and that of Addai and Mari to the East Syriac tradition. The Ethiopian church keeps more than a dozen in regular use. The Roman rite went the other way and used a single prayer, the Canon, almost alone from late antiquity until 1969, when the reformed Missal added three more beside it.
The second of those new Roman prayers was modelled on a text long printed as the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, a Roman church order of the early third century, and it was adopted partly because it was thought to be the oldest full eucharistic prayer in existence. That attribution has since been taken apart. A detailed commentary published in 2002 argued that the document is a composite assembled over a long period and in more than one place, with no secure connection to Hippolytus or to third century Rome, and that reading is now widely held among liturgical scholars while others continue to defend an early Roman core.
Protestant orders cut the prayer back sharply at the Reformation, chiefly because the Roman Canon speaks of the rite as an offering made by the priest. Full eucharistic prayers were restored across the Protestant West in the twentieth century, many of them drawing on the same ancient families.