1 The Lord’s day in the Apostolic age?

In a recent study of the reception of the Sabbath in early Christianity, Gerard Rouwhorst has pointed out that the conclusions reached in three major dissertations on the subject of the Sabbath and the early Christian Sunday strikingly match the practices of the particular denomination to which each of the authors belongs.1 The Swiss Reformed church historian Willy Rordorf had argued that Sunday was a very early Christian creation unrelated to the Sabbath and was not a day of rest but the weekly occasion for celebrating the Eucharist in the evening, rooted in the resurrection meals of Jesus with his disciples;2 the Roman Catholic Corrada Mosna, in his dissertation at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, had argued that almost from the very start Christians celebrated the Eucharist on Sunday mornings;3 and Samuele Bacchiocchi, a Seventh-Day Adventist, had argued in his doctoral dissertation, also at the Gregorian University, that it was only in Rome under Bishop Sixtus (c. 115–25) that the Christian observance of Sunday first began and that prior to that time Christians had observed the Sabbath.4 These examples could be supplemented. The English Evangelicals Roger Beckwith and Wilfrid Stott, for instance, argued for the observance of Sunday as the equivalent of the Sabbath day of rest from the earliest period of Christianity.5

All this stands as a warning of the great danger of reading one’s own preconceptions into this particular subject, and of the relative lack of very firm evidence for what the earliest Christian practices might have been. In the New Testament there are in fact only three passages that could perhaps imply that there were regular Christian gatherings on the first day of the week, and in every case alternative explanations of the passage are possible:

• 1 Corinthians 16.2: ‘On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that contributions need not be made when I come.’ Because this direction about making regular savings for the needs of the church in Jerusalem specifies that particular day, rather than just ‘every week’, it seems to imply both that this predominantly Gentile congregation was accustomed to the use of the Jewish seven-day week and also that the first day of the week had particular significance for them, as there is no evidence for it having any special importance in the surrounding culture, for example, that it was the day on which workers were commonly paid. While some have gone on to draw the conclusion that this must mean that the day was the one on which the community regularly came together for worship, others have noted that the passage stops short of stating that, and indeed could be held to indicate the opposite, as it appears to speak of individuals storing up the money for themselves rather than handing it over to church officials each week.6

• Acts 20.7–12: ‘On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the morrow; and he prolonged his speech until midnight …’ Some argue that this passage implies that Sunday was the regular day of the week on which the Christian community in Troas met to celebrate the Eucharist, and the only unusual feature was that Paul preached at great length, with disastrous consequences for Eutychus, who fell asleep and tumbled out of the window. Others claim that community had gathered on the first day of the week only because Paul intended to leave them the next day, and so the passage gives no information about their customary practice.7 There is also the further question as to what is meant here by ‘the first day of the week’ – is it Saturday evening or Sunday evening? – because, it has been argued, a celebration of the Eucharist after midnight on Sunday would not have been ‘on the first day of the week’, and this factor would support the view that the breaking of the bread here was simply a social meal rather than a regular liturgical event. We shall return to this question later.

• Revelation 1.10: ‘I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day …’ While some interpret the unusual expression ‘the Lord’s day’ (κυριακμέρα) as referring to Sunday, and thus implying that the first day of the week was being observed regularly as a day of worship in the Christian community of the author, others have understood it instead to mean the eschatological Day of the Lord, and still others Easter Day.8

Those who contend that ‘the Lord’s day’ in this passage from the book of Revelation (conventionally dated in the last decade of the first century) does mean Sunday claim support from the occurrence of a very similar expression in what was probably a roughly contemporary text, the Didache.9 This instructs: ‘On the Lord’s [day] of the Lord (κατ κυριακν δ κυρίου) having assembled together, break bread and give thanks, having first confessed your faults, so that your sacrifice may be pure’ (14.1). While most scholars treat this as meaning Sunday,10 there are some who have tried to argue that even here the reference is to an annual Easter11 or to a Day of Atonement celebration by Jewish Christians.12 Bacchiocchi, not surprisingly, believed that it referred not to a day at all but to the manner of celebrating the Eucharist, ‘according to the Lord’s doctrine or command’. He adopted a similar attitude towards the occurrence of the same adjective in Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Magnesians 9.1, ‘not keeping the Sabbath but living according to the Lord’s [day/life?]’, although he admitted that when the word was used in the Gospel of Peter 35 and 50, it did refer to Sunday, but he dated that work later than many other scholars, in the second half of the second century, a time when he was willing to acknowledge that Sunday worship had become generally established.13 Bacchiocchi’s interpretation of Magnesians 9.1 has recently been supported by Clemens Leonhard.14

A letter written by Pliny the Younger when serving as Roman governor of Bithynia to the Emperor Trajan c. 112 has also often been cited as providing support for the early existence of Christian worship on Sundays, since it refers to the Christians he had interrogated as meeting regularly ‘on a fixed day’ (stato die) before daylight and again later in the same day to eat together.15 However, this ‘fixed day’ might equally well refer to Saturday rather than to Sunday,16 and indeed more probably so, because we have no other evidence that Christians anywhere met twice on a Sunday at this early period, morning and evening, whereas a Saturday morning gathering for the study of the Scriptures based on synagogue practice followed by a gathering to eat in the evening does seem a plausible explanation. Nevertheless, as this Saturday evening gathering would no doubt have occurred after sunset, when the Sabbath was over, it would still – according to Jewish reckoning – have been on the first day of the week, the Lord’s day. Pliny reports that the Christians said that they had subsequently abandoned the evening meal as a consequence of his edict forbidding such assemblies. What they may have done was to transfer it to Sunday morning and reduce it in scale – which, if true, would make it our earliest known instance of such a celebration.17

In years gone by the Epistle of Barnabas was generally not adduced into the debate about the beginnings of Sunday observance, because it was conventionally thought to have been written around the end of the first quarter of the second century, but recently the weight of opinion has begun to shift towards a somewhat earlier date. Stephen Wilson proposes somewhere around 96–8, which could make it the first fairly sure reference to the regular Christian observance of Sunday, as Barnabas 15.9 states that ‘we keep the eighth day with rejoicing, on which also Jesus rose from the dead …’.18 There is widespread, though not universal, agreement that this expression refers to the weekly recurrence of the day and not to an annual celebration of Easter.

Thus, while the cumulative evidence for the early observance of Sunday by Christians remains somewhat flimsy, it is probably sufficient for us to conclude that by the end of the first century the custom had become established in some places, but not yet in all. Unless the fact that nearly all of the most likely early extant references to it come from the regions of Asia Minor and Syria is merely coincidental, that area seems the probable point of origin.19

In spite of the weakness of the evidence, a number of scholars have nonetheless presumed that the practice must have originated in Palestine, and at a much earlier date. Rordorf, for example, argued not simply for its existence in Pauline communities but for a pre-Pauline origin. Developing a view originally put forward by his mentor Oscar Cullmann, he believed it had its historical roots in the post-resurrection meal-appearances by Jesus to his disciples, several of which are said to have taken place on the first day of the week.20 Other scholars, however, have rejected this particular argument on the ground that it is more likely to have been the other way around – that it was the existence of regular Christian meal gatherings on the first day of the week that gave rise to stories about Jesus having appeared to his disciples at meals on those days.21 Yet both these views discount the possibility that the New Testament references to the empty tomb having been discovered on the first day of the week and Jesus having appeared to his disciples on the same day may be no more than simple historical recollection, and neither the immediate cause nor the effect of the Christian transition to worship on that day. As Harald Riesenfeld observed, ‘In the accounts of the resurrection in the Gospels, there are no sayings which direct that the great event of Christ’s resurrection should be commemorated on the particular day of the week on which it occurred.’22 It is important also to note that when the resurrection is mentioned by early Christian writers in connection with the observance of Sunday, it is not presented as being the primary reason for the choice of that day: Barnabas speaks of Sunday as the day ‘on which also Jesus rose from the dead’; Ignatius has a similar expression, ‘… living according to the Lord’s [day], on which also our life sprang up through him and his death’; and even Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century recalls Sunday as having been the first day of creation before he mentions it as the day of Christ’s resurrection.23

Although recognizing the weakness of the arguments attempting to trace the origin of Sunday observance back to the resurrection appearances or even to the time of the writing of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection, Richard Bauckham still considered it likely that the practice went back to the Palestinian Jewish-Christian churches. He believed that the absence of any controversy over the matter among second-century Christians could best be explained if Sunday worship was already established prior to the Gentile mission.24 Wilson, however, dismisses such claims for an early date as ‘pure speculation’.25 In any case, was Bauckham right in saying that there was no dispute over the observance of the Lord’s day? He assumed that Jewish Christians, who he admits were continuing to observe the Sabbath,26 were doing so in addition to keeping the Lord’s day and not instead of it. But was that true? He refers to the testimony of the fourth-century historian Eusebius, who described two types of a deviant Jewish-Christian sect known as the Ebionites still existing in his own time: one group observed the Sabbath and the Jewish law, the other added to this the celebration of the Lord’s day ‘as a memorial of the resurrection of the Saviour’.27 Bauckham cites the second of these groups as possibly retaining ‘the original practice of Palestinian Jewish Christianity’, but the other he regards as having discontinued their original Sunday worship, perhaps as the result of pressure from their Jewish brethren.28 Wilson, however, more plausibly suggests that it was the first group who may have retained the earlier practice, while the second reflected a later accommodation to the emergence of Lord’s day observance among other Christians.29

Somewhat surprisingly, in another essay Bauckham acknowledges that the opponents criticized by Ignatius of Antioch in his letters in the early second century for holding separate Eucharists (see especially Philadelphians 4.1; Smyrnaeans 7.1; 8.2; cf. Magnesians 9.1), whom Bauckham identifies as probably mixed communities of Jewish and Gentile Christians, were likely to have done so ‘on the Sabbath in distinction from the bishop’s eucharist on Sunday’.30 While Bauckham views this as an instance of ‘Judaizing’, that is, of slipping back into something that they had long given up or that had never been part of their tradition, the more likely explanation would seem to be that they were conservative communities which were resistant to making the transition from Sabbath observance to worship on the Lord’s day and thus came into conflict with the more progressive Ignatius. If this is so, then it suggests that the transition is more likely to have been of relatively recent origin than something reaching back to the earliest days of Christianity, and the motivation behind it seems to have been the desire to make a clearer distinction between Christianity and Judaism that we see emerging around the end of the first century.31

However, we still need to ask the fundamental question as to what ‘keeping the Sabbath’ or ‘observing the Lord’s day’ might have meant in practical terms at this time, and especially when it was that Jewish Christians would have gathered to eat their regular Christian meal together. For Jews in the first century, as William Horbury has cogently argued,32 the most significant meal in connection with the Sabbath was that held actually on Friday evening, before sunset and the onset of the Sabbath when the lighting of fires and cooking would be prohibited, resulting in little food, often cold, being eaten during the day itself. It seems all but certain therefore that it would have been this meal that became the weekly ‘eucharistic’ occasion for the first generation of Jewish Christians, and at least in some cases for succeeding generations. Some Gentile Christian communities, and mixed gatherings of Jewish and Gentile believers, might well initially have adopted the same occasion,33 but others might have assembled instead when the Sabbath was over, after sunset on Saturday, which would technically have been the beginning of the first day of the week according to Jewish reckoning. It is possible that the gathering described in Acts 20.7–12 and referred to earlier in this chapter was an instance of this practice, as was the one reported to Pliny in Bithynia in the early second century.

The exhortations by early Christian leaders for certain congregations to abandon the keeping of the Sabbath, therefore, would have meant not simply ceasing to rest on the Sabbath but also transferring their weekly meal to Saturday evening, viewed now as the beginning of the first day of the week. Indeed, for some Gentiles it is likely to have been the Sabbath-eve meal and the assembly for Bible study the next morning that would have constituted the main feature of their Sabbath observance, if they were unable to pass themselves off as Jews and take advantage of the general recognition accorded to Jews within the Roman Empire of their religious duty to refrain from working on that day. On the other hand, for any communities that were already accustomed to meeting for their eucharistic meal on Saturday evenings, what was required in order to distance themselves from the Jewish roots of their faith was not initially a change in their practice as it was starting to view the occasion as the beginning of the Lord’s day rather than as something that ended the Sabbath. For we have no evidence at all of Christians transferring their meal to Sunday evenings. Rordorf’s thesis that the first Christians must have adopted the custom of assembling on Sunday evenings for the Eucharist as a result of the resurrection appearances of Jesus having taken place on Sunday evenings lacks any firm support, and has been strongly refuted by Bauckham in particular. Bauckham points out that while some resurrection appearances of Jesus do take place on a Sunday evening, others do not, and only one of them is explicitly said to involve a meal (Luke 24.30–31, 35), while other meals in the Gospels with apparent eucharistic significance are not said to have taken place on that day.34

Thus, the transfer to Sunday morning can only have happened when a congregation finally abandoned an evening eucharistic meal and resorted to a token feeding instead. Some scholars have argued that this transition, too, took place at quite an early date, but apart from what may be inferred for Bithynia from Pliny’s letter, any direct evidence for it is lacking until very much later, in the third century.35 Even Justin Martyr’s description of Christian assemblies as taking place ‘on the day called “of the Sun”’ is not necessarily inconsistent with their actually taking place on Saturday evenings and still involving a meal.36 That is not to say that the transfer might not have happened earlier than this in some places, especially where congregations were growing larger and catering was proving difficult, but there is nothing to compel us to think that it did. Linked with this matter is the question of the manner in which early Christians would have calculated when a day began and ended. Some have thought that they might have abandoned the Jewish view that a day was to be counted from sunset to sunset at quite an early date and substituted either the Roman reckoning from midnight to midnight or alternatively the common Hellenistic reckoning from dawn to dawn.37 As we saw earlier, this question is not unrelated to Acts 20.7–12. For Rordorf to be able to argue that the gathering described there took place on Sunday evening, he had to assume that such a change in calculating the day had already happened. However, because Christians continued to use the Jewish names for the days of the week for several centuries, except when addressing pagans,38 it seems unlikely that they abandoned the Jewish reckoning of the day very quickly.

In order to undergird the adoption of Saturday evening as the proper occasion for the Christian weekly gathering, it was necessary for those early Christians advocating the change to do two things: to undermine the observance of the Sabbath and to give some positive justification for meeting on the day after the Sabbath. Bestowing on this day the designation ‘the Lord’s day’ – the day when true believers acknowledged the lordship of Christ and looked forward to the eschatological Day of the Lord – was one such step. But Christian apologists in the second century went further. They generally interpreted the commandment to observe the literal Sabbath as having been only a temporary measure, which had now been abrogated by Christ, that Christians should instead fulfil in a spiritual manner by living in holiness every day rather than by what they described as living in idleness on just one day, and that the true Sabbath was the rest that believers would enjoy in the age to come.39 Barnabas, apparently originating in Alexandria as a concerted attack upon Jewish Christians, gives this a novel twist by claiming that the seventh-day commandment in the Old Testament was actually referring to an eschatological event and not a day of the week at all, and that therefore God rejects the present Sabbaths in favour of this, which he will ‘make the beginning of an eighth day, which is the beginning of another world’. This, the author says, is why the Christians observe ‘the eighth day’ of the week with rejoicing. By giving Sunday the same name as the end time and emphasizing its joyful character, he thus draws out the implication of the title ‘the Lord’s day’ as an anticipation of the age to come.40 The designation ‘eighth day’ recurs in later Christian writings.41 Justin Martyr, while not using that less easily understood term in his First Apology addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, gave as the reason for worship on Sunday its being ‘the first day, on which God, having transformed the darkness and matter, made the world’, and as we saw earlier, like Barnabas, added that it was also the day of Christ’s resurrection.42

Thus, the adoption of the Lord’s day by early Christians was not as a replacement for the Jewish Sabbath understood as a divinely mandated day of rest. It was, however, a replacement for the Sabbath insofar as it became the day of the week when God’s people were expected to assemble together for worship. The language used to describe it confirms that it was understood primarily not as a memorial of Christ’s resurrection but as the key weekly expression of the constant eschatological readiness for the parousia which was intended to permeate the whole of a Christian’s daily prayer and life.43

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1 Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘The Reception of the Jewish Sabbath in Early Christianity’ in P. Post, G. Rouwhorst, L. van Tongeren and A. Scheer (eds), Christian Feast and Festival (Louvain: Peeters 2001), pp. 223–66, here at pp. 226–36.

2 Willy Rordorf, Der Sonntag (Zurich: Zwingli Verlag 1962); ET: Sunday (London: SCM Press/Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1968).

3 Corrada S. Mosna, Storia della domenica dalle origini fino agli inizi del V seculo (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University 1969).

4 Samuele Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University 1977). For a refutation of his thesis, see Richard Bauckham, ‘Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church’ in D. A. Carson (ed.), From Sabbath to Lord’s Day (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1982), pp. 251–98, here at pp. 270–3.

5 Roger T. Beckwith and Wilfrid Stott, This is the Day (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott 1978) = The Christian Sunday (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1980).

6 See Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 90–5; Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 193–5; and the works referred to in both these discussions. For the meaning of the Greek phrase translated above as ‘aside’, see the debate between S. R. Llewelyn, ‘The Use of Sunday for Meetings of Believers in the New Testament’, Novum Testamentum 43 (2001), pp. 205–23, here at p. 209, and Norman Young, ‘“The Use of Sunday for Meetings of Believers in the New Testament”, A Response’, Novum Testamentum 45 (2003), pp. 111–22, here at pp. 112–14.

7 See Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 101–11; Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 196–202; and the works referred to in both these discussions.

8 See Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 111–31; Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 207–9; and the works referred to in both these discussions. For an account of the other usages of the adjective κυριακ, see Richard Bauckham, ‘The Lord’s Day’ in Carson, From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, pp. 221–50, here at pp. 222–7.

9 This work has been variously dated from the middle of the first century to the middle of the second, but the current consensus seems to be that it is no later than the end of the first century: see Kurt Niederwimmer, The Didache: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1998), p. 53, n. 71.

10 See, for example, Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 209–10; Niederwimmer, The Didache, pp. 194–6.

11 Most notably C. W. Dugmore, ‘Lord’s Day and Easter’ in Neotestamentica et Patristica, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 6 (Leiden: Brill 1962), pp. 272–81.

12 Neville L. A. Tidwell, ‘Didache XIV:1 Revisited’, VC 53 (1999), pp. 197–207. His thesis has been refuted by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2003), pp. 217f.

13 Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 113–15, 214–16. For a very cautious assessment of all these references, see Bauckham, ‘The Lord’s Day’, pp. 227–32.

14 Clemens Leonhard, The Jewish Pesach and the Origins of the Christian Easter (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2006), pp. 124–9.

15 Pliny, Ep. 10.96; Latin text and ET in Pliny, Letters, ed. Betty Radice, Loeb Classical Library 59 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1969), pp. 284–91. Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 202–3, supported its meaning Sunday, as more recently has Stephen G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians, 70–170 C. E. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1995), p. 231. Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, pp. 98–9, claimed improbably that the ‘fixed day’ might not have been on the same day every week.

16 This possibility is acknowledged by Dugmore, ‘Lord’s Day and Easter’, p. 270.

17 This interpretation of the evidence has been made by Alistair Stewart-Sykes, The Life of Polycarp (Sydney: St Pauls Publications 2002), p. 67.

18 Wilson, Related Strangers, pp. 231–2. See also James Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background (Tübingen: Mohr 1994), pp. 9–30, who inclines towards the same date. For the use of ‘the eighth day’ to designate Sunday, see below, p. 13.

19 So Wilson, Related Strangers, p. 233.

20 Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 215ff.; Oscar Cullmann, Early Christian Worship (London: SCM Press/Naperville, IL: Allenson 1953), pp. 15f.

21 See, for example, Xavier Léon-Dufour, Sharing the Eucharistic Bread (New York: Paulist Press 1982), pp. 39–40.

22 Harald Riesenfeld, ‘The Sabbath and the Lord’s Day in Judaism, the Preaching of Jesus and Early Christianity’ in Harald Riesenfeld, The Gospel Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell 1970), pp. 111–37, here at p. 124.

23 Barnabas 15.9; Ignatius, Magnesians 9.1; Justin Martyr, First Apology 67.8 (emphasis added).

24 Bauckham, ‘The Lord’s Day’, pp. 232–8.

25 Wilson, Related Strangers, p. 233.

26 Bauckham, ‘Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church’, p. 257: ‘Certainly the Jewish-Christian communities of Syria and Palestine continued to keep the Sabbath.’

27 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 3.27.5. On the Ebionites, see further Gerd Lüdemann, Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity (London: SCM Press/Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 1996), pp. 52–6.

28 Bauckham, ‘The Lord’s Day’, pp. 237, 270.

29 Wilson, Related Strangers, p. 233.

30 Bauckham, ‘Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church’, p. 260.

31 Wilson, Related Strangers, p. 235, agrees that the motivation was probably anti-Jewish.

32 William Horbury, ‘Cena Pura and Lord’s Supper’ in Jack Pastor and Menachem Mor (eds), The Beginnings of Christianity (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press 2005), pp. 219–65.

33 Young, ‘“The Use of Sunday for Meetings of Believers in the New Testament”, A Response’, p. 117, went so far as to claim that ‘it is inconceivable that Jewish Christians in the Apostolic era were meeting on any other day than the Sabbath; and if they were to meet unitedly with the Gentile Christians, the latter had to join the former on the Sabbath and not Sunday’.

34 Bauckham, ‘The Lord’s Day’, pp. 234–5.

35 Tertullian’s reference to Christians taking ‘in gatherings before daybreak and from the hand of none but the presidents the sacrament of the eucharist’ (De corona 3) has commonly been understood as the first explicit reference to a morning eucharistic celebration, but see Andrew B. McGowan, ‘Rethinking Agape and Eucharist in Early North African Christianity’, SL 34 (2004), pp. 165–76, here at pp. 169–70, who suggests that it may instead be to the reception of pre-consecrated bread on the station days of Wednesday and Friday (for which see below, pp. 29–35). If so, Cyprian, in the middle of the third century, would constitute our earliest sure witness (Ep. 63.16.4), though McGowan detects signs in what Cyprian says that others in North Africa were still holding their eucharistic suppers in the evening. See also Paul F. Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins (London: SPCK/New York: Oxford University Press 2004), pp. 97–101, 108–10.

36 Justin Martyr, First Apology 67.3. See further Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, pp. 61–75.

37 See Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo 1986; 2nd edn, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1991), pp. 14–16. For a more detailed exposition of the variety of ways of reckoning the day in the ancient world, see Llewelyn, ‘The Use of Sunday for Meetings of Believers in the New Testament’, pp. 213–19.

38 See Rordorf, Sunday, pp. 39–41, and esp. n. 6.

39 For examples, see Bauckham, ‘Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church’, pp. 252–69.

40 See further Bauckham, ‘Sabbath and Sunday in the Post-Apostolic Church’, pp. 262–4, 273.

41 See Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 41.4; 138.1; Tertullian, De idolatria 14; and Jean Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1956), pp. 255–81.

42 Justin Martyr, First Apology 67.8.

43 See further Paul F. Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church (London: SPCK 1981/New York: Oxford University Press 1982; reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock 2008), pp. 37–9, 57–9.