Literature or Liturgy? Early Christian Hymns and Prayers in their Literary and Liturgical Context in Antiquity An Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Association between the Form and the Liturgical and/or Literary Background of New Testament Texts

Basic data for this project

Description

The workshop in Münster starts from the basic question what can be known about Christian hymns and prayers in New Testament times. Each term in this question associates an intricate network of concepts that ask for discussions of all its ramifications. First, the suggested hymns and prayers are called "Christian" by way of a hypothesis, because those people who eventually emerged as Christians in the later history appropriated the New Testament as sacred scripture. They search for antecedents of their liturgies in those texts. Second, and no less sophisticated, the widely differing notions of "hymn" and "prayer" lead to similarly differing sets of texts regarded as such and reconstructions of their contexts. In this situation, the workshop takes as a point of departure a form-critical approach. This approach has not yet received enough consideration in recent times and promises to provide a basis for an interdisciplinary debate of the issue. It will be asked, how traces of "hymns" and "prayer" texts can be detected in the New Testament. More specifically, the form of those texts will be of primary interest. Again more detailed, it will be asked whether some kind of "poetic" form of texts betrays their liturgical use prior to their inclusion in the texts in which they are transmitted. The idea of "liturgical use" need not be taken too restrictively. One may allow for a certain grey zone between texts that were actually used in liturgies and texts which imitate these. Yet, the workshop also intends to address the question of the use of these texts in the liturgies and to classify texts as neatly as possible with regard to this criterion. The distinction between "liturgical text" and "text imitating liturgical speech" implies a distinction between liturgy and literature as backgrounds for the creation of such texts. It need not be emphasized that this distinction, likewise, raises more questions than it solves. It disperses, however, the blunt presupposition that anything that is written in the New Testament should be "liturgy" in some way. The workshop will collect features of style and rhetoric that allow comparisons with contemporary, but also earlier and later texts and their specific contexts. As a result, the most important New Testament texts which have been claimed to be "liturgical" because they are cast in "poetical" style or contain "hymns" and the like will be addressed briefly. More important, the criteria for earlier classifications of these texts will be tested within a broad context of literature and liturgies. For this aim, the workshop takes into account an exemplary set of non-Christian texts from both Jewish and Greco-Roman tradition in antiquity. After the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church adopted several New Testament texts as "cantica" into its hymnals for the liturgy of the hours as well as common prayer books. Those cantica had never served as such throughout the history of the Church. This move responded to New Testament scholars who had analyzed several texts such as the so called Philippians' hymn as survivals of the liturgy of the age of the Apostles.