A Name and Its History

The attribution to John Chrysostom is ancient, but it is a banner rather than an author's signature. Chrysostom came to Constantinople from Antioch in 398, and it is entirely plausible that he brought Antiochene eucharistic usage with him; the liturgy that bears his name is of the Antiochene family, and scholars have found real correspondences between phrases of its anaphora and the wording of Chrysostom's genuine sermons, which is as close as the evidence comes to his hand. What is certain is that the service grew for centuries after him.

The Barberini euchologion, the oldest surviving Byzantine service book, copied around the year 800, gives the core prayers but attributes only some of them to Chrysostom, and the elaborate preparatory rite, the great entrance ceremonial and much of the hymnography are later growth, reaching their familiar form in the medieval Typikon. By the second millennium the Chrysostom liturgy had displaced the longer liturgy of St Basil as the ordinary Sunday service, with Basil's reserved for ten appointed days of the year. The name, then, records what the Byzantine church believed about the pedigree of its worship and honoured in its greatest preacher, and the scholarly consensus that the text is a layered corporate work does not diminish the liturgy; it simply makes the whole church its author.