Department of Catholic Theology

The article aims to re-read Rev 17:16 amid the catastrophic patterns of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Employing narratological methods as well as a close reading of the text, it is argued that Rev 17:16 can be coherently read as the violent sexual punishment of an anthropomorphic female character. Signals in the text point to God’s involvement in this punishment and to its overall positive evaluation. Considering reader’s realities in the context of sexual abuse and its cover-up, the article argues for the necessity of taking a positional stance while reading biblical ‘texts of sexual terror’. Such a positional stance must have visible effects on a responsible reading and interpretation of the ‘great whore’s’ story.

Interest in the Gospel of Mark has been steadily growing in the field of biblical studies for years. Although Mark’s narrative had long been treated as less polished and thus theologically lacking compared to the other canonical gospels in the past, many scholars now recognize it as a complex narrative with various intertwining and intentionally employed plots and storylines. This study aims to contribute to this growing scholarship which takes the narrative skill of Mark’s author seriously when it traces the term ἐξουσία (exousia) throughout the whole gospel. Special attention will be paid to the way ἐξουσία (exousia) is connected to conflict. Read through this lens, several interesting developments in the Markan presentation of Jesus, the disciples, and reader involvement will emerge. Finally, the question of why ἐξουσία (exousia) is totally absent from the Markan passion story will be answered. This study proposes to see Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross as a consequence of his practice of ἐξουσία (exousia) for which readers are prepared from the beginning of Mark’s narrative.

This paper is dedicated to the three oldest Cyrillic texts of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy held at St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai: Sin. Slav.38/N, Sin. Slav. 39/N and Sin. Slav. 40/O+N. With the exception of a part of Sin. Slav. 40, all three rolls were discovered in 1975 and are described in detail for the first time in this article. The three manuscripts are dated to the 14th century and written in the Serbian redaction of Church Slavonic. Importantly, they contain eucharistic liturgies that are not standardized according to the influential diataxis of Philotheos Kokkinos (†1377/78). As such, these rolls offer new data for tracing the early history of the eucharistic liturgy among medieval Slavs on Sinai and on the Balkan Peninsula. The article includes a liturgiological commentary with comparisons to other South-Slavic and Greek euchologies. Full editions are given for each roll.

The article introduces a new Glagolitic fragment recently discovered at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Codicological, paleographic and orthographic analyses indicate that it was copied by an unknown South-Slavic scribe in the first half of the eleventh century. A noteworthy orthographic feature of the fragment is the habitual use of the monograph ⱖ for [jǫ]/['ǫ] instead of the usual digraph ⱖⱔ. The liturgiological examination of the folio’s contents leads the author to propose that the leaf preserves an early monastic midnight service (mesonyktikon) that once belonged to an horologion. The new fragment would thus represent the oldest Slavic source for this book type. Furthermore, textual and ritual affinities to sources representative of Palestinian and Sinaitic liturgical practices situate the mesonyktikon of the new fragment within the liturgical milieu of that region. The author thus concludes that the new Glagolitic horologion fragment was copied on Sinai for the liturgical use of Slavic monks there. As such, the fragment offers concrete evidence that eleventh-century Slavic monks were active within Sinaitic monastic and liturgical currents. The article includes a Glagolitic transcription of the text, followed by a Cyrillic transliteration.

This volume contains sixteen papers on Eastern Christian liturgies: on their origins, historical developments, current practices, and their theologies. The subjects range from initiation in Syriac Christianity to the origins of the feast of the Ark of the Covenant, and to the Book of Hours of Armenia and Jerusalem; from Coptic liturgy to an ancient Ethiopian catechesis with liturgical comments, and to the Palestinian Typicon; from Byzantine vesting rituals to the rite of marriage in the South-Slavic tradition, and to the fifteenth-century Archbishop Symeon of Thessalonica; from present-day Romanian liturgy ‘between Greeks and Slavs’ to Catholic veneration of Russian saints, and to the American Orthodox monastery of New Skete; and from the interactive web 2.0 to Robert Taft looking back on his impressive academic career. Thus the Society of Oriental Liturgy, dedicated to inquiries into the manifold worship traditions of the Eastern Churches, once more demonstrates that its research is an attractive cornucopia.

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of modern worship and an emerging liturgical revival movement in the Serbian Orthodox Church. Among the specifics in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy representative of this renewal movement, the author lists the following: worship with the holy doors open, censing during the Alleluia, preaching after the reading of the Gospel, pronouncing eucharistic prayers in an audible voice, the elimination of the troparion of the Third Hour, among others. Under consideration are such issues as the frequency of communion, the possibility of performing the sacrament of marriage during the Divine Liturgy, and the removal of particles for the angels during the Prothesis Rite. The author concludes that, on the one hand, the liturgical
renewal movement in Serbia reflects the emergence of broader theological formation in the post-Yugoslav Serbian Church. On the other hand, criticism of the liturgical movement is largely due to the fact that Serbian believers have different levels of theological formation and different experience of participating in Church assembly, which is largely due to the specifics of the historical development of the Serbian Church. Thus, liturgical renewal is only part of a larger renewal of Church life, the goal of which is a more complete realization of life in Christ.

The article explores a unique eucharistic manuscript written in the early fourteenth century in the Serbian redaction of Church Slavonic. The codex preserves non- Philothean texts of the liturgies of St John Chrysostom and St Basil that are characterized by distinctive features, including a rare clerical vesting rite and a significantly reduced prothesis rite. After a codicological and historiographical description of the codex, a transcription of the full text of the Chrysostom liturgy is given. The transcription is followed by a detailed liturgiological analysis of its contents, with ample reference to Greek and other parallel texts of the liturgy. The conclusion of the study is that HAZU III a 32 was likely first used within a parochial, non-monastic context, and represents liturgical practices in the rural Slavic Balkans prior to the widespread standardization efforts at the end of the fourteenth century.