The Divine Liturgies of Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Basil the Great, Paperback

Published by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, this translation into modern English is of the two major Liturgies of the Orthodox Church, that of St John Chrysostom (died 407 A.D.)which is used on most occasions when the communion is celebrated, and the fuller Liturgy attributed to St Basil the Great (died 379 A.D.), now used on 1 January, the Feast Day of the Saint, on the first five Sundays of Great Lent, and on Holy Saturday. Both liturgies express the essence of the Orthodox Christian faith, and have been in use since the early centuries of the Christian era. St Basil's Liturgy was for many centuries the most used, that of St John Chrysostom taking priority only in the early medieval period. Though both have had material added to them, recent scholarship, by comparing phrases and expressions in the liturgies with works undoubtedly by the two saints, have established that the traditional attributions are likely to be correct. These two translations into modern English were first commissioned by Archbishop Gibran (Ramlawi) for the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of Australasia, to meet a need expressed by the youth of the archdiocese for an elegant and intelligible translation of the services into a modern English that worshippers and visiting friends from varied ethnic backgrounds might find comprehensible and moving. On the publication of the St John Chrysostom Liturgy in its modern version, Philip Tovey in his review for NEWS OF LITURGY wrote: 'This English version of the Orthodox Liturgy is done by David Frost to the high standard we might expect. It is a fresh translation which brings the liturgy to life . . . Indeed, the move to good Modern English shows the Orthodox Liturgy to be something living, rather than looking like a fossil. This translation is another great help in our appreciation of the Divine Liturgy.' This collection also contains translations of the short hymns, troparia and kontakia, that are used on the Sundays and Great Feasts of the Church's year. The text is intended as the foundation English version to be used in a project of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, to provide parallel texts of the Liturgy for use in the various ethnic Orthodox Churches in Great Britain, whereby texts authorized by each Church can be paired with a common English translation of quality that can establish itself as a version familiar to all Orthodox who are bi-lingual and which will be acceptable to those from ethnic Churches who wish to worship in the language of their adopted country.

About the Author:

The translations are by Professor David Frost, a former Fellow and Director of Studies in English at St John's College, Cambridge, and a University Teaching Officer in the University of Cambridge, then Professor of English Literature in the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, and now Principal of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England. Professor Frost, though a scholar of Renaissance literature, served on the Liturgical Commission of the Church of England throughout the period of creation of church services in modern English that led to AN ALTERNATIVE SERVICE BOOK, 1980, to which he contributed drafting and for which he wrote a number of prayers that achieved international recognition. He was also responsible for the translation into modern English (with the help of an interdenominational team of Hebrew scholars) of the Book of Psalms, which as THE (CAMBRIDGE) LITURGICAL PSALTER was bound up with AN ALTERNATIVE SERVICE BOOK 1980 and also went into some six national prayer books around the English-speaking world. The making of these versions of St John Chrysostom's and Saint Basil the Great's Liturgies, here gathered into one volume, occasioned the translator's decision to join the Orthodox Church as having an unbroken tradition back to the days of the apostles, yet also led to him creating modern translations that have been praised as bringing a fresh eye and ear to material that had been encrusted by tradition and hidden under archaic expression.