The Liturgy of Saint James is considered to be the oldest surviving liturgy developed for general use in the Church. Its date of composition is still disputed, but most authorities propose a fourth-century date for the known form, because the anaphora seems to have been developed from an ancient Egyptian form of the Basilean anaphoric family united with the anaphora described in The Catechisms of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. The earliest manuscript is the ninth-century codex, Vaticanus graecus 2282, which had been in liturgical use at Damascus, in the diocese of Antioch. The only critical edition is the one published by Dom B.-Charles Mercier in the Patrologia Orientalis, vol. 26.
Rubrics of worship
The Liturgy of St. James is commonly celebrated on the feast day of Saint James and the first Sunday after Christmas, and then almost exclusively celebrated on a daily basis in Jerusalem, in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Liturgy of Saint James is long, taking some hours to complete in full. The recitation of the Divine Liturgy is performed according to the worship rubrics of a particular Rite, with specific parts chanted by the presider, the lectors, the choir, and the congregated faithful, at certain times in unison. Like other compositions in the Byzantine tradition, the Divine Liturgy of St. James as celebrated in Greek forms the basis of the English transcription. In its Syriac form, the Liturgy is still used in the Syriac and Indian Churches - Catholic and Orthodox - both in a Syriac translation and in Malayalam and English. During the Offertory, the partiture calls for a Cherubic Hymn chanted by readers as the priest brings the gifts to be consecrated onto the altar. In the Latin Catholic Church, this composition became popular as a separate hymn of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, known in English as Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.
Musical annotation
The hymnographers of the early Church composed both the words of the sung prayers and the tones of the musical scale to be sung in a single codex for a particular community. The annotation was recorded in close correspondence to the text with neumes indicating the melodic tones and their duration used before the adoption of the Western system of staff and scales became established in medieval times. In those communities that worship in Syriac the neumes are mirror images of those used by the authocthonous Greek and Cyrillic Orthodox Churches and written and read right to left in accordance with the Syriac script of the prayer texts. The English Hymnal features the 1906 Ralph Vaughan Williams arrangement of the English verses of the Cherubic hymn of the Offertory chant to the melody of the French folk tune Picardy. The hymn known as Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence is also popular in the Roman Catholic Latin rite as an alternative to the spoken communion antiphon.
