We see this on CF where someone googles a Greek word and now thinks they are an expert on Greek. If someone who actually uses Greek and has a seminary background is seen as someone who simply parrots what they have been taught. It is incredibly frustrating and one of the reasons why I now rarely post to CF, it simply isn't worth the effort anymore.
What we need to do is just post more frequently in The Ancient Way and Traditional Theology, which have been static of late, the latter existing largely for the needs of Christians from traditional churches, and the former as you know being a haven for Eastern Orthodox Christians. And I also enjoy visiting with dzheremi and occasionally another Oriental Orthodox guest in the Voice in the Desert, and with our Anglican, Lutheran and Roman Catholic friends.
One thing CF.com has taught me is that the liturgical churches are much closer than I realized in my initial Hyperdox Herman stage after converting to Orthodoxy, although in my case Hyperdox Herman was always tempered by a fascination with Western Rite Orthodoxy and an extreme love for the Oriental Orthodox, which led to an awkward moment when I did once inadvertently join an Old Calendarist church thinking it was canonical ROCOR.
However for those who do regard ecumenism as a grave error, there is no need to leave the denomination-specific forums. Also I have looked at Orthodox-specific forums on the net but have not found them interesting.
I very much love ChristianForums.com however and I also love conversing with you, given your expertise on the liturgy. Speaking of which I recently received the new Sluzhbenik, or Liturgikon, for the Divine Liturgy of St. James and the Presanctified Liturgy of St. James in English and Church Slavonic, which I would love to discuss with you if you are familiar with the Greek Orthodox recensions.
Also if you feel so inclined, I could very much use some help finding digitial scans, ideally OCR’d scans, so that the text has been captured in unicode, of certain Greek liturgical manuscripts, such as Codex Barberini 336b, and also I am trying to find a copy of the actual service text that Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus used when he celebrated “The Divine Liturgy of St. Seraphim” which is to say the Alexandrian-rite liturgy contained in the Euchologion of St. Serapion of Thmuis. I greatly doubt he used just the text from the book, since it is a bishop’s Euchologion, a Pontifical, as the Latins call them, and as such it contains only the text spoken by the bishop in the liturgical rites contained within, such as the Divine Liturgy, and so he would have needed to add in other content (part of the reason why Eucharistic Prayer no. 2 from the Novus Ordo Missae and its derivatives like Eucharistic Prayer B from Rite II of the 1979 Episcopal BCP are so heavily derided by liturgical traditionalists is that it is basically the same thing, ripped devoid of context from the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus. The same liturgical text appears, in a more complete form, with all of the responses by the choir and deacons one would expect, as the Anaphora of the Apostles in the Ethiopian Orthodox liturgies, and it is of Antiochian provenance, a close relative of the Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles and the Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom, so it remains something of a mystery as to why St. Hippolytus quoted it, when we have evidence that the Roman Canon existed in the fourth century, and based on that it seems reasonable to assume such an idiosyncratic anaphora, which is so very different from the Eastern anaphorae, and which extensively quotes the second century Latin translation of the Bible, the Vetus Latina, translated along with the liturgy at the orders of St. Victor the Bishop of Rome, existed in the third or second century, or before that even (the oldest attested liturgy is the Alexandrian liturgy, from the Strasbourg Papyrus, as I am sure you are aware).
I suspect St. Hippolytus quoted an Antiochene liturgy because then, as now, the Antiochene form was the most widely used, geographically, spanning a region from Judaea through Greece, and later extending into Armenia and Georgia and Ethiopia, being used everywhere except in the Church of the East and the Roman Church, for even in the Coptic church, a mildly Alexandrianized-version of the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, and the Divine Liturgy of St. Gregory the Theologian, which is also Antiochene in structure, largely replaced the Divine Liturgy of St. Cyril, which is the Coptic translation of the Alexandrian liturgy usually referred to by the Greek church in Egypt as the Divine Liturgy of St. Mark.
Alas if the Dunning-Kruger effect hasn’t scared you off, I fear my unfettered enthusiasm for all things liturgical might, although I hope it doesn’t, because everything you write I have found very edifying, and I did pray for you while you were away from us for many months and was so glad to see you return.
God bless you, PsaltiChrysostom.
