In a brilliant miniature study, the twentieth-century liturgical scholar R. P. C. Hanson indeed established that in general, up to the end of the third century, bishops were free to improvise a form of words around set themes which would be considered appropriate for the great drama of the Eucharist. They were after all the Church’s teachers, as their cathedra chair came to symbolize, and they could be trusted to include the right material. In the fourth century the situation changed: the liturgy, like the buildings in which it was celebrated, became more fixed and structured. From that era
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