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Comments on Prothesis
''—Archimandrite Ephrem in'' Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity.
==Comments==
Thanks for putting this up Basil - it's interesting and helpful and I hadn't seen it before. I am a bit worried about the copyright issue, so we'll have to work this out...
I do have two questions or comments about the article: First, I always understood the procession from the skeuphylakion into the church to the be equivalent of the Western offeratory procession. I wonder what Taft says, or what Archimandrite Ephrem means to say about this -- maybe I'm just dense or should read more carefully.
The second thing is that the Prothesis goes back well before the 11th c. -- at least there's an O.T. precedent in Lev. 24 -
:24:5 “You shall take fine flour and bake twelve loaves from it; two tenths of an ephah [2] shall be in each loaf. 6 And you shall set them in two piles, six in a pile, on the table of pure gold [3] before the Lord. 7 And you shall put pure frankincense on each pile, that it may go with the bread as a memorial portion as a food offering to the Lord. 8 Every Sabbath day Aaron shall arrange it before the Lord regularly; it is from the people of Israel as a covenant forever. 9 And it shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place, since it is for him a most holy portion out of the Lord's food offerings, a perpetual due.
