Lectionary - History

History

The Talmud claims that the practice of reading appointed Scriptures on given days or occasions dates back to the time of Moses and began with the annual religious festivals of Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles (Talmud, Megilah 32a). The Mishnah portion of the Talmud, probably finished in the early 200's C.E., contains a list of Torah readings for various occasions (Talmud, Megilah 32a) and assumes that these special readings interrupt a regular schedule of Torah readings (Talmud, Megilah 29a, 30b). In addition to these Torah readings, the later Gemara portion of the Talmud also knows of assigned annual readings from the prophets (Talmud, Megilah 31a).

By the Medieval era the Jewish community had a standardized schedule of scripture readings both from the Torah and the prophets to be read in the synagogue. A sequential selection was read from the Torah, followed by the "haftarah" – a selection from the prophetic books or historical narratives (e.g. "Judges," "Kings," etc.) closely linked to the selection from the Torah. Jesus probably read a providentially "random" reading when he read from Isaiah 61:1-2, as recorded in Luke 4:16-21, when he inaugurated his public ministry. The early Christians adopted the Jewish custom of reading extracts from the Old Testament on the Sabbath. They soon added extracts from the writings of the Apostles and Evangelists.

Both Hebrew and Christian lectionaries developed over the centuries. Typically, a lectionary will go through the scriptures in a logical pattern, and also include selections which were chosen by the religious community for their appropriateness to particular occasions. The one-year Jewish lectionary reads the entirety of the Torah within the space of a year and may have begun in the Babylonian Jewish community; the three-year Jewish lectionary seems to trace its origin to the Jewish community in and around the Holy Land. The existence of both one-year and three-year cycles occurs in both Christianity and Judaism.

Within Christianity, the use of pre-assigned, scheduled readings from the scriptures can be traced back to the early church, and seems to have been inherited from Judaism. Not all of the Christian Church used the same lectionary, and throughout history, many varying lectionaries have been used in different parts of the Christian world. Until the Second Vatican Council, most Western Christians (Catholics, Old Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and those Methodists who employed the lectionary of Wesley) used a lectionary that repeated on a one-year basis. This annual lectionary provided readings for Sundays and, in those Churches that celebrated the festivals of saints, feast-day readings. The Eastern Orthodox Church and many of the Oriental Churches continue to use an annual lectionary. Within Lutheranism there remains an active minority of pastors and congregations who use the old one-year lectionary, often referred to as the Historic Lectionary.

Lectionaries from before the invention of the printing press contribute to understanding the textual history of the Bible. See also List of New Testament lectionaries.