Dear John K,
The word "anaphora" means both the sacrifice and the sacrificial prayer, just as "Eucharist" means an act of thanksgiving, the prayer of thanksgiving, and the thanksgiving banquet.
This is not an accurate statement.
The word "anaphora" as it has always been used by the Church means a lifting up or an elevation, or the state of being elevated or raised up.
That is what it means Jeff.
The word also started being used as the TITLE of a suite of prayers that changed over the centuries in form, content and organization....the Anaphora of James, the Anaphora of Basil, the Anophora of the Twelve Apostles and so on.
The word "anaphora" has never really meant prayer at all, though eventually the word was employed in the titles that came to be used to reference a particular kind of prayer....a consecratory prayer....a prayer of offering or lifting up.
Now a title referencing something and a word meaning something are not at all equivalent things.
So the word "anaphora" did not then, nor does it now mean prayer.
So this false assertion becomes the opportunity to remove the focus of the liturgy from the oblation itself, to the prayers of oblation, which alters the whole theology and pneumatology of the liturgy or the eucharist.
That is unacceptable, and no amount of wiggling now is going to erase the fact, in public and in print, that Father David has insisted that till this very moment in time, the translators did not know what they were meaning when they translated "anaphora" as "oblation"....
Well that is just simply bunk.
Mary
