Saturday, June 11, 2022

The Eucharistic Prayer of The Apostolic Tradition (Latin) Interpreting "Remembrance" as Indicative, not Imperative

In the Latin of The Apostolic Tradition 4:10, we read the following in the Eucharistic prayer:

 

When you do this, you do my remembrance.

 

In the Hermeneia commentary on this work, we read the following:

 

The indicative “you do my remembrance” (Latin meum commemorationem facitis) rather than the imperative “do my remembrance” (cf. Luke 22:19 and 1 Cor 11:24-25) has been thought to be the result of a wrong translation of the Greek verb (which can be either indicative or imperative), although again it should be noted that Ambrose De sacr. 4.26 has a similar phrase, though in the future tense, commemorationem mei facietis. (Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary [Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002], 48)