Published by ☕, April 3rd, 2022

1. Jesse Billett
   September 8, 2015 at 1:56 pm
   The details, Bosco, in case you want to follow them up:
   
   
   The 1922 lectionary can by found in many old printings of the Church of England’s BCP (especially of the rejected 1928 revision). But the texts of the lessons were printed in full (in the language of the Authorized Version, obviously) in the "Daily Service Book", with either the 1662 or the 1928 BCP. (My copy is a 1662, with the royal family as in 1938.) They’re scarce but sometimes turn up on used book sites. Canterbury Press has reprinted the 1928 version: http://www.canterburypress.co.uk/books/9781853119118/book-of-common-prayer-as-proposed-in-1928
   
   
   Thanks to an act of Parliament, the 1922 lectionary is still authorized for use in the Church of England. (An earlier draft of it was authorized in Canada’s 1918 BCP.) But it underwent radical surgery in a 1955 draft revision. (This revision was again adopted in Canada’s 1959 BCP, which we still use here.)
   
   
   If you have access to the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, there is a fine article on the 1922-to-1955 revision by Geoffrey G. Willis, who looks at its Roman (and non-Roman) sources: "The Historical Background of the English Lectionary of 1955," JEH 9 (1958), 73-86.
   
   
   Some of Willis’s critiques of 1955 were reflected in a final revision in 1961, authorization for which has only recently lapsed in England (where canon law actually lets you do whatever you want anyway). It restored the more traditional framework of 1922 (e.g. 1 Samuel after Trinity, as in the Breviarium Romanum). It is very hard to lay hands on a copy of the 1961 Table of Lessons. (It took me years to get mine!) But its substance can be found in the annual "Order for the Eucharist" compiled by Fr. John Hunwicke (published by the Additional Curates Society), where an Old Testament lesson is also provided for use with the 1662 BCP Eucharistic lectionary (usually thematically linked to the Epistle, and therefore rather tedious).
   
   
   I keep with 1922, mostly for the convenience of the Daily Service Book. But I also appreciate that in certain parts of the year it tells a connected "Life of Christ" by weaving together passages from all four Gospels. I notice things when they’re laid out chronologically that I don’t when I read them in their integrity. 1955 and 1961 thought this approach was unsound and went back to reading the Gospels separately.
   
   
   Overall, it is utterly astounding to me how often the 1922 lectionary’s sequential readings from the Old Testament and its sequential readings from the New Testament seem miraculously to line up in typologically or tropologically significant ways. Like arriving in Exodus at the plague that turned Egypt’s rivers into blood on the same day that you just happen to have arrived in John at the wedding at Cana (Mattins on Wednesday after Lent II).
   
   
   One slightly amusing quirk is that many references to sex are expurgated. This was not the result of 1920s libertinism: the same omissions occur in the revised lectionary of 1871 (which you’ll find in every copy of the 1662 BCP). The Victorian revisers judged episodes like the rape of Dinah to be unsuitable even for weekday celebrations of the Office. At Mattins on Tuesday after Sexagesima, 1922 has the angelic visitors come to Lot’s house in Sodom, stay the night, and leave very urgently in the morning — for no apparent reason!