The two authors who come together to present this Study are well-known experts in their field of patristic liturgy, and not least for their work on early Eastern initiation rites. Paul Bradshaw is known for his researches and scholarly writing across the whole range of patristic liturgy, including not only baptismal, eucharistic and ordination rites, but also the origins of daily offices and the roots of the liturgical year. Within this series of Joint Liturgical Studies he provided no 2 in 1987, The Canons of Hippolytus, and no 8 in 1988, Essays in Early Eastern Initiation, a symposium the title of which gave rise to the present volume’s title. Juliette Day provided no 43 in this series in 1999, Baptism in Early Byzantine Palestine 325-451 and also no 59 in 2005, Proclus on Baptism in Constantinople; while her major work in this sphere has been The Baptismal Liturgy of Jerusalem: 4th and 5th Century Evidence in Jerusalem, Egypt and Syria (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007).

Paul Bradshaw here investigates the relationship of anointing candidates for baptism to the actual immersion of them in water, running his enquiry across three centuries from the second to the fourth, and across the whole of Syria. He gently queries conclusions of previous authors, particularly those which have been propounded with a confidence that has outrun what the evidence (under careful inspection from Paul Bradshaw, the advocate of ‘splitting’) has warranted.

Juliette Day on the other hand has gone to a particular set of lectures of a single author in a single city at a single time – namely the Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem, delivered by him in 351. She combs the lectures in order to put together a reasonable construction of the baptismal rite for which Cyril was preparing his catechumens.