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. He has particularly contributed to the serious testing of speculative theories by earlier scholars, being sceptical of the trustworthiness of ‘lumping’ procedures – ie of asserting necessary causal links where they cannot be shown, and extrapolating conclusions backwards in time to conclude that text or practice of one period must have been in use in the same form in earlier periods. Within this series of Joint Liturgical Studies he has provided, among others, no 2 in 1987, The Canons of Hippolytus, no 8 in 1988, Essays in Early Eastern Initiation, and more recently in 2014 one half of no.78, Further Essays in Early Eastern Initiation: Early Syrian Baptismal Liturgy.