The 11 Matins Gospels of the Rite of Constantinople: Liturgy and Numerology

In Sunday Matins in Antioch and Constantinople, no Gospel passage was read until the 6th century, when Patriarch Severus of Antioch introduced this custom. The Hagiopolite liturgy preserved in Armenian knows a se-ries of four pericopes, which the Jerusalem cathedral later doubled to eight. The 11 resurrection gospels appear in Constantinople in the 9th cen-tury as a series independent of the Jerusalem one in both structure and content. The choice of the number 11 in the series, based on numerology, depends on a solid patristic tradition that links the two numbers of the resurrection, three and eight, in the sum of 11