The answer
The East in general, and Egyptian Church in particular, still retains the spirit of the apostolic patristic Liturgy. The liturgical texts that are used have not changed very much since the fifth century, which gives the study of the Egyptian liturgy particular importance. In his book “The Early Liturgy,” Father Jungmann says, “especially in the general structure of the Mass, the Oriental rites have kept many primitive characteristics which have disappeared from the Roman rite … Whereas our Mass changes day after day, the Orient constantly repeats the same invariable formulary.”1546 Fr. Dix, the Anglican monk, says, “The main lines of all the Eastern traditions had been reached before the end of the fourth century, and after this the process in all of them is no more than one of adjustment and development of detail. No new principle arose in the fifth century, as it did in the West …”1547
Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty
Notes
1546 Josef Andreas Jungmann, The Early Liturgy, to the Time of Gregory the Great, trans., Francis A. Brunner (University of Notre Dame Press, 1959): pp. 211, 221.
1547 Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (Bloomsbury, 2005): p. 546.