Prayers For The Dead

The earliest Christian Father to refer to the practice of praying for the departed, Tertullian,* admits also that there is no direct biblical authority for doing so. Third-century inscriptions indicate the kinds of petitions made in these prayers, usually a simple and general request for the dead person to be with God or to know the forgiveness of sins. It is possible that such prayers arose out of the confused ideas over the consequences of postbaptismal sin, which caused much debate in the church of Tertullian's time. One suggested solution to this problem was the idea of a purgatorial discipline after death, which was discussed at Alexandria in the early third century and spread in the West through the powerful advocacy of Augustine* and Gregory the Great.* Meanwhile, at Jerusalem in the mid-fourth century the Eucharist came to be regarded as a propitiatory sacrifice which could be offered on behalf of both the living and the dead. Consequently intercessions for the departed came to