Praying for the dead is a very early Christian practice. The mid-second-century Christian text “Acts of Paul and Thecla” describes a Christian praying for a dead daughter, that the deceased “may be transferred to the place of the just.” A late-second-century inscription from Abercius, bishop of Hieropolis, exhorts readers to “pray for Abercius.” The early Church writer Tertullian, at the beginning of the third century, declares, “We offer sacrifices for the dead on their birthday anniversaries,” and, elsewhere, that “a woman, after the death of her husband . . . prays for his soul and asks that he may, while waiting, find rest.”
Some Protestants discount this evidence of prayers for the dead as proof that the post-biblical church increasingly became beholden to heresy—an admittedly difficult position to hold, given it was the same post-biblical church that compiled and defined the biblical canon! Other Protestants, admitting that the early Church should have some purchase on what is normative for all Christians, have offered a few explanations as to what is meant by praying for the dead.
The esteemed nineteenth-century Protestant church historian Philip Schaff, for example, argued, “Commemorations and intercessions for the departed fathers and brethren, who are conceived to be, [are] not in purgatory, but in communion with God and in a condition of progressive holiness and blessedness, looking forward in pious longing to the great day of consummation.”
In other words, when the early Church prayed for the dead, they were not praying that the faithfully departed be purified of their sins, but that they enjoy rest and the consummation of their faith at the final resurrection. Purgatory, says Schaff, was a later, erroneous development.
Seventeenth-century Anglican archbishop James Ussher—famous for his chronology that claimed the date of the earth’s creation as 4004 B.C.—made a similar argument in his Answer to a Challenge Made by a Jesuit in Ireland. There he wrote: “They shall never be able to show that the commemoration and prayers for the dead used by the ancient Church had any relation to their purgatory.” Rather, says Ussher, “these things were mainly intended by the Church in her memorials for the dead, and not the cutting off of sins which they carried with them out of this life or releasing them from any torment.” He adds, “Even the prophets and apostles and martyrs themselves were included therein.” If prayers for the dead included praying for those considered saints, how could the practice have anything to do with purgatory?
Finally, one Protestant with whom I recently corresponded argued that “prayers for the dead don’t necessarily imply a belief in purgatory.” Rather, he posited, “they may be offered up in recognition of the fact that God dwells in eternity—and that he hears the prayers which [for example] one offers up today for soldiers who died on a battlefield in 1944.”
Let’s first address Schaff’s and Ussher’s interpretation, given that it is popular among some Protestants today. The biggest problem with the claim that early Christian prayer for the dead was a commemoration and anticipation of the Final Judgment is that the sources themselves speak of a purgation. Tertullian claims in Treatise on the Soul that the allegory of Christ found in Matthew 5:25-26—which mentions not getting out of prison “till you have paid the last penny”—refers to people committed “to the prison of hades, out of which there will be no dismissal until the smallest even of your delinquencies be paid off in the period before the resurrection.”
Nor is Tertullian unique. St. Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), citing the same Gospel passage, describes souls “tortured by long suffering for sins, to be cleansed and long purged by fire.” Lactantius (d. 325) writes that “they whose sins shall exceed either in weight or in number shall be scorched by the fire and burned.” St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) preaches that “after his departure out of the body, he [the Christian] . . . finds that he is not able to partake of divinity until he has been purged of the filthy contagion in his soul by the purifying fire.”
Particularly confounding for Protestants who describe themselves as Augustinian, because of the early fifth-century Church Father’s doctrine of grace, the great bishop of Hippo on many occasions propounded the doctrine of purgatory. “Temporary punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by others after death,” he notes in his City of God. In the time between a man’s death and the final resurrection, he writes, “the soul dwells in a hidden retreat, where it enjoys rest or suffers affliction in proportion to the merit it earned by the life it led on earth.”
Moreover, Augustine elsewhere speaks to Ussher’s argument regarding praying for prophets, apostles, and martyrs: “The names of the martyrs are read aloud in that place at the altar of God where prayer is not offered for them. Prayer, however, is offered for other dead who are remembered.” Likewise, St. Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) says that the church commemorates “patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs” but explicitly notes “that at their prayers and intercessions God will receive our petition,” meaning those dead pray for the Church. He then adds that the Church prays for “all who in past years have fallen asleep among us, believing that it will be a very great benefit to the souls for whom the supplication is put up.” In sum, from some dead (i.e., the saints), the Church on earth receives prayers; for other dead (i.e., all those not yet cleansed), the Church offers prayers.
Finally, what should we make of prayers for the dead offered for those who have died, regarding events that have already occurred, based on the idea that God is outside time? Granted, Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 83, a. 2, explains that prayer does not change God’s eternal will; rather, prayer is one of the causes God eternally wills to use in bringing about effects. Thus, we can at least theorize that if you, say, pray that God help someone recover from an illness, when, in fact, unbeknownst to you, the person yesterday recovered from the illness, God, in his eternal knowledge, could foreordain that your prayers be effectual.
Yet it seems another thing for God to foreordain that we pray for things we already know happened. Augustine wrote his famous Confessions between 397 and 400. What’s the point in me praying that God have him write it, given I’ve already read it? My father served in Vietnam and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery; I don’t need to pray that he survive the war so he and my mom will have me—I’m already here! Moreover, in this Protestant theory, the people we are praying for would actually not be dead, but alive, since we would be praying for them at a time when they were living. That seems contrary to the idea of prayers for the dead.
In sum, the Catholic practice of praying for the dead is no late ecclesial accretion, but something for which we have evidence dating to the second-century Church. And, as we’ve seen, those early Christian sources pointed to the Bible itself—not only Matthew 5:25-26, but also 1 Cor. 3:11-15—as justification for offering such prayers. It was, in fact, a practice inherited from the Jews, as we know from 2 Maccabees 12:41-45.
As even early twentieth-century Anglican scholar Shirley Carter Hughson admits, “there would seem to be no doubt that our Lord and his apostles habitually prayed for the dead.”