330 to 360, feast day: March 21[1]), bishop of Thmuis (today Tell el-Timai) in the Nile Delta and a prominent supporter of Athanasius in the struggle against Arianism.
It is a celebrant's book, containing thirty prayers belonging to the Divine Liturgy or Mass (19-30, 1-6), baptism (7-11, 15, 16), ordination (12-14), benediction of oil, bread and water (17), and burial (18), omitting the fixed structural formulae of the rites, the parts of the other ministers, and almost all rubrication, except what is implied in the titles of the prayers.
[2] The name of Serapion is prefixed to the anaphora of the Eucharistic celebration (I) and to the group 15-18: but whether this indicates authorship is doubtful; for whereas the whole collection is bound together by certain marks of vocabulary, style and thought, 15-18 have characteristics of their own not shared by the anaphora, while no part of the collection shows special affinities with the current works of Serapion.
370 treated by Didymus the Blind of Alexandria as heretical; the apparent presupposition that the population is mainly pagan (1, 20); the exclusive appropriation of the regular Eucharistic observance to Sunday (19; cp.
The book is important, therefore, as the earliest liturgical collection on so large a scale, and as belonging to Egypt, where evidence for 4th-century ritual is scanty as compared with Syria.