of the published writings of Jones (1887–1957) and Parsons (1868–1960)
❦
Compiled 4 August 2026
Author
Status
82 items
AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
of the published writings of
BAYARD HALE JONES1887–1957
and
EDWARD LAMBE PARSONS1868–1960
❦
Compiled 4 August 2026
Prefatory Note
Bayard Hale Jones and Edward Lambe Parsons are joined in the memory of the American Church by a single book — The American Prayer Book: Its Origins and Principles (1937) — and this bibliography accordingly treats them together. They were not equal partners in authorship. Parsons, then Bishop of California, took up a project bequeathed by the death of Bishop Charles Lewis Slattery and invited Jones, his own priest, to share it; Jones drafted much of the historical substance. Jones himself gave the account of that collaboration in print, and the entry for it is listed below under his own writings.
The backbone of the Jones section is the authorial list of Published Works of Bayard Hale Jones appended to George M. Alexander's memorial essay in the Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 28, no. 2 (June 1959): 139–164 — the only published bibliography of Jones known to exist. That list stops at 1953 and omits his 1912 prize essay, his book reviews, and everything posthumous. Those have been supplied here from independent full-text searches of every digitised issue of the Anglican Theological Review from 1936 to 1972 and of the Historical Magazine from 1932 to 1975, together with catalogue records from the Library of Congress, Open Library, and the Internet Archive.
Every entry below carries its evidentiary weight openly. Where two sources disagree — and on Jones's birthplace, his Harvard degree, and several page numbers they do — the disagreement is printed rather than silently resolved. Where an item is known only by secondhand mention, it is marked unverified. Nothing here has been reconstructed from probability.
I. Bayard Hale Jones
Priest, professor of Church history and liturgics, and editor of the Prayer Book Studies
Biographical Sketch
Born 1887, the son of a Baptist minister, Charles Melancthon Jones, and of Mary Mott Jones. He took his A.B. (1906), M.A. (1907), and Master of Letters (1912) at the University of California, Berkeley, intending a career in English literature, and did graduate work at Harvard. In 1911, while teaching high school at Visalia, he was confirmed in the Episcopal Church — "allowed to convert myself," as he put it. He entered the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in 1912, completed the course in eighteen months, took the B.D. at the General Theological Seminary in 1914 on the Ellen H. Cotheal Fellowship, and spent a year at Oxford with continental travel just before the war.
Ordained deacon 11 June 1913 by Bishop William Ford Nichols of California and priest 25 March 1914 in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd at General Seminary by Bishop David H. Greer. He married Emily Forbes Stewart on 31 August 1917. He was vicar of St. James', Paso Robles (1916–1918); rector of All Saints', Watsonville (1918–1930); Dean of Trinity Cathedral, Reno — "a strange interlude" — (1930–1936); and rector of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, San Francisco (1936–1939), lecturing simultaneously in Church history and liturgics at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He was made honorary canon of Grace Cathedral in 1938 and received the D.D. honoris causa from C.D.S.P.
In early 1939 he went to Sewanee, where he held the Benedict Chair of Church History and later the Cleveland Keith Benedict Professorship of Church History and Liturgics, serving as sub-dean and twice as acting dean. Nominated by Bishop Parsons, he sat on the Standing Liturgical Commission from 1934 until his death, became its Vice-Chairman, and from 1950 was the editor of the Prayer Book Studies. He was the principal author of the Daily Office Lectionary adopted in 1943, and was invited — though not a deputy — to address the General Convention of that year upon it.
He died on 27 April 1957 at Sewanee, aged sixty-nine, in his study chair, at work on a Commission project. The University of the South created the Bayard Hale Jones Chair of Liturgics in his memory. Of his celebrated recall the Sewanee Alumni News recorded the local proverb: "If you don't find it in the encyclopedia, ask Dr. Jones."
A. Books
Parsons, Edward Lambe, and Bayard Hale Jones. The American Prayer Book: Its Origins and Principles. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937. xvi + 340 pp.
Verified
The work by which both men are remembered, and for two generations the standard English-language history of the American Book of Common Prayer. It was undertaken at the request of Bishop Charles Lewis Slattery, who died in 1930 before beginning it; Parsons took it up and invited Jones to share the labour. The book traces each office of the American book backward through the English books of 1662, 1604, 1559, 1552, and 1549 to their patristic and medieval sources, and it was the first American treatment to absorb the manuscript and papyrus discoveries of the early twentieth century — the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus above all — into a continuous narrative rather than an appendix. Its method is historical rather than partisan: it explains why a rite reads as it does before asking whether it ought to. Burton Scott Easton, reviewing it in The Living Church of 11 December 1939, wrote that it "supersedes all other works on the Prayer Book." The Historical Magazine called it "a model of English style; scholarly, but not abstruse."
Printings and editions: Scribner's reprinted it in 1946 (the printing most often found, and the one digitised at the Internet Archive). A modern reset edition, edited by Christopher William Bogosh, appeared in 2017 (ISBN 9781976295164\) and is what is currently in print; it should be cited as a reprint, not as a revised edition. Contemporary reviews: Anglican Theological Review 20, no. 1 (January 1938): 59ff.; Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 6, no. 4 (December 1937).
Jones, Bayard Hale. The American Lectionary. New York: Morehouse-Gorham Co., 1944. x, 163 pp. LCCN 44044064; OCLC 5762512. Reprinted 1957.
Verified
Jones considered this his best work, and it is the book in which his particular gift is clearest. It is the published rationale for the Daily Office Lectionary adopted by the General Convention of October 1943 and incorporated into all new printings of the Prayer Book from 1944 — a lectionary for which the Standing Liturgical Commission gave Jones the principal credit. The chapters move from the making of the new lectionary and the shape of the Church Year, through the use of Scripture in worship and the history of revision, to detailed treatment of the Sunday and weekday tables, the use of the Psalter, the thematic logic governing the Sunday choices, and the alternative Epistles and Gospels for weekdays. It is thus both an apologia and a working handbook: it explains why a given lesson falls where it does, which is precisely the information a lectionary itself cannot supply. E. C. Chorley called it "surely a must book for the clergy." Anyone comparing the 1943 table with its 1928 predecessor, or arguing about either, has to begin here.
Jones, Bayard Hale. Dynamic Redemption: Reflections on the Book of Common Prayer. Greenwich, Conn.: Seabury Press, 1961. xii, 147 pp. LCCN 61009107; OCLC 2039431.
Verified
Published four years after his death: a series of essays on the Prayer Book, gathered from his papers. It is the most accessible of his books — reflective rather than technical, addressed to the general Churchman rather than to the liturgiologist — and it stands as the one place where his own devotional reading of the rites, as distinct from his historical account of them, was given to the public. Reviewed in the Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 31 (1962): 357.
Jones, Bayard H. The Heritage of the First Book of Common Prayer. [Nashville?]: Department of Religious Education, Diocese of Tennessee, 1949. 8 pp. OCLC 6657613.
Verified
A printed address delivered as part of the Diocese of Tennessee's observance of the four hundredth anniversary of the first Prayer Book. One of three quatercentenary pieces he produced in 1949 (with the Living Church and Forth articles below), each pitched to a different audience — this one to a diocesan gathering. It does not appear in the 1959 memorial's bibliography and survives, so far as can be traced, in a single library copy; no digitised text has been located.
B. Earliest Publication: A Contribution to a Composite Volume
Jones, Bayard Hale. "Tolstoy and the Social Problems of Today." In The Truxtun Beale Prize Essays on Tolstoy's "What Shall We Do Then?", 7–54. University of California Prize Essays, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1912. LCCN 13015201.
Verified
His first appearance in print, twenty-six years before his first liturgical paper, and a document of the man before the priest. Written as a Berkeley graduate student in English, it took the first prize of six hundred dollars against twenty submissions, judged by Leo Wiener of Harvard, A. G. Newcomer of Stanford, and Wesley C. Mitchell of Berkeley. The essay is in five parts: The Great Precursor — which casts Tolstoy as a figure of John the Baptist and opens with Isaiah 40 and Luke 1; What Shall We Do Then?; Tolstoy's Place in Russian Thought; a criticism of his view of society, his economics, and his sociology; and The Problems of Today. It was written before his confirmation the following year, and the biblical frame he already reaches for is worth noting. Fellow contributors to the volume were Sheldon Warren Cheney, Stith Thompson, Newton Bishop Drury, and Lillian Ruth Matthews. The full text is freely available at the Internet Archive.
C. The Prayer Book Studies
Jones was editor of the series from its inception in 1950 until his death, and Vice-Chairman of the Standing Liturgical Commission. The Studies are published corporately, over the name of the Commission, and carry no individual authorship; what follows are documented credits drawn from the printed prefaces and from the Commission's minutes, not title-page attributions. They should be cited as Commission publications with Jones's role noted.
The Commission's memorial minute of 25–27 June 1957 records: "In the work of preparation and editing of the Prayer Book Studies begun by the Commission in 1950, Dr. Jones' contributions have been incalculable. His peculiar genius may be particularly noted in the second and fourth of the Studies, on the Eucharistic Lectionary and Rite respectively, for he had the major responsibility in drafting the learned introductions to these volumes."
Studies in which his hand is specifically documented
Standing Liturgical Commission. Prayer Book Studies II: The Liturgical Lectionary. New York: Church Pension Fund, 1950.
Verified
The preface (dated 28 April 1950\) names the drafting committee as "the Rev. Bayard H. Jones, D.D., the Rev. Cuthbert A. Simpson, Th.D., and the Rev. Edward Rochie Hardy, Jr., Ph.D." Jones bore the major responsibility for the historical introduction. This is the eucharistic lectionary — the Epistles and Gospels — as distinct from the Daily Office lectionary of 1943 that was his own work; the two together constitute his complete labour on the Church's reading of Scripture.
Standing Liturgical Commission. Prayer Book Studies IV: The Eucharistic Liturgy. New York: Church Pension Fund, 1953.
Verified
The most consequential of the early Studies and the one that set the terms of the revision debate for the next twenty years. Jones is listed as "Bayard H. Jones, Vice Chairman" and had the major responsibility for drafting the introduction. Its proposed rite — restoring the ancient shape of the eucharistic prayer, moving toward a unified anaphora with a fuller epiclesis — was tested against the clergy of the Diocese of Chicago in 1951, an exercise Jones himself reported on in Advance (see below), and it is a direct ancestor of the Rite of the 1979 book.
Standing Liturgical Commission. Prayer Book Studies IX: The Calendar. New York: Church Pension Fund, 1957.
Verified
The sub-committee was "Dr. Shepherd, Dr. Jones, and the Rev. Morton C. Stone." The preface (pp. v–vi) records that his "invaluable assistance … continued with unabated energy and interest until his untimely death on April 27, 1957"; he had read and approved most of the manuscript. The title-page list of commissioners carries the dagger: "Bayard H. Jones, Vice-Chairman • Died, April 27, 1957." The Kalendar was the subject on which he left the largest mass of unpublished technical material.
Standing Liturgical Commission. Prayer Book Studies X: The Solemnization of Matrimony. New York: Church Pension Fund, 1958.
Verified
Posthumous; the Commission specifically acknowledged his work on the first drafts. The subject was one he had treated at length sixteen years earlier in his Anglican Theological Review article on marriage and divorce, and the Study should be read alongside it.
Standing Liturgical Commission. Prayer Book Studies XII: Propers for the Minor Holy Days. New York: Church Pension Fund, 1958.
Verified
He left "an able and exhaustive draft on the propers for the minor Holy Days"; the Study was completed by other hands and was dedicated to his memory. It is, in substance if not in name, his last book. Prayer Book Studies XVI (1963), revising both IX and XII into The Calendar and the Collects, Epistles and Gospels for the Lesser Feasts and Fasts, derives from the same body of work, though it does not credit him directly.
Studies he edited without documented drafting credit
Studies I (Baptism and Confirmation, 1950), III (The Order for the Ministration to the Sick, 1951), V (The Litany, 1953), VI and VII (Morning and Evening Prayer; The Penitential Office, 1957), and VIII (The Ordinal, 1957\) all passed through his hands as series editor. No specific drafting credit for Study XI (Thanksgiving for the Birth of a Child, 1958\) has been found.
D. Articles in the Anglican Theological Review
Published in his lifetime
"Liturgical Discoveries of the Twentieth Century." Anglican Theological Review 20, no. 4 (October 1938): 258–275.
Verified
His first published paper on a strictly liturgical subject, a year after The American Prayer Book, and the best short statement of the scholarly ground on which that book stood. It surveys how the century's manuscript and papyrus finds overturned nineteenth-century reconstructions — most pointedly demolishing Ferdinand Probst's thesis that the elaborate "Clementine" liturgy of Apostolic Constitutions VIII, whose Preface alone runs past twelve hundred words of Greek, is the fountainhead of all other rites. It treats the several national Gallican uses, with the Mozarabic as the surviving witness, and traces "how former liturgical studies have flowered into a definite Liturgical Movement, with practical as well as historical objectives, and affecting alike the English, Lutheran, and Roman communions." Still a serviceable orientation to what changed, and why the older handbooks cannot be trusted.
"The Church as a Worshipping Society (Church Congress Syllabus IV.2)." Anglican Theological Review 21, no. 4 (October 1939): 293–312.
Verified
His contribution to the Church Congress Syllabus, arguing the identity and nature of the Church from its character as a worshipping body rather than from polity or confession — an argument congenial to a liturgiologist and characteristic of the period's ecumenical debate.
Written between the General Convention marriage commission reports of 1931 and 1940, in anticipation of the 1943 report. He surveys the history of the Church's discipline of marriage and reaches a conclusion more canonical than pastoral: "it is a pity … we have tried to dispose of a grave social and moral question by passing a sweeping law about it." In its place he urges "the simple clearcut stand of forbidding the clergy to take any part whatever in the contraction or the benediction of marriages which the Church's basic principles do not permit it to approve" — that is, that the Church should govern its ministers rather than legislate about the estate itself. The article is the necessary background to his drafting work on Prayer Book Studies X.
Book reviews
None of these appear in the 1959 memorial bibliography; all were recovered by full-text search.
Review of Felix L. Cirlot, The Early Eucharist (London: S.P.C.K., 1939). Anglican Theological Review 21, no. 3 (July 1939). Signed "Bayard H. Jones."
Verified
He frames Cirlot against Lietzmann's Messe und Herrenmahl and A. B. Macdonald's English presentation of it, praises the author for canvassing every alternative hypothesis impartially — then adds, drily, that "perhaps the book might be more convincing … if it were more dogmatic, and less scrupulous in covering every possible contingency" — and concludes that it gives "not only an intelligent but a profoundly religious interpretation to the central principles of eucharistic worship," being "an excellent antidote to the partisan … contribution to the interpretation of historic religion." Exact page numbers were not captured; the running-head scan failed at that point.
Review of Felix L. Cirlot, Christ and Divorce (Versailles, Ky.: the author, 1945). Anglican Theological Review 28, no. 1 (January 1946).
Verified
Review of Book of Divine Service, ed. Paul Hartzell (New York: Morehouse-Gorham, 1947). Anglican Theological Review 29, no. 4 (October 1947).
Verified
He calls it "the first American Breviary ever to be printed," combining everything needed for the Daily Offices with a lectern Bible — a book that would naturally interest the author of the 1943 lectionary. Characteristically tart in passing: 110 lessons in the new lectionary come from the Apocrypha, which the Bible Societies ceased printing early in the nineteenth century, "with what results on such movements as Prohibition and Christian Science need not be here discussed." Attribution probable; the argument, the lectionary expertise, and the manner are unmistakable.
Published posthumously
Items 2 through 4 below are chapters of a projected book on the origins of the Christian liturgies which he did not live to finish. His files contained one manuscript complete but for final revisions, half a dozen papers he meant to expand into pamphlets or short books, and a great quantity of highly technical material on the Kalendar.
"What Is a Rubric?" Anglican Theological Review 42, no. 3 (July 1960): 207–226. "George Alexander, redactor."
Prepared either as a lecture or in answer to a student's question, and edited for publication by Dean Alexander. It traces the word from the red-lettered titles of secular law codices to the ritual laws of the Church, and then makes a constitutional argument that deserves to be better known: "Formally considered, a Rubric has a considerably greater authority than a Canon. The Canons of the Church are its current laws, enacted by a single General Convention. … A Rubric, on the other hand, is enacted by the adoption of the Prayer Book, in the same solemn and cumbrous process," carrying "the approval of a concurrent majority of three legislative houses — of Bishops, of Clergy and of Laity," so that "formally and legally, a Rubric may be considered to be as much more authoritative than a Canon as the Constitution itself is." Indispensable to any argument about rubrical obligation.
"The Quest for the Origins of the Christian Liturgies." Anglican Theological Review 46 (1964): 6–[?].
Verified
The programmatic opening chapter of the unfinished book. Cited by Paul F. Bradshaw in The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, which is how it has kept a foothold in the modern literature. The start page is confirmed and the article is present in the volume index; the end page was not verified.
"The History of the Nestorian Liturgies." Anglican Theological Review 46 (1964): 157–176.
Verified
The East Syrian rites were the field to which he turned last, and the three Nestorian papers are the fullest American treatment of them from the period. This first one sets out the historical frame.
"The Sources of the Nestorian Liturgy." Anglican Theological Review 46 (1964): 414–425.
Verified
The source-critical companion to the preceding paper, in the same volume.
"The Formation of the Nestorian Liturgy: The Great Conflation." Anglican Theological Review 48 (1966): 276–306.
Verified
The longest and the last of his published writings, appearing nine years after his death; the title is confirmed verbatim from the volume index. "The Great Conflation" is his name for the process by which the East Syrian rite absorbed and fused its several strands, and the paper represents the furthest point his research reached.
E. Articles in Church Periodicals
Except where noted, all items in this section are taken from the 1959 memorial bibliography.
The Pacific Churchman (Diocese of California)
He contributed regularly to his diocesan paper from Watsonville and later. Five items are itemised in the memorial bibliography:
"Reconstruction, Reaction and Religion." 55, no. 3 (October 1919): 9–10.
"At the Quarter Post." 61, no. 9 (April 1926): 12–13.
"The Dilemma of Reunion." 62, no. 12 (July 1927): 15–16.
"Defending and Extending the Faith." 65, no. 8 (March 1929): 12–13.
"The Dilemma of Reunion" (1927) is the most substantial of the five and the best evidence of his mind before he turned to liturgy proper. He weighs three bases for reunion — the "Highest Common Factor" of a common Christianity, the "Lowest Common Denominator," and the Lambeth Quadrilateral — argues that the Anglican Communion has "always been a sort of laboratory or testing ground" and is "a kind of microcosm of contemporaneous Christendom," and yet insists that Anglicans cannot surrender "our one positive possession with which we can never afford to part," the historic ministry. He states the dilemma sharply: "How can we offer them something they do not believe we have … in such a way that they can self-respectingly accept it?" He looks hopefully to South India, and closes by quoting Parsons: "our task is to catholicize Protestantism from within\!"
The Living Church
"The Gospel of Our Church." 80, no. 10 (January 1929): 339f.
"A New Approach to Prayer Book Revision." 112, no. 24 (16 June 1946): 8–10.
"What Happened in 1549." 118, no. 23 (5 June 1949): 16–17.
"The Prayer Book and the Priesthood." 120, no. 8 (19 February 1950): 11–13.
"Shakespeare Was an Anglo-Catholic." 122, no. 6 (15 February 1953): 18–19.
"A New Approach to Prayer Book Revision" (1946) is the single most historically important article Jones ever published, and the reason the Prayer Book Studies exist in the form they do. Writing as Vice-Chairman of the Standing Liturgical Commission, he reviews the structural obstacles to revision, notes that a 1943 proposal for a complete draft book to be laid before the centennial Convention of 1949 was "promptly rejected by the House of Bishops," and concludes that a complete draft was both too ambitious and misleading, since it would suggest immediate wholesale revision. In its place he proposes the method that was adopted: "We propose to do so in the form of a series of 'Prayer Book Studies,' to be published by the Liturgical Commission from time to time as the material may be ready, and to continue as long as may be necessary. … Each issue will deal with a single office or feature of the Prayer Book." He cites the gradual acceptance of the 1943 lectionary and of The Hymnal 1940, and the South African and Canadian precedent of trial forms, hoping that revision might grow as "a natural development," yielding "a living liturgy allowed to grow and develop from its own living roots." Every subsequent American revision, down to 1979, proceeded by this method.
"The Gospel of Our Church" (1929) is a call for an evangelist clergy, and unusually blunt: "Curiously enough, the very perfection of our Church conduces to the imperfection of her clergy. We have come to depend on organization, not initiative. … We live under the last traces of the evil tradition of the eighteenth century, when our Church was universally regarded as so completely sufficient that her clergy felt themselves dispensed from doing any work whatever." Evangelism, he argues, "must begin and continue in the pulpit of the parish Church."
"What Happened in 1549" (1949) was his contribution to the Living Church quatercentenary issue for Whitsunday, alongside Bishop Mason of Dallas, Massey H. Shepherd Jr., Carroll E. Simcox, William H. Dunphy, Samuel J. Martin, and George J. Cleaveland.
The Witness
"The Bible in the Prayer Book." 25, no. 4 (29 January 1942): 8–10.
The second is the essential primary source for the Parsons–Jones collaboration and belongs equally to the Parsons section below. Jones gives his own account of how The American Prayer Book came to be written: "The Bishop knew that with his diocesan responsibilities it would be indispensable to have some help in an undertaking of this size; and did me the signal honor of inviting me to share the work, knowing that for twenty years I had been making an intensive study of the history of Christian worship, with the unusual restraint of not having published a word on the subject." That last clause is the best single sentence about Jones's scholarly temperament in print.
The Southern Churchman
"Prayer Book Backgrounds." A series of six feature articles, vol. 107, nos. 6, 14, 20, 28, 37, and 45 (written 1940–41).
"The Trial Lectionary." A two-part article, vol. 108, nos. 15 and 16.
The Churchman
"Creating the Trial Lectionary." 156, no. 8 (15 April 1942): 10–12.
Written while the lectionary was still on trial, and structured around three questions: why a new lectionary so soon after 1928, on what principles of choice it should rest, and what the basic objectives of a lectionary for this Church are. He closes: "it would take a book to discuss the application [of these principles] to specific days and seasons. Some day that book may be written." He wrote it himself two years later as The American Lectionary.
The second of his 1949 quatercentenary papers, pitched to a general readership. It sets out the principal differences between the English book of 1662 and the American books of 1789, 1892, and 1928, and calls 1928 "the greatest revision" because "every office, save those in the Ordinal, received consideration." Its direction, he argues, was enrichment rather than partisanship, showing that in the Church "there is ample room for the prophet and the priest, for the mystic and the ritualist. All parties profited alike." And then the sentence that most clearly marks him as a revisionist of a particular temper: "This 'greatest revision' was not perfect. No Prayer Book perhaps ever can be, while the Church is alive and growing."
Advance (Magazine of the Diocese of Chicago)
"Where Is the 'Old-fashioned Prayer Book Churchman'?" 64, no. 1 (January 1951): 31f. [or p. 3].
"Clergy Study Prayer Book Changes." 64, no. 3 (March 1951): 3 [or p. 11].
The first laments the current disregard of rubric and text and hopes that a future revision may revive "the vanishing race of 'Prayer Book Churchmen' as the norm of loyalty and effectiveness which it has been" — a striking complaint from a member of the revising commission, and the natural companion to "What Is a Rubric?" The second reports a week of liturgical conferences sponsored by the Diocese of Chicago's Department of Education and led by members of the Standing Liturgical Commission, convened to test Prayer Book Studies IV against "the direct reactions of the clergy of a great metropolitan Diocese," with a summary of the suggestions received. Together they are the best record of how the Studies were actually received in the parishes.
F. Unpublished, Locally Printed, and Unlocated
Recorded here because the memorial essay quotes from them and because several are likely to survive in archives.
"A Norm of a Plain Celebration." Produced for use in St. Luke's Chapel, Sewanee, and "widely circulated by the students." Probably a mimeographed or locally printed sheet; not verified as a formal publication. Of interest as his own practical rubrical guidance, as against his theoretical writing on rubrics.
Advent Lectures, delivered at the Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta, 1948. Quoted in the memorial from manuscript; no published version located.
Address to the General Convention, October 1943, on the principles and values of the new Daily Office Lectionary. The Commission's minutes note that "Dr. Jones was accorded the unusual honor of being invited to address that body, though he was not a deputy." Whether the text was printed in the Convention Journal is unverified — and worth checking, since it would be his own summary of the lectionary before the book.
Letter and memorandum on Reservation addressed to Bishop Boyd Vincent of Southern Ohio, 28 May 1917. Eight single-spaced typed pages. Unpublished; he was a priest of thirty at the time.
Correspondence with Clifford Morehouse, 1955, containing extensive technical material on the Kalendar; and, in his files at death, "half a dozen papers" he intended to expand into pamphlets or short books.
G. Archival Sources
Edward Lambe Parsons Papers, BANC MSS 86/58 c. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Contains a discrete correspondence file, "Jones, Bayard Hale, 1887–1957, 1914–1954," Box/Folder 28 — forty years of letters spanning the whole of the American Prayer Book collaboration and well beyond it. Confirmed from the EAD finding aid. This is the richest single documentary source for the relationship between the two men and is the obvious starting point for any study of the book's composition.
Bishop Edward L. Parsons: Pamphlets, Articles, and Sermons on Church Unity, 1919–1950. Graduate Theological Union Archives, Berkeley. OAC finding aid ark:/13030/c8vd7165.
Verified
Records of the Standing Liturgical Commission. Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas.
Verified
The Commission's minutes for 1934–1957, together with drafts and correspondence, must contain a great deal of Jones material, including the drafts of Studies X and XII left at his death. Not searched for a Jones-specific series; the catalogue was unreachable during compilation.
William R. Laurie University Archives and Special Collections, Jessie Ball duPont Library, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.
Verified
H. Writings About Jones
Alexander, George M. "Bayard Hale Jones (1887–1957): Priest, Teacher, Liturgiologist." Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 28, no. 2 (June 1959): 139–164.
Verified
The essential source, and the foundation of this bibliography. Written by the Very Rev. George Moyer Alexander, Dean of the School of Theology at Sewanee, it quotes extensively from Jones's letters and personal papers, prints the Standing Liturgical Commission's memorial minute of 25–27 June 1957, and closes (pp. 163–164) with the list "Published Works of Bayard Hale Jones" — the only published bibliography of him known. Its limits should be understood: it stops at 1953, omits the 1912 prize essay and all his book reviews, and contains internal contradictions in the page numbers it gives for the Advance articles. It appeared a full two years after his death; no obituary notice of him has been found in either the Historical Magazine or the Anglican Theological Review for 1957 or 1958.
"Dr. Jones Dies." Sewanee Alumni News 23 (May 1957): [13].
Verified
The contemporary obituary: "regarded as an international authority on the liturgy of the Episcopal Church and the Book of Common Prayer … admired for his remarkable memory which gave rise to the saying, 'If you don't find it in the encyclopedia, ask Dr. Jones.'" Use with care — it names his collaborator "Bishop Edwin L. Parsons" and dates his D.D. to 1939 against the memorial's 1938. Full text at the Internet Archive.
Armentrout, Don S., and Robert Boak Slocum, eds. "Jones, Bayard Hale." In An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church. New York: Church Publishing.
Verified
The standard short reference notice, available online at episcopalchurch.org. Convenient but not always accurate: it differs from the memorial on his birth date and birthplace and misstates the title of Prayer Book Studies XII.
Standing Liturgical Commission. Preface to Prayer Book Studies IX: The Calendar, v–vi. New York: Church Pension Fund, 1957.
Verified
The Commission's contemporaneous tribute, published within months of his death and the most authoritative statement of what his colleagues believed he had contributed.
II. Edward Lambe Parsons
Bishop of California, ecumenist, pacifist
Biographical Note
Edward Lambe Parsons (1868–1960) was Bishop Coadjutor and then Bishop of California, serving the diocese from 1919 to 1941 — a period he himself chronicled. He was a leading liberal evangelical, an active ecumenist, a pacifist associated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and a founder and board member of the Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. He nominated Bayard Hale Jones to the Standing Liturgical Commission in 1934, and it was he who took up the Prayer Book history left unbegun at Bishop Slattery's death and invited Jones to share it.
A. Confirmed Publications
Parsons, Edward Lambe, and Bayard Hale Jones. The American Prayer Book: Its Origins and Principles. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937. xvi + 340 pp. Reprinted 1946; modern edition ed. Christopher William Bogosh, 2017.
Confirmed
See the full annotation under Jones, section A, above. For Parsons's part specifically, the indispensable primary account is Jones's own article "Bishop Parsons' Liturgical Work," The Witness 28, no. 5 (12 July 1945): 8–10, which describes how Parsons received the project from Slattery's estate and why he sought a collaborator. The book is Parsons's most enduring publication by a wide margin.
Parsons, Edward Lambe. The Diocese of California: A Quarter Century, 1915–1940. Church Historical Society, 1958.
Confirmed
A first-hand history of the diocese across the years of his own episcopate, written in his ninetieth year. It is at once a diocesan chronicle and a memoir, and it is the principal published source for his administration — including the rebuilding years after the 1906 earthquake's long aftermath, the completion of Grace Cathedral, and the diocese through the Depression. Publisher and year confirmed from catalogue listings; pagination not verified.
B. Working List — Titles Requiring Verification
The following titles appear in aggregated catalogue records (Open Library / WorldCat derivatives) under his name. For each, it remains to be established whether the item is a book, a pamphlet, a published address, or an article, and to fix its publisher, place, date, and extent. Several are almost certainly pamphlets from the church-unity collection at the Graduate Theological Union.
The Bishop and the Pastoral Relationship
Awaiting confirmation
Presumably an address or pamphlet on episcopal office and cure of souls.
The Christian in the Modern World
Awaiting confirmation
Likely a published lecture or short book; theme consistent with his liberal evangelical social teaching.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation
Awaiting confirmation
Recorded in two editions. Connected with his pacifism; the F.O.R. published extensively in pamphlet form between the wars.
Lambeth and Unity
Awaiting confirmation
Almost certainly a church-unity pamphlet responding to a Lambeth Conference — 1920, 1930, or 1948. Dating it would locate it precisely within his ecumenical work.
The Liberal Evangelical's Message in Our Church Today
Awaiting confirmation
The clearest statement of his own churchmanship, and the item most worth recovering first.
No Escape from Decision
Awaiting confirmation
Title suggests a wartime or pre-war address on the moral obligation to choose; date unknown.
Reunion and the World Mission of the Church
Awaiting confirmation
Ecumenical; likely connected with the Faith and Order or Life and Work movements, or with the South India scheme.
The Ruling Eldership
Awaiting confirmation
Anomalous for an Episcopal bishop — the ruling eldership is a Presbyterian office — and therefore probably a contribution to Presbyterian–Episcopal reunion negotiations, in which he was active. Worth particular attention.
So Holy Oracle of God
Awaiting confirmation
Title unverified and possibly garbled in transmission; subject unknown.
Time for Decision
Awaiting confirmation
Possibly the same work as "No Escape from Decision," or a companion to it. The pair should be checked against each other.
An autobiography
Awaiting confirmation
Title not established. It may exist only as a typescript in the Bancroft Library rather than as a published book; the catalogue entry may reflect a manuscript. This should be resolved before the item is cited.
C. Not Yet Searched
Diocesan convention addresses, 1919–1941. Twenty-two years of annual addresses, printed in the diocesan journals; collectively the largest body of his published writing and entirely unexamined here.
Articles in The Christian Century, The Living Church, The Witness, Christendom, the Pacific Churchman, and the Anglican Theological Review.
Introductions and forewords to the books of others.
Publications connected with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
D. Archival Sources
Edward Lambe Parsons Papers, 1865–1968 (bulk 1890–1960). BANC MSS 86/58 c. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Online Archive of California finding aid ark:/13030/tf4c6003w7.
Confirmed
The principal collection. Contains, among much else, a discrete file of his forty-year correspondence with Bayard Hale Jones, 1914–1954 (Box/Folder 28). The finding aid describes the papers item by item and will resolve most of the questions raised in section B above.
Bishop Edward L. Parsons: Pamphlets, Articles, and Sermons on Church Unity, 1919–1950. Graduate Theological Union Archives, Berkeley. Online Archive of California finding aid ark:/13030/c8vd7165.
Confirmed
A gathered collection of exactly the fugitive material — pamphlets, articles, sermons — that catalogue records represent so poorly. For the ecumenical writings in particular, this inventory is the authoritative list.
Appendix: Unresolved Questions
Recorded so that nothing here is mistaken for settled fact.
Jones's birth date and birthplace. 23 June 1887, Golden, California (1959 memorial) against 23 July 1887, Golden, Colorado (Episcopal Dictionary).
Jones's Harvard degree. The Sewanee obituary's "master's degree in law" is uncorroborated; the memorial says only that he was a graduate student there.
The year of Jones's D.D. from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. June 1938 (memorial) against 1939 (obituary).
Pagination and extent of the individual Prayer Book Studies. WorldCat, the Library of Congress catalogue, and HathiTrust were all unreachable during compilation.
End page of "The Quest for the Origins of the Christian Liturgies," ATR 46 (1964).
Page range of "The History of the Nestorian Liturgies": 157–176 or 155–176.
Dates and page numbers for the six "Prayer Book Backgrounds" articles and the two-part "The Trial Lectionary" in The Southern Churchman.
Page numbers for both Advance articles, on which the memorial contradicts itself.
The editor, preface, and contents of Dynamic Redemption (1961).
Whether Jones's October 1943 address to the General Convention was printed in the Convention Journal.
Whether a Bayard Hale Jones collection exists at the Sewanee archives.
Attribution of the ATR reviews of Christ and Divorce (1946) and Book of Divine Service (1947) — probable but not confirmed.
The whole of the Parsons bibliography beyond the two confirmed books: format, publisher, date, and extent of every title in section II.B, and the existence and title of his autobiography.
❦
No citation in this bibliography has been reconstructed from probability. Where a source could not be reached, the gap is printed rather than filled.