5 -6
This blessing at the eucharist of food other than the bread and wine is a remnant of the primitive custom when the rite included a meal; in Hippolytus’s day, presumably, the cheese and olives were eaten at the service and part of the oil was sipped, the remainder being reserved for anointing the sick.[176] Perhaps only Hippolytus’s exaggerated reverence for the past preserved the usage, which at any rate soon disappeared. None of the other versions of his treatise retain chapter 6, for which the Canons[177] substitute a blessing of first-fruits. In the Testament the oil is blessed solely for the sick,[178] and this is probably the conception in the Ethiopic and the Canons. The Sahidic and Arabic replace all of 4-6 with a note that the bishop should follow “the (local) custom”.
The usual Old Testament background to these prayers need hardly be pointed out.
The prayer at the blessing of the oil has real affinities with the prayer still used in the Roman church for blessing the “oil of the sick” at the bishop’s Maundy Thursday eucharist.