![]() The wider cultural setting: the Greco-Roman SymposiumĪlthough the Synoptic Gospels all record a version of the Last Supper, they do so within the longer narratives of the ministry of Jesus which include a variety of meals he attended. Some of the possible forms and influences on the way to the emergence of what is usually understood today as ‘the Eucharist’ need to be considered further. ![]() What does seem safe to say is that by the fourth century there emerged from the different geographical areas of Christianity, rites which, both by osmosis and because of the emergence of a canon of Scripture, used bread and wine mixed with water, and related these in prayer in some way or other to a sacrifice fulfilled by Jesus in his death, and linking the bread and wine to his body and blood. We have scant information as regards the actual forms of Jewish meal prayer in the first century ce and therefore precious little on which to speculate about some evolution of Christian Eucharistic Prayers. ![]() Those who have adopted such a position have transplanted some or all of the rabbinic rites and customs of tenth-century Babylon or early medieval Europe to first-century Judaea and the surrounding Jewish diaspora and have declined to distinguish the continuity of some liturgical traditions from the patent novelty of others. In pursuit of this reconstruction, liturgists have sometimes turned for guidance to the authoritative Jewish prayer-books of almost a thousand years later, or even of the more modern period, and sought to extrapolate backwards, making assumptions that defy the vast chasm of history, geography and ideology that separate one millennium from another. More sober scholarship of Jewish prayers questions whether these ‘statutory’ prayers were the only or the predominant form in the first century, and also underscores the fact that the forms that have come down to us post-date our earliest Christian forms. Focus on the berakot forms of Jewish prayers, and the birkat ha-mazon in particular, became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Dix favoured a chaburah setting (a religious fellowship meal) for the Last Supper over against a specific Passover meal, but since in both rites (and we know precious little about a chaburah) the post-meal prayer is the birkat ha-mazon, he suggested that this prayer is the locus for what became the anaphora, qurbana or Eucharistic Prayer. Such questioning is not a return to the older extreme liberal Protestant claim that ‘sacraments’ were invented by Paul and borrowed from Hellenistic mystery religion, a view that was recirculated in English-speaking countries in the 1950s translations of the works of Rudolf Bultmann.³ Recent scholarship questions a simplistic notion that every Christian community celebrated its sacred meal with the foundational narrative found in 1 Corinthians 15 and the Synoptic Gospels always in mind. Quite apart from whether or not the Eucharist did ever become a four-action shape as argued by Dix, ² the very notion that all eucharistic meals celebrated by those who claimed in some way to be ‘Christian’ in the first three centuries always consisted of an Anamnesis (‘remembrance’) of Jesus’ death, were always related to the Last Supper Jesus had with his disciples, and always used bread and wine mixed with water, are ones that more recent scholarship has called into question. Its rhetoric is superb, but its assumptions are ones that today have to be considerably nuanced. ![]() ![]() This quotation from Gregory Dix has become one of those ‘purple passages’ that is often quoted in relation to the Eucharist, both in general essays on eucharistic liturgy and especially in Anglican homilies. Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. He had told His friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning ‘for the anamnesis’ of Him, and they have done it always since. So the four-action Shape of the Liturgy was found by the end of the first century. Soon it was simplified still further, by leaving out the supper and combining the double grouping before and after it into a single rite. Introduction In Search of the Meals behind the Last Supper: Cultural Background and Eucharistic OriginsĪt the heart of it all is the eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute simplicity – the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night before He died. ![]()
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