Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist. Martin D. Stringer

and evangelical activity than at many other times in the Church’s history. However, baptism would not have been held as frequently as a regular weekly meal. Why is there no other mention of the meal? There is no easy answer to this question except to suggest that there was no regular weekly meal within the communities that Paul founded.

      There are three other sections of the letters attributed to Paul where references to a weekly meal might be expected if it existed. The first two raise the question of who can eat with whom: the account of the divisions at Antioch that Paul provides in his letter to the Galatians (2.11–21) and a brief reference to a similar issue in Romans (14.1–23). The third relates to the issues raised by the Pastoral Epistles.

      The Galatians material raises a number of complex issues. First, it is necessary to reconcile the account of the dispute at Antioch, as recounted by Paul, with the account in Acts. Having done that, it is important to decide what the real issues were in this dispute. It looks, on the surface, as if the issue concerned the question of whether Jews could share a meal with non-Jews (Esler 1987). Paul said that they could, his opponents argued that they could not. There is scholarly literature to suggest that both positions reflected the accepted position of the time, but the more general view in recent scholarship is that ordinary Jews in the first century, whether in Palestine or the Diaspora, would actually have shared meals with non-Jews with little concern (Sanders 1992, pp. 214–17; Barclay 2001). They would have become unclean in doing so, but this was easy to remedy. It would only be the nature of the food that would have caused problems, and if the Jews and non-Jews each brought their own food then even this could be avoided. It would only be the strictest Jewish groups that would have seen any real problem with this and so, once again, it is necessary to go back and ask what the real issues were in the Antiochene dispute. Unfortunately that is beyond the scope of this particular discussion and I will come back to it in Chapter 5.

      Whatever the real issues, however, what is very striking in relation to the discussion in this chapter is that there is no mention of the ‘Lord’s Supper’, or of any other regular cultic meal that the community is obliged to celebrate. The reference in Galatians 2.12 simply says ‘before certain men came from James, he [Peter] used to eat with the Gentiles’. There is no further reference to indicate the context in which this eating takes place. This would be the ideal place to make reference to the regular weekly meal if such existed. Smith takes it for granted that the ‘eating’ in question represents the same basic meal tradition as at Corinth; ‘in other words, what Paul calls “the Lord’s Supper” at Corinth is also what was being practiced at Antioch’ (Smith 2003, p. 174). However, if that is the case then why is this not mentioned explicitly in the text? If Jesus really did institute a regular weekly meal, and if there were some in Antioch who found sharing food with others difficult if not impossible, then once again some reference to Jesus’ command would surely have settled the issue once and for all.

      The same argument can also be raised in relation to Romans 14, although this also relates back to the discussions in 1 Corinthians 8—10. As with Galatians 2, however, there is no reference to a specific meal within which, or around which, this discussion takes place. Once again Smith states, ‘in Romans Paul also refers to a church fellowship meal’ (Smith 2003, p. 177), except that he does not. He talks about what individuals feel it is appropriate to eat. At no point in the argument does Paul say that the Roman community should eat any particular thing at any particular meal, and the question that is raised over the wine in verse 21 (it is better not to eat meat or drink wine) would sit very strangely with the Lord’s Supper as outlined in 1 Corinthians. Finally, there is reference in verses 5–6 to days kept sacred or not, depending on the consideration of each individual, making any suggestion that either Paul or the Roman community kept one day a week special with a celebration of a fellowship meal highly problematic.

      Unlike the discussion of Galatians or Romans, there is very little scholarly discussion about the place of what might have become the ‘Eucharist’ in the Pastoral Epistles. This is not surprising as there is no direct mention of any meal, or anything that might be considered remotely eucharistic, within these texts. It is generally accepted by modern scholarship that these letters are not by Paul and represent a later development of a Pauline school or community (Pietersen 2004, pp. 4–26). They have features that indicate that the communities they represent are becoming more formal and more highly organized. In particular there is considerable discussion about the role of the overseers, deacons and elders within these texts (MacDonald 1988). Some have argued that these texts are proto-church orders (Pietersen 2004, p. 3), others suggest that this is misleading and that the texts are essentially written to challenge certain factions within the community and to bolster the position of Timothy and Titus (Pietersen 2004). If, however, these texts are concerned, in whatever way, with the role and practice of the leaders of the community, including their role in prayer (1 Tim. 2.1–8), in the public reading of scripture and teaching (1 Tim. 4.13; 2 Tim. 4.2) and in pastoral care (1 Tim. 5.1–25; Titus 2.1–15), why is it that they say nothing about meals (Rowland 1985, pp. 242–3)?

      There is a condemnation of the ‘hypocritical liars’ who abstain from certain foods (1 Tim. 4.3) and a comment that if any food is ‘received with thanksgiving’ (εuχαριστíας) then it should be considered good. This is not developed, however, into a statement about any kind of regular meal within the community. Timothy is also encouraged to ‘stop drinking only water’ (1 Tim. 5.23), which suggests that some of the ascetic practices that McGowan identifies in a later generation are already present here (McGowan 1999a, pp. 231–3). If a regular meal was taking place within this community, therefore, what might it have consisted of, and would wine have played any part in it?

      The overwhelming lack of evidence for regular meals, with ritual significance, in the corpus of Paul’s work, and those other texts that are a product of the school or community associated with him, must be important. I cannot accept that this silence is coincidental and that meals were occurring that had a special place for bread and a cup, blessings, and an eschatological or paschal meaning, but that they were not infringing on Paul’s thinking enough to be mentioned in more than one letter. The only real solution is that they were not a regular or frequent part of the life of the communities Paul founded, or, by implication, of Paul’s own practice. In my view at least, this lack of evidence suggests even more strongly that the meal in 1 Corinthians was probably an event that occurred less frequently than once a week and could possibly have been an annual event associated with the Passover. What I am proposing, therefore, is that the Lord’s Supper was probably a part of the Passover celebrations of the Corinthian community. To justify this assertion, however, the Christian communities beyond Paul’s own orbit need to be looked at much more closely, along with any evidence about the possible celebrations of the Passover within Christianity as a whole at this very early date. That will form the basis for the next chapter.

      2

      The Passion

      At the end of the previous chapter I raised the possibility that the meal presented by Paul in 1 Corinthians was an early form of Christian Passover. This is not the first time that this has been presented, but the idea is usually dismissed, partly because there is very little positive evidence to support it, and partly because the presentation of the idea has often been too specific or too detailed. I am not, in this book, aiming to suggest that the form of an early Christian celebration at the time of the Jewish Passover can ever be known. I am not even suggesting that every Christian community in the middle of the first century must have celebrated a Passover. I am simply offering the possibility that the Lord’s Supper, as outlined in 1 Corinthians, was an annual event, most probably associated with the time of the Jewish Passover. What I hope to do in this chapter, therefore, is to investigate the various texts and ideas that would be needed to support such a minimal contention.

      There is one text in particular that is central to this argument and that is the text of the Last Supper. Paul quotes from this text when discussing the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11.23–25), suggesting that such a text, or at least an oral narrative that underlies the text, was available to him in the mid 50s of the first century. The various Gospel versions of the text were compiled, at the earliest, much later in the first century. So what was the source of Paul’s quotation? If it is assumed that the meal was a celebration