Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist. Martin D. Stringer

and prayer and the Eucharist proper. These two elements, he stresses, have different origins. For Dix the synaxis is ‘simply a continuation of the Jewish synagogue service of our Lord’s time’ (1945, p. 36). The origin of the Eucharist is a little more complex. The problem Dix outlines is that the accounts of the Last Supper present a seven-action scheme (the taking, blessing, breaking and distributing of bread followed by the taking, blessing and distributing of wine), while ‘with absolute unanimity the liturgical tradition reproduces these seven actions as four’ (taking bread and wine, blessing bread and wine, breaking bread, and sharing bread and wine) (1945, p. 48). One point that Dix draws from this is that ‘liturgical practice was not understood by the primitive church to be in any way subject to the control of N. T. documents’ and so ‘this liturgical tradition must have originated in independence of the literary tradition in all its forms’ (1945, p. 49).

      Dix follows Oesterley in designating the Last Supper as a meal held by a haburah, or Jewish religious society, on the eve of the Passover itself (1945, p. 50) and then uses material from the Mishnah to fill in the details. In stressing the importance of the haburah meal, Dix is able to argue against Lietzmann that if the emphasis had been entirely on the bread then the rite that followed would have been a private, individual activity. However, by emphasizing the wine, an essential part of a haburah supper, Jesus was able to accentuate the communal nature of the new rite (1945, p. 59). The rite itself must, in Dix’s view, go back to Jesus’ command at the Last Supper because pious Jews would not normally associate a haburah supper with death or with the Last Supper itself, and, most importantly, how otherwise would they have thought of the idea of drinking human blood as a sign of a new covenant (1945, p. 69)? Dix then looks at a range of texts and traditions associated with the agape, which he also sees as originating in the haburah meal, but being those elements that remained once the Eucharist itself had been removed (1945, p. 95). He is, however, very tentative in his suggestions for when the meal and the Eucharist are separated except to say that it must have been in apostolic times and must have been undertaken by those who had a real and deep knowledge of Jewish customs (1945, pp. 101–2). From here Dix goes on to develop his understanding of the history of the shape of the liturgy through the subsequent centuries.

      In a paper published in 1965, Dugmore divided previous studies on the origins of the Eucharist between those that treated the Last Supper as a Passover meal and those that did not (Dugmore 1965). Practically all the texts that have been looked at so far fall into the second category and this became something of a consensus among serious scholars in the field. In 1935, however, Jeremias published his text on The Eucharistic Words of Jesus and made a plea for the Passover theory of eucharistic origins (1955). Jeremias dives straight into his main thesis in Chapter 1 of his book by asking, ‘was the Last Supper a Passover Meal?’ (1955, p. 1). The first 60 pages then consist of very careful textual analysis of the Pauline and Synoptic accounts of the Last Supper, looking at all the evidence in favour of the Passover theory and all the main objections. It is the little things that suggest that the Last Supper must be a Passover: the time of the meal (only a Passover was held at night), the reclining at table, breaking the bread during the meal (rather than at its start), the use of red wine, the hymns at the end of the meal, and the fact that Jesus did not go back out to Bethany but rather stayed within the confines of a larger Jerusalem. This is detailed analysis and it is the cumulative effect of each new item of evidence that builds into a plausible and authoritative argument.

      When looking at the account of the Last Supper within the framework of the Passion story, however, some of Jeremias’s other assumptions begin to emerge. In order to address the lack of eucharistic words in John’s Gospel, Jeremias resorts to two distinct tactics. First he emphasizes the commonality in structure between Mark and John, focusing once again on the smaller details, which leads Jeremias to reconstruct a history of the wider Passion narrative itself. Then, when he comes to ask about the words of institution, he argues that the silence of John’s Gospel is due to an already existing disciplina arcani (1955, pp. 72–3), a practice that he also uses to explain the form of the eucharistic narrative in the Didache and other troubling texts. Jeremias traces the eucharistic words at the heart of the Last Supper to a cultic formula that he claims existed in a pre-Pauline form at Antioch where Paul had settled in the early 40s (1955, p. 131) and, previous to that, in a pre-Markan Aramaic form that originated in Palestine. He states ‘that in the remaining space of at most a decade after the death of Jesus the Eucharistic rite should have been freely created, and the account of the Lord’s Supper invented as an aetiological legend, is as much incapable of proof as it is improbable’ (1955, p. 132). The origin of the rite, therefore, is the Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he was betrayed.

      Jeremias takes it entirely for granted that the earliest Christian community would have celebrated some kind of Eucharist from the earliest days after the resurrection on a weekly, or even daily, basis and that in doing so they would have used some kind of institution narrative. This assumption is never in doubt for Jeremias and the whole purpose of the book is to show how the accounts of the Last Supper that exist in Paul and the Gospels preserve this ancient tradition. Jeremias ends, therefore, with a chapter speculating on the possible meaning of the words of interpretation as used by Jesus at the Last Supper, a meaning that shows Jesus equating himself with the sacrificial lamb of the Passover.

      Through very careful textual analysis Jeremias was able to restate the official church position and counter many of the alternative views. His work is based on highly technical textual and linguistic analysis and this, in itself, has given the book a level of authority that is difficult to refute by anybody who does not share Jeremias’ own technical skills. Many Church-based authors, therefore, who wish to find support for the view that the Eucharist originated in the Last Supper, and was passed on to the earliest Christian community almost complete in its conception, have turned to Jeremias to support their position and have quoted his work with little or no critical engagement (Martin 1974, pp. 110–19). A text such as La Verdiere’s The Eucharist in the New Testament and the Church (1996) has no difficulty in assuming a weekly rite very similar to contemporary Catholic practice from the days following the resurrection, and he draws on many different and disparate New Testament passages with the unquestioning assumption that the author’s shared his own Catholic theology. The root and support for this position is founded primarily through references to Jeremias.

      The sociological turn

      During the 1970s and 1980s a new approach to biblical scholarship developed that became known as ‘social-scientific criticism’ (Elliott 1995). In this work scholars began to use ideas and theories from the sociological literature to explore issues raised within the biblical texts. Two of the most prominent figures within this tradition were Gerd Theissen and Wayne Meeks, both of whom undertook detailed sociological analysis of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (Theissen 1982; Meeks 1983). In their work both scholars explored the social context of the meal described in chapter 11 of the letter and both developed theories about the nature and form of the community and the meal itself. Neither, however, went so far as to speculate as to the origins of the meal within the early Christian communities. I will come back to look at their work in more detail in Chapter 1. Their approach, however, and the tradition of social-scientific criticism that developed out of it, did inspire a number of authors who have asked more direct questions about the origin of the Eucharist, what Rouwhorst describes as the new paradigm in origins studies (Rouwhorst 2007). In this section I want to focus on just three of those who have been particularly influential, Andrew McGowan (1999a), Dennis Smith (2003) and Paul Bradshaw (2004).

      In some ways McGowan’s book Ascetic Eucharists (1999a) does not belong in this survey, as he is not strictly speaking aiming to provide a theory of origins. In fact he makes clear on a number of occasions that he is not going to discuss the question of the origins of the Eucharist at all. However, he is exploring what he calls ‘eucharistic meals’ in the first few centuries of the Christian community and he establishes two basic principles that are central to all the texts that follow him. First, McGowan begins with an exploration of food and society. He stresses that any investigation of meals within the Christian communities of the first three or four centuries have to be set within the food culture of the period, most specifically that of the Graeco-Roman world. Second, he stresses that it is important to look at all the texts as they stand rather than try to link them all together,