Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist. Martin D. Stringer

to discuss activity – what people did – without asking some questions about meaning – what people thought about their activities – as the two are intimately linked. It is the action, however, what can be discovered about who did what, and perhaps from my point of view most importantly, when they did it, that is going to form the core of this study.

      Third, therefore, I want to set a parameter in relation to the material that I am using: the evidence that is available. It is true that the number of relevant texts for the period up to 160 ce is very limited. All of them have been studied extensively and there may not be much more to find out from them. However, it is also the case that the archaeological evidence for the same period is almost non-existent, particularly that related to specifically ‘Christian’ evidence. It is this that has led many scholars, especially in recent years, to look beyond the Christian evidence at what is available within Jewish literature, or at evidence from the wider Graeco-Roman context. It has also encouraged those with a sociological concern to look for theoretical material that will help them to interpret the evidence they have. The parameter I am setting myself, however, is to begin with the Christian evidence that is available and to ask what this does suggest, and also, and just as importantly, what it does not indicate about what people were doing. I am not, therefore, going to begin with wider discussions and theories. I am going to begin with the earliest documentary evidence that is available, that is, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I will then build from this through the various texts, and, where relevant, with reference to other kinds of data (Stringer 2005, pp. 26–9). In my final chapter I will return to the wider theoretical consideration.

      Taking these three parameters into account – to focus on all kinds of eating and drinking; to focus on the practice of the early Christian communities rather than on meanings; and to focus on the evidence in roughly chronological order – it might be thought that very little that is new could ever be said. In the strictest of terms this is entirely true. Very little is known, and there is probably very little else to know. There is, therefore, one other element of my methodology that I need to explain at this point before I move on to the evidence itself.

      I am going to work on the assumption that it is possible, and appropriate, for the scholar to make some wild guesses about what was going on within, or behind, the various texts under scrutiny (Stringer 2009). Without some level of imaginative engagement with the texts the study becomes very dry and uninformative. Scholarship moves forward by trial and error on the part of those who make informed guesses when the evidence does not provide the answers. I am going to be making a series of informed guesses, therefore, throughout this work, and I will be very explicit about what these are. In each case it is my contention that the guess provides the best explanation of the gaps within the literature. I do not expect every reader to agree with me. I do, however, expect other scholars to look at the evidence and to argue against me in relation to that evidence and to suggest that other guesses may provide a better fit. What I arrive at, in Chapter 8, as my own narrative of the origins of the Eucharist may or may not be historically accurate. The reality will never be known. What I do contend, however, is that it will provide a reasonable narrative based on the evidence available, and a narrative that has to be taken seriously as a possible contender for the origins of the Eucharist among all the other possibilities that have been looked at within this Introduction.

      In what follows, therefore, I will begin with the biblical material and through Chapters 1–3 I will look in turn at Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the Passion narratives in the Synoptic Gospels (particularly Mark) and the range of other evidence of meals in the rest of the New Testament. In Chapter 4 I will look at the evidence from the wider Graeco-Roman context and the Jewish material from this period. In both cases I will argue that there is very little relevant evidence of any kind that can inform our view of Christian practice. In Chapters 5–7 I will look at the second and third generation of Christian authors focusing on Antioch, Asia Minor and Rome respectively. This will give me the opportunity to look at the Didache, the letters of Ignatius, and the work of Justin Martyr among others, and to try and track the development of meals and the sharing of bread, wine, water and other foodstuffs through the first half of the second century. In the final chapter I will bring all this together and outline my own speculative narrative of the origins of the Eucharist based on the evidence that I have presented in the previous seven chapters.

      1

      Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians

      In this study I am breaking with much of the tradition in the search for the origins of the Eucharist by beginning, not with the accounts of the Last Supper in the Gospels, but with the account of the Lord’s Supper in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. This is partly because this account is the first literary record of a ‘Christian’ meal that still survives and partly because I am convinced that if it is possible to rethink what this meal may or may not have been then all the other accounts of meals in the early Christian literature will have to be rethought in the light of this re-analysis. There is no indication within the text of how often the Lord’s Supper was held. The only reference to any regular activity comes in the recommendation by Paul to put some money aside each week for the collection he is due to take to Jerusalem (16.2). It is only the subsequent history of the Eucharist, and particularly the accounts in the Didache and in the writings of Justin Martyr, that has led to the assumption that because the Lord’s Supper has some elements in common with what was to become the Eucharist, it must have been held on a weekly basis. If that subsequent history did not exist then what kind of assumptions might be drawn from the account given in the letter?

      Any solution to this question must be suspect on two grounds. First, it is clear that the subsequent history does exist and therefore it is not possible to look at the account without some pre-formed ideas. Second, as the account does not provide information on the frequency of the supper then any proposal has to be speculative and one guess might well be as good as another. Let me, therefore, rephrase the question that I want to address in this chapter: is it plausible to suggest that the Lord’s Supper represented in chapter 11 of 1 Corinthians was an annual event? If it is, then, I would suggest, it might make scholars look again at the rest of the texts that are available in a very different light.

      This Chapter, therefore, will have four parts. I will begin by setting the account of the Lord’s Supper within the wider context of the letter as a whole. Second, I will look at what this text can say about the meal that is being described. Third, I will relate this to other references to meals and to eating within the rest of the letter. Finally, I will look to the rest of Paul’s writing, and writing attributed to Paul, to see how this account relates to other elements in the wider corpus.

      The Lord’s Supper in the context of 1 Corinthians

      As with all of Paul’s writings there has been considerable debate about the purpose and structure of the first letter to the Corinthians (Mitchell 1992; Thistleton 2000; Hall 2003). Much of this is not directly relevant to this discussion, but there are a number of questions that need to be addressed if the account of the meal in chapter 11 is to make sense. The first asks whether the text presented in the New Testament is the letter as Paul originally wrote it, or whether a subsequent editor has put it together in its current form (Hall 2003, pp. 30–50). Or, to rephrase the question, does 1 Corinthians represent a single letter or should it be divided into two or more texts? There have been various attempts to show that the letter is made up of different elements, led largely by apparent contradictions in the author’s position on the eating of meat offered to idols and the role of women in worship. De Boer for example, would want to divide the letter between chapters 1––4 and chapters 5––16 (de Boer 1994). He says, ‘there are considerable points of continuity between the two sections of the epistle . . . But points of continuity are to be expected . . . They are not worthy of special notice and certainly need no explanation. The discontinuities, or discrepancies, however, do’ (de Boer 1994, p. 242). While this appears to be eminently reasonable, if this were to be taken to the extreme then every chapter, or subsection of each chapter, would have to be considered as a different letter (Hall 2003, pp. 44–5).

      In practice few, if any, of the attempts to discern a division in the letter would affect the interpretation of chapter 11, and so the simplest and safest solution at this stage in the discussion is