Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist

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Martin D. Stringer. Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist

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Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist

The Collect in the Churches of the Reformation

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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.

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