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Introduction

‘The Lord Jesus, on the night that he was betrayed, took bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said . . .’ (1 Cor. 11.24). And so, for almost two thousand years the Church has followed the instruction of Jesus at his Last Supper and has taken bread, blessed it and broken it saying . . . That, at least, is what many of those sitting in our churches Sunday by Sunday, and often day by day, of whatever theological position, still believe to be the case. Whether Catholic or Evangelical, Orthodox or Pentecostal, what Christians do when they come together to share bread and wine (and whatever theological position they take on the significance of that bread and wine) the overwhelming understanding is that this is something that Jesus did, this is something that Jesus commanded his disciples to continue doing, this is something that the followers of Jesus began to do immediately following the resurrection and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, and this is something that Christians have continued to do for two thousand years. We only need to look at the hymn to eucharistic practice as presented by Gregory Dix in his classic book, Shape of the Liturgy, to get a feel for the scope and spread of this practice throughout the Church (1945, p. 744), and yet many churchgoers sitting in the pews Sunday by Sunday still believe it all started in that upper room on the night before Jesus was betrayed.

Perhaps it was. The reality is that we do not know, and for just over a hundred years scholars from different churches, different disciplines and different theological persuasions have been arguing among themselves about a wide range of different possibilities. The fact that they have never reached a consensus on what they believed did happen, and probably never will, does not mean that scholars should ignore the question. If historians are going to write a history of Christian worship, then one of the first questions that will inevitably confront them is what happened at that Last Supper, and how does what may, or may not, have occurred at that moment relate to the central act of Christian worship for much of the following two thousand years?

There is no question that historical scholarship informed the liturgical revisions that occurred in practically all the churches in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is also clear, however, that the historical period that was most influential at that time was focused on the third and fourth centuries. This period preceded many of the debates that have caused subsequent divisions within the Church, but it was also late enough to provide a significant body of evidence about what actually happened, whether that is the Eucharistic Prayer of Hippolytus (ignoring the debates about its authorship and whether it was in fact ever used) (Bradshaw et al. 2002) or the baptismal practices of fourth-century Jerusalem (Yarnold 1994). The earlier period, the first 150 years of Christian development, was conveniently overlooked, although the informality of Justin Martyr is often quoted as a model to be followed.

In current thinking the role of historical precedent in contemporary liturgical practice and innovation has declined. Many commentators believe that contemporary worship ought to reflect contemporary issues, whether that is in terms of language, culture or technology (Burns et al. 2008; Ward 2005). Alternatively there are large sections of the Church that see a direct link between the words of scripture and contemporary practice without the need for any kind of historical mediation (Peterson 1992). Meanwhile, in the scholarly community, there is a strong sense that because there is so little evidence, and so little can be said with any kind of certainty about what might or might not have happened, then perhaps nothing should be said at all (Bradshaw 2004). I have considerable sympathy for all three of these positions and my own aim in researching this area was not to influence contemporary liturgical practice. I strongly believe that the exploration of the history of Christian worship is a worthwhile activity in its own right without the need to find an alternative justification from within the Church.

I come to this research because, like others who have studied this history before, I became curious about the questions that I have already mentioned. Why was it that the sharing of bread and wine, with all the imagery and theological reflection that surrounded it, became so central to Christian practice? How did it originate? What were the precedents, and how can the limited, and quite disparate, range of evidence that is available be interpreted?

It could be argued that after a hundred or more years of study, with very few new sources of evidence, there is nothing more to say. That if liturgists have not found the solutions to these problems by now, then, short of finding a new text or providing a radical reinterpretation of a known text that will convince other scholars, there is nothing more to say and scholars should simply accept that they do not know, and probably will never know, what actually happened. This may be true. There is very limited data: just a few texts – none of which are really about the subject in hand – which are scattered in time and space. This is unlikely to change. But this, in itself, throws down a challenge. Lack of data, and the disparate nature of the evidence, does not stop historians of the classical world from speculating about possible practices and understandings. As I will show in Chapter 4 these historians do not have all that much more data than the historian of Christian worship, and yet they tend to be much more confident in their use of that data and, what is more, liturgical scholars tend to assume that what they are presenting is authoritative (Smith 2003; Alikin 2009).

Historians of the classical world, like all historians, are constantly looking again at the evidence before them. They are asking new questions, bringing it together with other evidence in new juxtapositions, drawing on new theoretical insights in order to see it from a new angle, and so on. There is no reason why the historian of Christian worship should not be doing the same. My aim in this text, therefore, is to ask different questions, from a different perspective, and to see what kind of understandings and insights might emerge from that process. It is for my colleagues to assess these questions, and the answers that I have explored, and to see which may be of lasting value, which need rethinking and which remain mere curiosities. Between us, over time, it is hoped that the discipline as a whole will move forward.

In this first chapter, therefore, I wish to begin by looking at the kinds of questions scholars in the past have asked of these first few decades of the Christian community and the role of rituals involving meals and the sharing of bread and wine within this period. I will end the chapter by outlining a few of the principles by which I am working within the rest of the text.

Two types of Eucharist

Up to the end of the nineteenth century the prevailing view of the vast majority of liturgical scholars was, either implicitly or explicitly, that Jesus used a form of the worship at the Last Supper that would have been familiar to the scholars themselves. They argued that Jesus passed this liturgy on to his disciples who, in their turn, passed it on to subsequent generations, who either embellished it or corrupted it depending on the particular churchmanship of the scholar concerned. It was rarely questioned whether the format of the Last Supper was anything other than a formal liturgical event, albeit with a meal included, or that Jesus would have needed to provide fixed words for the blessing of the bread and wine and perhaps for other elements of the rite. The merest impression of that original rite is seen in the accounts that are offered in the Gospels and in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and some biblical scholars would argue among themselves as to which of these was the most likely to be the original wording. Other elements of the rite could also be seen in other texts from the New Testament, although by the time the writings of the ‘church fathers’ are written then things were probably too corrupted to be entirely retrievable. What remained, however, was the idea of a direct and single line of transmission from Jesus to his disciples and on to the earliest Christian communities.

The earliest critical questions concerning the origins of the Eucharist, therefore, came from those scholars who began to explore, and to a certain extent to rethink, what has become known as the ‘historical Jesus’ (Hagner 2001). In 1835–36 Strauss produced a book in which he set out to trace exactly what could be discovered about the real Jesus of history from the evidence that was available. This led him to ask critical questions about the nature of the Gospel texts, which are the primary source for the life of Jesus, and to seek to question whether the Jesus presented by these texts was plausible in any historic sense. Much of this work consists of questioning the historicity of the miracles and other elements of the traditional gospel narrative. Within this wider critical analysis, however, the tradition of the Last Supper was also investigated and Strauss comes to the conclusion that Jesus was expecting that ‘within a year’s time the pre-messianic dispensation will have come to an end and the messianic age will have come’, although he did suggest that this might have been a pious hope on the part of the writers of the Gospels (Schweitzer 2000, p. 88).

The historical Jesus controversy was one that raged in academic circles throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and much of it revolved around questions of miracles and the message that scholars believed Jesus was preaching (Schweitzer 2000). The question of the Last Supper, and its role within the wider narrative of Jesus’ life, was touched upon but never explored in depth by any of these authors. It was when scholars began to apply similar critical historical techniques to the early Church, especially as that was portrayed in the book of Acts and the writings of Paul, that the role of a cultic meal became more relevant.

Two authors in particular came to very similar conclusions from this kind of study. Spitta, writing in 1893, distinguishes between the agape, or love feast, derived from the meal accounts in Acts, and the Pauline version of the Eucharist with its focus on the death of Jesus and the Last Supper (Higgins 1952, p. 57). Weiss develops a similar view in his History of Primitive Christianity (1959), first published shortly after his death in 1914. Weiss argues that the ‘breaking of bread’ in Acts reflects a specifically Christian way of designating a meal and is the first step in the development of the Eucharist. A joyful eschatological atmosphere accompanied the breaking and sharing of bread linking the celebration of the community with the practice of Jesus and his disciples. Paul’s linking of this joyful celebration with the death of Jesus and the tradition of the Last Supper is a later development, encouraged, according to Weiss, by reflection on the sharing of wine at the meal. As he comments, ‘the moment when someone, as the red wine was being poured from the skin into the cup, first thought of the out-poured blood of Christ, was one of the greatest importance in every respect’ (Weiss 1959, p. 61).

Much of this early scholarship was brought together in one of the most detailed and most often quoted texts that focused specifically on the origin of the Eucharist, Lietzmann’s Mass and Lord’s Supper (1979), first published in 1926. Lietzmann argues backwards from the principal families of the liturgical tradition to what he identifies as two distinct forms of the Eucharist in the later second century, the Hippolytan-Roman, or that found in the Apostolic Tradition, and the Egyptian, which is essentially that of Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis in Egypt (1979, p. 142). Lietzmann aims to demonstrate that all the material found in the Eucharistic Prayer attributed to Hippolytus can be traced back to the writings of Paul, including its sacrificial elements. The understanding of sacrifice in the anaphora of Serapion, however, is not seen in relation to the death of Jesus but rather in terms of ‘the laying of the elements on the Lord’s table and in their consecration by prayer’ (1979, p. 159).

This is followed by a discussion of the agape, especially as that is seen in the Apostolic Tradition, and by a detailed discussion of the Last Supper. Lietzmann is keen to demonstrate that the Last Supper could not have been a Passover meal, as it does not contain any of the elements that would be expected in such a meal. Rather he sees the Last Supper as a haburah meal or ‘a Jewish festal meal in a narrow circle of friends’ (1979, p. 185), which takes the form of ‘the blessing of bread at the beginning, the blessing of wine at the conclusion, [and] the actual meal between the two’ (1979, p. 185). The text of the Didache is then investigated to show that this contains a ‘type of the Lord’s Supper with no reference to the tradition extant in Mark and Paul’ (1979, p. 193), but with language and content that is similar to that of Serapion. ‘This confirms us in assuming’, Lietzmann suggests, ‘a connection between the ancient Egyptian liturgy and that of Didache’ (1979, p. 194).

It is only having dealt with all this material that Lietzmann can begin to present his own ideas about the primitive form of the Lord’s Supper. Here he draws on material from the apocryphal Acts of John, Thomas and Peter to illustrate a form of the Lord’s Supper that included bread and water instead of bread and wine and so suggests that this was the earliest form of the supper, relating to the breaking of bread in the Acts of the Apostles. This was also a haburah meal, following the practice of Jesus and his disciples, but with no reference to the death of Jesus, and with the idea of sacrifice contained in the offering of the bread and the saying of a blessing or thanksgiving over it. Lietzmann refers to this as the ‘Jerusalem type’ (1979, p. 205). It is Paul, Lietzmann suggests, who creates a ‘second type’ (1979, p. 205) by combining the Jerusalem type with ideas derived from the Hellenistic meals held as memorials for the dead to create a supper that focuses on the death of Jesus and links the ideas of sacrifice specifically with the words over the bread and wine. These two types are then developed through the Didache (and on into the Egyptian tradition) and through Hippolytus.

Through the whole of his analysis Lietzmann pays particular attention to the forms of words used in worship, with most of the first two-thirds of his text being a detailed analysis of elements of the Eucharistic Prayer. It is by taking these ideas back, through the application of Baumstark’s comparative method (1958), that he is justified in arguing behind the extant manuscripts to the origins of the texts that they contain, and then behind the texts to the reconstruction of ideas that predate the written material. It is where this backward movement of archaeological analysis meets the forward development of Spitta and Weiss that the construction of the theory of origins is developed. It is also in the speculative and controversial nature of much of this backwards analysis that the work of Lietzmann ultimately fails, and has been critiqued by many scholars over the years (Richardson 1979). Unfortunately by criticizing those elements that cannot stand up to scrutiny, the whole theory has been dismissed, along with the idea of the two types of the Eucharist that forms the core of its central thesis.

Other authors in the early part of the twentieth century, however, did follow up on Lietzmann’s work and developed it in different ways. Cullmann, for example, provides one of the most convincing developments in a short essay originally published in 1936 (1958). This focused particularly on the meal tradition that Lietzmann associates with Jerusalem and, like Weiss before him, Cullmann linked this to the traditions surrounding the resurrection appearances, many of which are associated with meals and have a joyful eschatological feel (1958, pp. 8–12). Cullmann argues that it is the meal that keeps the resurrection memories alive within the community and he links this to thoughts about the second coming. He identifies the ‘maranatha’ used both by Paul and by the compiler of the Didache as a link to this eschatological tradition (1958, pp. 13–16). Even Cullmann’s analysis, however, could not save the two Eucharists theory and this was eventually swamped by another more substantial line of enquiry, that which related the earliest Eucharists to contemporary Jewish models.

Discovering Jewish roots

Lietzmann linked the ‘Jerusalem type’ of the Eucharist and the Last Supper with the haburah meal from Jewish tradition. He also looked for Jewish roots to many of the texts that became part of both types of Eucharist and their subsequent developments. In particular he identifies the texts of the Didache and the Hippolytan agape with Jewish meal blessings (1979, pp. 161–71), and sees the development of the preface in the Eucharistic Prayer of the Apostolic Constitutions, concluding with the Sanctus, as deriving from the morning service of the synagogue (1979, pp. 100–11). In doing this Lietzmann is part of a much wider tradition within the literature that has looked for Jewish origins to the Eucharist and its associated texts.

Duchesne, for example, in his classic work on the origin and evolution of Christian worship, simply states ‘the Christian Liturgy to a great extent took its rise from the Jewish Liturgy, and was, in fact, merely its continuation’ (1904, p. 46). He goes on to clarify that this is only true for synagogue worship, temple worship having no influence on Christian worship at all, and that the Eucharist is an exception to this general statement as this derives directly from the Last Supper which constitutes ‘the principle elements of the Mass in its entirely Christian and original aspect’ (1904, p. 49). Others, however, have also sought Jewish antecedents for the Eucharist. The most detailed of the early studies in this area is Oesterley’s work, The Jewish Background of the Christian Liturgy (1925).

Oesterley begins his study by asking about the reliability of the Jewish documents. He claims to be drawing primarily on the Mishnah and other related texts, and while he acknowledges that these were compiled in the early years of the third century he notes that ‘what it records is prior to this date’ and could perhaps go back as far as 250 bce (1925, p. 32). He also notes the importance of the Old Testament, intertestamental literature and the development of the oral tradition. From this Oesterley develops what he calls the pre-Christian elements of the Jewish liturgy and then looks at the general view of early Christian worship and notes in particular the paucity of data that is available. However, he does identify a number of examples to show that Jewish liturgical influence is a reality (1925, p. 154). When looking specifically at the Eucharist, Oesterley notes that the institution of the rite took place at the end of a meal. The real question, therefore, for Oesterley is to determine what kind of meal this was.

Oesterley focuses on the Last Supper, which he argues was a festal meal on the eve of Passover (transferred from Friday to Thursday because of the date of the feast in that particular year) that ended with a kiddush or sanctification ceremony. ‘This consisted’, according to Oesterley ‘of the commemoration and institution of the Sabbath, the blessing over the cup and its partaking by all; then the memorial of redemption from the Egyptian bondage, followed by the blessing over the bread and its distribution’ (1925, p. 171). Oesterley links the supposed text of the Passover kiddush to the language of the Didache and to other early Christian texts. Finally, Oesterley sees the agape as a continuation, within a Christian context, of the Jewish Sabbath meal with the term agape being ‘a Greek equivalent to the neo-Hebrew Chaburah’ or fellowship (1925, p. 204).

Undoubtedly the most famous author in this tradition is Gregory Dix who, in the Shape of the Liturgy, follows Oesterley in arguing that the Last Supper was probably a haburah supper, one that had a special religious status among a group of pious friends (1945). It is not the link with the haburah meal, however, that particularly distinguishes Dix’s approach. More significant is his emphasis on the sequence or ‘shape’ of the meal rather than the content of any of the words used. It is the shape of the liturgy, Dix argues, that could be ‘genuinely apostolic tradition’ while the words demonstrate considerable differences (1945, p. 5). In doing this Dix prefigures some of the more sociological approaches that became more common towards the end of the twentieth century. He emphasizes that the Eucharist was something that was done, that it is a communal act within the assembly, and he stresses the possible structure and spatial context of that assembly (1945, pp. 12–35).

Dix sees the liturgy as having two elements, a synaxis or service of readings, preaching 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, and takes the possibility of diversity within Christian practice as a starting point. His interest is primarily in those eucharistic meals that appear in the literature to involve bread and water rather than bread and wine. Others, including Lietzmann, have discussed these texts in passing but have either seen them as anomalous or as heretical and therefore have not focused on them as a specific eucharistic tradition. For McGowan the bread and water tradition is as important and as interesting as the bread and wine tradition, and this forms the focus of his work.

McGowan starts with a theoretical chapter focusing on the cultures of food, drawing primarily on the work of Mary Douglas (1966, 1970, 1972), and the idea of diversity. He then moves on to look more closely at the food culture of the Graeco-Roman world. He focuses specifically on the eating of meat and the drinking of wine and associates this with what he calls the ‘cuisine of sacrifice’ (1999a, pp. 60–7). In identifying a code of food practices that are associated with sacrifice McGowan can then look at those who reject this code, both in relation to Jewish meals and to what he calls ‘ascetic meals’ (1999a, p. 67) among certain philosophical schools within the Graeco-Roman world. Asceticism, he stresses, is not just about the rejection of all food, it has to be constructed within the wider food culture and can only be understood in terms of what is rejected from that culture. In the Graeco-Roman world McGowan sees asceticism as primarily a rejection of the cuisine of sacrifice and therefore as a rejection of meat and wine. It is in this context that he moves on to look at Christian meals.

An important central chapter provides a survey of foodstuffs mentioned by Christian texts in the first three or four centuries and he identifies the sharing of bread, wine, oil, cheese, vegetables and other foodstuffs among specific communities and sometimes more generally within communal meals. Out of this he identifies a specifically bread and water tradition of eucharistic meals that is associated with a number of texts, primarily the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles but also other related texts from the eastern empire and beyond. What McGowan identifies through a close analysis of these texts is a similar rejection of the cuisine of sacrifice that he had already identified among Cynics and other groups within the wider Graeco-Roman culture. What he argues, therefore, is that this ascetic tradition, developing in Palestine or Syria from a very early date within the Christian community, can be traced through a series of examples and probably forms the base for later monastic asceticism in the same part of the world.

It is only in the last two chapters that McGowan traces this tradition back into the New Testament texts, where he sees a number of instances in which the authors appear to be arguing against this tradition, but little evidence for the tradition itself, and then, in the final chapter, to ask about the sources of the bread and water tradition. It is possible, he argues, that there might have been Jewish precedents, but there is in fact very little evidence for this. There is nothing specifically within the Christian tradition that can form the basis for these practices and so he has to argue that it is the wider prevalence of the cuisine of sacrifice and the recognized rejection of this by a number of different groups that forms the discursive context for the development of this tradition. What is important, therefore, is not that the bread and water tradition should be seen as an ‘origin’ of the Eucharist, or even a second strand of eucharistic development as Lietzmann appears to suggest, but that it is a distinct tradition within the eucharistic meals of the early Christian community and probably one of a number of such traditions within a much more diverse range of practices than previous scholars were sometimes willing to accept.

Smith’s book, From Symposium to Eucharist (2003), builds on many of the ideas in McGowan’s text and is probably the most overtly sociological of the three works that I am looking at in this section. Along with Matthias Klinghardt, Smith initiated a seminar within the Society for Biblical Literature to explore Graeco-Roman meals and their associations with early Christian practices (Alikin 2009, p. 3). Smith’s own work builds on that of Klinghardt who had published a similar theory in German in 1996 (Klinghardt 1996). In his own book Smith sets out to argue that ‘although there were many minor differences in the meal customs as practiced in different regions and social groups, the evidence suggests that meals took similar forms and shared similar meanings and interpretations across a broad range of the ancient world’ (2003, p. 2). This includes Jewish and early Christian meals as well as those of the wider Graeco-Roman world. Smith argues that earlier writers on the origins of the Eucharist, particularly Lietzmann and Jeremias, despite their differences, all ‘construct a model for analysing the ancient data based on the form of the Eucharist in the later church’ (2003, p. 4). Alternatively, Smith proposes that the Eucharist developed out of a range of early Christian meals that were themselves part of the common banqueting tradition of the ancient world.

Smith then goes on to explore this common banqueting tradition through an exploration of Graeco-Roman banquets, Jewish banquets and finally banquets in the writings of Paul and in the Gospel traditions. He is specifically working within a sociological tradition that, like McGowan, he associates with the work of Douglas. This leads Smith to identify idealized models which he claims are presupposed by the ancient literature and which, using Douglas’ terminology, can be linked to the ‘social codes’ that they represent (Smith 2003, pp. 8–9; Douglas 1970). The two specific idealized models that he chooses to explore are the symposium and the messianic banquet. These come together within the meal tradition of the early Christian communities and, according to Smith, do not simply determine the structure of the meal but also, through the codes contained within them, determine much of early Christian theology.

Smith argues that the earliest references to Christian meals come from the writings of Paul and refer specifically to meal traditions at Antioch, Corinth and Rome. All of these must, Smith argues, predate Paul’s own writing and yet it is the ideology of the meal, or to use Douglas’s term their ‘social code’, that informs Paul’s own theology. The emphasis on boundaries, for example, is seen in the discussion of the meal at Antioch in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, community identity, ethics and social equality are developed in relation to the meal at Corinth, and ideas of hospitality and fellowship are developed with reference to the meal in Rome (2003, pp. 216–17). It is not only the wider social code of the Graeco-Roman banquet that informs the meals within the Pauline churches, however. Smith also claims that the shape of the meal, as outlined in 1 Corinthians, is also modelled on the wider social norms. The meal begins with ‘a benediction over the food, represented by the bread’ and ends with ‘a benediction over the wine marking the transition from deipnon to symposium’ (2003, p. 188). It is the symposium that is seen in chapter 14 of Paul’s letter.

The following chapter, on the ‘Banquet in the Gospels’, takes Smith back into more conventional biblical criticism as he looks at the narrative traditions and their underlying codes in relation to the wider narrative traditions of banquets and table fellowship within the Graeco-Roman world. He shows that these wider cultural narratives have clearly influenced the Gospel writers, or their sources, and have been adapted by each author for their own theological purposes. ‘The table of Jesus’, Smith argues, ‘is a literary phenomenon’ (2003, p. 276) and one should not ‘read the Gospel narrative as an exact model for the Gospel community’, but rather ‘the story told in the Gospel narrative, would have functioned to provide an idealized model for the life of the community as it should be’ (2003, pp. 276–7). In conclusion Smith asks, ‘what kind of meal did the early Christians celebrate?’ and he provides a simple answer: ‘Early Christians celebrated a meal based on the banquet model found commonly in their world’ (2003, p. 279). While this model clearly provided the early Christian community with the basis for their social ethics and much of their theology, ‘no further explanation for the origin of early Christian meals is needed’ (2003, p. 279).

It is impossible to complete a history of histories of the origin of the Eucharist without mention of Paul Bradshaw. While his is not the most recent text to be published on the subject (see Alikin 2009), Bradshaw’s scholarship and his radical approach does probably make it the most definitive of the most recent group of writings. Bradshaw’s work on Eucharistic Origins (2004) builds on the two editions of his more general text on the origins of Christian worship (1992, 2002). In these earlier books Bradshaw is keen to point out just how little evidence there is for the origins of Christian worship of any kind and, by implication, how little can be said in any definitive sense. It is the scarcity of the evidence, and its very wide distribution across time and space, that makes any attempt to provide a single narrative for the origins of Christian worship impossible. Bradshaw goes further than this, however, to suggest not only that a single common narrative is impossible to construct, but also that this is not the best way of thinking about origins at all. For Bradshaw, what evidence there is points to a variety of different practices within the early Christian communities and hence to the possibility of a variety of different origins.

If there is one theme, therefore, in his work on Eucharistic Origins (2004) it is that liturgists must never assume that there is one narrative, one origin, and that they must always be alert to the great diversity of practice and hence the potential for a great diversity of origins. In this he follows very closely on the work of McGowan, but takes McGowan’s conclusions, such as they are, much further. Apart from the radical nature of the conclusions, however, the structure of the book is far more conventional and tends to disguise the radical use of the sociological material that it contains. Bradshaw begins by looking at the Last Supper and the institution narratives and moves on from there to look in turn at the Didache, other early Christian meals, and Justin, taking a textually based starting point for each chapter.

The first chapter in particular, on the Last Supper and the institution narrative, follows through the very limited evidence for the use of the institution narrative in either forming the ritual of the Eucharist or having a role within that ritual. In relation to the first question, Bradshaw can say, ‘we do not possess one scrap of direct testimony that the earliest Christian Eucharist ever conformed itself to the model of the Last Supper, with a bread ritual before the meal and a cup ritual afterwards’ (2004, p. 13). Even the example from 1 Corinthians is dismissed in this assessment as Paul does not say, or even suggest, that the meal he is critiquing follows the model of the tradition that he recounts. While many other authors quote from, or use traditions related to, the institution narrative when discussing the Eucharist it is not until the Sacramentary of Serapion that the narrative actually appears within a Eucharistic Prayer. The other point that Bradshaw makes is that very few of those who do refer to an institution narrative actually quote directly from any of those found in the Gospels or in Paul.

Bradshaw then provides a very detailed discussion of the various scholarly treatments of the Didache, emphasizing the Jewish roots but refusing to draw any conclusions from the text for the origin or development of the Eucharist as such:

If the meal in the Didache were thought of simply as one of a number of different patterns that existed side-by-side in early Christianity, each being the practice belonging to a particular community or group of communities, then there would be no pressure to slot it into an especially early time frame. (2004, p. 32)

It is this same principle that is picked up in the following chapter on other early Christian ritual meals. Each of these – Paul’s account of the meal at Corinth, wineless Eucharists, the ‘breaking of bread’, etc. – exist, for Bradshaw, as alternative forms with no obvious or necessary connection between them. What is more, he concludes by suggesting that ‘a number of different combinations’ of bread, wine, water and other foodstuffs ‘might have existed in the first 250 years of Christianity’s history’ and not just the few examples that are represented within the remaining literature (2004, p. 60).

This takes Bradshaw to a discussion of Justin Martyr, which has often been seen as the traditional end point of whatever development the Eucharist may have undertaken in the first hundred years or so of its development. In Justin there is a rite with bread and wine, held in the morning and linked with the reading of scripture, a sermon and prayers of intercession. Bradshaw, therefore, uses a discussion of Justin’s accounts of the Eucharist to challenge accepted notions of the separation of the bread and wine from the rest of the meal, the issue of timing, the move from a sevenfold to a fourfold shape and the proposed link with a synagogue-type liturgy of the word. In much of this Bradshaw is actually challenging Dix’s theories rather than engaging with a wider range of possibilities, but he draws on a selection of authors and a significant amount of sociological style analysis to make his own points. In the following chapters, however, he tends to move back towards a more text-based and theological understanding of the development of the rite in the second, third and fourth centuries.

What can be seen in all these different approaches, therefore, along with many others that have not been mentioned in this survey but will find a place at the appropriate point in the following text, is that there are almost as many ways of understanding the origins of the Eucharist as there are scholars who write about it. There will never be a definitive answer to this question, but that does not mean that there are not new things to say, alternative ways of looking at the evidence, and new questions that can be asked from slightly different perspectives.

Principles underlying the current text

Anton Baumstark, in his study of Comparative Liturgy, sets out six laws for the development of liturgy (1958). Richardson in his further enquiry into Lietzmann’s Mass and the Lord’s Supper sets out six principles and probabilities for any satisfactory account of eucharistic origins (1979, p. 220). Paul Bradshaw, in the first edition of his work Search for the Origins of Christian Worship outlines ten principles for interpreting early Christian liturgical evidence (1992, pp. 63–78), although these were reduced to three warnings in the second edition (2002, pp. 17–20). Many of these principles or rules I happen to agree with, others I find extremely problematic. It would be very tempting, therefore, for me to lay out my own seven, eight or twelve principles on which the following text is based. In their place I want to set three parameters. These are not rules or principles that all those who study eucharistic origins should be expected to follow, they are self-imposed limits to my own work that enable me to make the following text more manageable and to provide a clearer perspective on what it is that I am doing and, perhaps more importantly, what it is that I am not doing.

The first parameter that I want to set is in relation to the kind of activity that I wish to discuss. Most, if not all, of the studies that have been discussed in this chapter talk throughout of the ‘Eucharist’, even when they are dealing with a series of meal practices that may not have been given that title by those who practised them. The more sophisticated do distinguish between that which they consider to be truly ‘eucharistic’ – that is, those activities that involved bread and wine, and/or a reference to the body and blood of Jesus – from other kinds of meals. As McGowan (2004) has clearly shown, however, such a distinction does not really work for much of the evidence that is available. When does a sharing of bread (with or without any further accompaniment) cease to be ‘eucharistic’? Others are very clear to distinguish between Eucharists proper and what has generally been termed the agape. Again the question of boundaries remains problematic. A significant number of the more recent accounts blur these boundaries completely and simply refer to all meals held within the early Christian communities as Eucharists, so following a standard position among biblical scholars to see any reference to eating or drinking in the New Testament as ‘eucharistic’. What interests me within the following study, however, is any activity that involves shared eating and drinking among early Christian communities. So far I would position myself with McGowan and those who follow him. Where I would want to differ, however, is that I do not want to presuppose that the communities concerned saw all these activities, or even the majority of them, as ‘eucharistic’, even if they did have such a concept to work with. Throughout the text, therefore, I will be careful to refrain from using the term ‘Eucharist’ in any way, unless it is clearly used by the evidence that I am considering – and then I will want to be very careful about how the word is interpreted – or by modern authors that I am engaging with. I will also do all that I can to prevent myself, and the reader of this text, from assuming that we know what ‘eucharistic’ means.

The second parameter is related to this, and focuses on the difference between action and meaning. Almost all the studies that have been discussed, even the most sociological, have been primarily concerned with the meaning that communal meals had for the early Christian community. Even Smith, who is interested in seeing the roots of the early Christian meals in the wider Graeco-Roman symposia, is using Douglas to develop what she describes as the ‘social code’ of the meal and hence bringing the discussion back round to one of meaning and even theology (Smith 2003). Meanings are, of course, important and a study of the development of imagery and ideas surrounding eating and drinking in the first 150 years of Christian existence could be very interesting. That, however, is not what this study is about. Having said that, I must also note that it is not going to be possible 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.