Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist. Martin D. Stringer
11, is whether, if there was a common weekly meal, the source of any meat that might have been eaten at that meal was an issue.
If each household was providing their own food there may not have been a problem, but the question could, potentially, have been raised with some members asking others where they had acquired their meat. However, this is not stated as an issue, either in the account of the meal or, more importantly, at the time that Paul is discussing the eating of idol meat. The second of these points is significant. As Goulder comments, ‘so many problems get an airing in the Corinthian letters that it is hardly believable that there was trouble over the meat at the agape without our hearing of it’ (2001, p. 170). Paul talks in terms of members of the community being invited to the houses of unbelievers where potential idol meat was being served (10.27). If this were a concern in a weekly meal within the community then surely he would have said something about this as well. It is perfectly plausible, however, that the weekly meal did not contain meat on a regular basis. The poor at this time hardly ever ate meat and the richer members of the community would not have done so on a regular basis. Other evidence suggests that a meat-free communal meal, especially if it was a regular event, would not have been considered particularly unusual. Some broth and a few vegetables, or fruit and nuts with some bread, would have been perfectly acceptable (Smith 2003). I will come back to these issues in Chapter 4. For now, all I wish to note is that this discussion of meat offered to idols does not offer any further insight into the meal described in chapter 11.
Within the wider discussion of meat offered to idols, however, following on from an account of Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness, there are a number of references to bread and the cup (10.14–17). These have always tended to be interpreted, without much critical reflection, as having a eucharistic referent. At the very least they are associated with the account of the meal in chapter 11, and are used as evidence that a symbolic discourse on the bread and the cup as the body and blood of Christ was central to the Corinthian community at this time. This, in turn, is used to suggest that the meal, with the blessing of the cup and of bread, was a regular, and potentially weekly event within the community (Mazza 1995, pp. 71–2). Fee, however, emphasizes that the main theme of this passage is not the eating of bread or the sharing of the cup per se, but rather the question of idolatry (Fee 1987, pp. 441–91). Indirectly, Paul is emphasizing the continuity between Israel and the Corinthian community, and only in passing is there a reference to bread and the cup. A core passage is in verses 15–21 where Paul refers to the ‘cup of blessing’ and also to the ‘bread that we break’, but goes on to talk about ‘those who eat the sacrifices’ (the Israelites) as participating ‘in the altar’. Paul then extrapolates this to refer to the eating sacrifices offered to demons as participating with demons. Finally he tells the Corinthians that they cannot ‘have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons’ (10.21). Fee picks up the threefold structure of the rhetoric here and emphasizes the links between the sacrifices of the Israelites, the sacrifices to demons and the table fellowship of the Corinthians (Fee 1987, pp. 462–75). The Lord’s Supper is being used here to say something about eating meat sacrificed to idols and not the other way round. It is an argument that draws on the Corinthians’ own experience of the meal and it is not aimed at presenting any commentary on that meal in itself. Does this suggest, therefore, that the experience is so common, say weekly, that nothing more needs to be said?
The other point that is almost always made in relation to the phrases in verses 16–7 is that they have a ritual ring about them; they do not appear to be Paul’s own words. The suggestion is that he is quoting a liturgical formula. Many of those who follow this line go on to point out that the nearest equivalent of these formulas, particularly the phrase ‘the cup of blessing’, appear in relation to the Jewish celebration of the Passover (Bruce 1971, p. 94). Very little is known about how the Jews celebrated weekly meals or festivals at this time, and so the phrases actually relate to later Jewish texts on the Passover. If there was no account of the meal within 1 Corinthians, however, and if there had been no future development of the Eucharist, it is very possible that these particular phrases would have been read metaphorically and would probably have led scholars to see the letter as being framed within a Paschal context (Bruce 1971). Paul would have been seen as using images and metaphors from the Passover liturgy to make wider theological points. Do these phrases, therefore, necessarily have to be seen as relating to a weekly meal?
There is a certain amount of other circumstantial evidence that points to a Paschal context for the letter, not least the reference to the place of unleavened bread at the feast and Jesus as the Paschal sacrifice (5.6–8), the reference to Jesus’ resurrection as the ‘first fruits’ (15.20) and the fact that towards the end Paul comments that he intends to wait in Ephesus until Pentecost (16.8) (Bruce 1971, p. 145). The imagery and ‘typology’ of 10.1–13 has also been associated with the period surrounding the Passover (Carrington 1952, p. 42; Bruce 1971, p. 90). The comment at 16.8 would suggest that Paul is writing between Passover and Pentecost. If this is the case then he would have ‘celebrated’ Passover in Ephesus fairly recently and many of the images and practices associated with the Passover celebrations would have been fresh in his mind (Shepherd 1960, p. 22). It is not possible to know, of course, how Paul would have celebrated Passover. Nor is it possible to know in detail how any Jew of this time might have celebrated Passover, especially in the Diaspora. Even whether Paul, in his rejection of many Jewish laws and practices, would have celebrated Passover at all has to be guessed at. At one level this does not matter, and I will come back to the detail of the question in the next chapter. Paul, having been brought up as a devout Jew, and having been a Pharisee for much of his adult life, would have celebrated the Passover regularly before his conversion, and even if he did not continue to do so as a Christian, the way in which he conceived of time would still have been firmly rooted in the Jewish calendar, so the time of year, of itself, would have brought to mind Paschal imagery and practices, even if he was not celebrating them himself. I would want to suggest, however, that Paul probably had celebrated some form of Christian Passover with the community in Ephesus, and what is more, that the meal he refers to in 1 Corinthians was probably a Paschal meal celebrated by the community in Corinth.
Obviously this cannot be proved. Conzelmann, among others, goes out of his way to stress that, unlike Mark and the other Synoptic Gospels, Paul makes no reference to the Passover in his account of the Last Supper (1975, p. 197). However, if it were the case that the meal in question were a Paschal meal, then this would explain, first, the range of Paschal imagery throughout the letter, second, the particular association of the meal with the account of the Last Supper, which, I will argue in the following chapter, may have formed a part of a Christian Passover narrative that Paul may have heard once again in Ephesus, and third, it would explain the eschatological thinking that Paul associates with the meal, as for the Christians the Passover would have been associated with the death and resurrection of Christ rather than, or perhaps as well as, the liberation of the Jews from Egypt (Bruce 1971, pp. 113–14; Segal 1984). What is more, it may explain why the Corinthian community, many of whom were non-Jews, had such difficulties engaging with the meal. They did not really know how to celebrate it, and hence created such difficulties for themselves, with each person or household providing their own food and some even going without. It may also explain why those who were Jews were so offended by this behaviour and reported it to Paul. This does, at the very least, provide a plausible reading of the information contained within the letter.
The rest of Paul’s letters
This explanation would also answer one other very puzzling element of Paul’s other writings. If the meal, with its emphasis on bread and the cup, and its link in some way with the narrative of the Last Supper, was a regular, even weekly event that Paul had established in all the communities he founded and that he also shared in each week wherever he happened to be based (although probably not in prison or while travelling), then why is it that the only reference to it is in the first letter to the Corinthians? Not only does 1 Corinthians provide the only account of what happened at this meal (although it does not even do that), it is also the only direct reference to any kind of communal meal within the whole of Paul’s output (whether that is measured by the traditional attributions or those of recent scholarship). Paul does mention baptism on more than one occasion, and makes a big play of the different ways of understanding baptism and the role it plays within the community and in the lives of individual Christians