Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist. Martin D. Stringer
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,