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Did Jesus institute the eucharist at the Last Supper?

The answer to the question posed in my title might seem obvious: ‘Of course he did; we have the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels to prove it.’ But as you may well have guessed already, I do not think it is as simple as that. Otherwise, this would turn out to be a very short chapter.¹

The Fourth Gospel

Let us start with St John’s Gospel, where there is no account of the institution of the eucharist within the narrative of the Last Supper. Commentators usually say that John has deliberately missed it out and for his own reasons replaced it with the account of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. But that is to assume that the Evangelist – and every Christian of the time – knew that the account of the institution of the eucharist really did belong with the Last Supper, and he chose not to put it there. But that is precisely to beg the question. We do not actually know whether anyone in the first century other than the writers of the Synoptic Gospels and St Paul thought it took place on the night before Jesus died – and even St Paul does not say that occasion was a Passover meal as the others do. So if we suppose for the sake of argument that the writer of the Fourth Gospel did not know of a tradition that Jesus said that bread and wine were his body and blood at the Last Supper, is there anywhere else in that Gospel that might look like an institution narrative?

What about chapter 6? Here we have the account of the feeding of the five thousand by Jesus, in which twelve baskets are filled with the leftovers from five barley loaves. And then, referring back to it on the following day, Jesus says that it was not Moses who gave them the bread from heaven; ‘my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’ (John 6.32–3). And he goes on to say, ‘I am the bread of life . . . I am the living bread that came down from heaven . . . and the bread that I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh’ (John 6.48, 51). Several scholars have already suggested that this latter statement is John’s version of the saying over the bread at the Last Supper,² and some have claimed that this form could in one way at least be closer to the original, as neither Hebrew nor Aramaic have a word for ‘body’ as we understand the term, and so what Jesus would have said at the Last Supper would have been the Aramaic equivalent of ‘This is my flesh’.³

There is, however, a difference of opinion among scholars as to whether what follows (and some would say even verse 51c itself) is an integral part of the material or a subsequent interpolation, either by the original author or by a later redactor.⁴ This section includes the saying, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in you . . .’ (John 6.53). Many who would excise these verses would do so on the ground that the earlier sayings are sapiential in nature, while the later verses have a more decidedly sacramental character. But there is another reason why at least part of this later material may be an addition to the original core. While the concept of eating flesh might have been difficult for a Jew to comprehend, the concept of drinking blood would have been an abomination. Thus it seems more likely that this part of the discourse would have been appended later, in a Gentile environment, and would not have formed part of the earlier Jewish stratum.

It seems possible, therefore, that the writer of the Fourth Gospel knew of a primitive tradition in which Jesus associated bread with his flesh, and this in the context of a feeding miracle rather than the Last Supper. But did any other early Christians know of such a tradition, or is it a peculiarity of this Gospel? Let us take a look.

The Didache

The Didache or ‘Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’ is commonly thought to be a very early Christian text, perhaps as old as the canonical Gospels themselves. Chapters 9 and 10 contain what appear to be prayers for use at a eucharistic meal, accompanied by brief directions.⁵ This meal includes a cup (apparently of wine rather than water,⁶ as the accompanying prayer refers to ‘the holy vine of David’) as well as bread. The bread and wine are not described here as being either the body and blood of Christ or the flesh and blood of Christ but simply as spiritual food and drink, and so offer us little help in this regard. It is to be noted, however, that this material does not associate the meal with the Last Supper or with Jesus’ death in any way. Instead, the prayers speak of Jesus as bringing life, knowledge, and eternal life – themes that are also characteristic of the Fourth Gospel.⁷ And to this we may add that Chapter 9 also uses the word ‘fragment’ when speaking of the bread rather than the normal Greek word for a loaf – and fragments are explicitly mentioned in the various feeding stories in the Gospels but not in the Last Supper narratives. Could it be that behind the text in the Didache is a remembrance of spiritual food and drink being associated with one of those stories? That suggestion may not be very convincing on its own, but let us go on to other early Christian writers.

Ignatius of Antioch

When Ignatius of Antioch mentions the eucharist, writing in the early second century, it is Christ’s flesh that he speaks of and not his body. He says, ‘Take care, therefore, to have one eucharist, for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup for union in his blood’ (Philadelphians 4). Notice that, while he includes a cup along with the reference to flesh, he does not describe the contents (which may have been wine or water – he is not explicit about this) directly as blood. In another letter he also criticizes some because ‘they abstain from eucharist and prayer, because they do not confess the eucharist to be flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, which the Father by his goodness raised up’ (Smyrnaeans 7.1). His choice of the word ‘flesh’ rather than ‘body’ suggests an affinity with the eucharistic tradition behind the Fourth Gospel rather than that of the Synoptics or Paul, which he shows no sign of knowing.

Justin Martyr

Similar language is also used by Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century: ‘not as common bread or common drink do we receive these things; but just as our Saviour Jesus Christ, being incarnate through [the] word of God, took both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too we have been taught that the food over which thanks have been given through [a] word of prayer which is from him, from which our blood and flesh are fed by transformation, is both the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus’ (First Apology 66.2). Here Justin is more explicit in his association of the contents of the cup with the blood of Jesus than was Ignatius, but shares the same tradition, reflected in the Fourth Gospel, that remembered Jesus speaking about his flesh rather than body.

Justin, however, is the first writer outside the New Testament to reveal knowledge of another tradition that did speak about body and blood. For, in addition to the words I have just cited, he goes on to say: ‘the apostles in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have handed down what was commanded them: that Jesus having taken bread, having given thanks, said, “Do this in my remembrance; this is my body”; and similarly having taken the cup and having given thanks, said, “This is my blood”; and gave to them alone’ (First Apology 66.3). Justin here claims to be quoting from ‘the Gospels’, by which it might seem that he was familiar with the Synoptic texts themselves. But none of them record as the words of Jesus, ‘Do this in my remembrance; this is my body’ – at least not in that order; and the only one of them to contain the words ‘Do this in my remembrance’ at all is the Gospel of Luke, and then only in the manuscripts that contain the longer version of the Last Supper narrative, and they do not record Jesus’ words over the cup as ‘This is my blood’, but as ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood . . .’ Yet in the one place in his writings where it is certain that Justin is quoting Luke’s Gospel, it is the so-called Western Text that he knows, the manuscript tradition that contains the shorter version of the institution narrative lacking the command to ‘do this in my remembrance’.⁸ So it is almost certainly not from the Gospels as known to us that Justin has actually drawn this saying, but from some other source, most likely a collection of sayings of Jesus that had these words in a somewhat different form. This would help explain why so many of the other features of the Synoptic Last Supper narrative fail to make an appearance in Justin’s writings. There is, for example, no mention of the words having been said on the night before he died, or of any of the interpretative phrases that form part of the sayings in the New Testament versions, such as ‘body given for you’ or ‘blood poured out for you’.

Perhaps even more significant than these omissions is that there is no reference to the action of the breaking of the bread, which is recorded in all of the Synoptic texts and in Paul’s account of the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11. Not only is this missing from Justin’s recollection of Jesus here but it is also not explicitly mentioned in Justin’s two accounts of actual Christian eucharistic practice in this same section of his work, although it can be said to be implied there (First Apology 65, 67). Now the one place in the New Testament where breaking is not mentioned in relation to Jesus giving thanks over bread is in the account of the miraculous feeding of the multitude with loaves and fishes in John 6. Could it be that the tradition which Justin knows links Jesus’ saying with a version of that story rather than the Last Supper? There is also another similarity between that story and Justin’s vocabulary. When Justin recalls that Jesus ‘similarly’ took the cup, the Greek word that he uses is not homoios, found in the Last Supper accounts of Luke and Paul, but hosautos, used in John 6.11 of Jesus ‘similarly’ taking the fish.⁹ Admittedly, this variation could be just a coincidence, but the omission of a reference to breaking the bread looks more significant, especially when we add to it the fact that Irenaeus, writing later in the second century, appears to have been familiar with a similar tradition.

Irenaeus

Like Justin, Irenaeus makes no mention of the context of the eucharistic sayings when he quotes them, neither of the Last Supper nor of the impending passion. He simply says: ‘He took that created thing, bread, and gave thanks, saying, “This is my body.” And the cup likewise, which is part of that creation to which we belong, he declared his blood . . .’ (Adversus haereses 4.17.5). Not only, like Justin, does his version of the sayings lack any of the interpretative phrases attached to them in the New Testament accounts, but there is again no mention of the breaking of the bread. True, Irenaeus shows no knowledge of the use of ‘flesh’ rather than ‘body’, but the close parallels between his account of Jesus’ words and Justin’s suggest that both are drawing on a catechetical tradition as to the origin of the eucharist that has come down independently of the Gospel texts themselves and that did not link it with the narrative of the Last Supper.

Unlike Justin, however, Irenaeus is definitely also familiar with at least one of the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper themselves, as he quotes part of the Matthean version elsewhere in the same work.¹⁰ Nevertheless, it is upon its eschatological statement about drinking in the kingdom that he comments, passing over in silence the reference to the ‘blood of the new covenant, which will be poured out for many for forgiveness of sins’ and not making any explicit connection to the eucharist. Indeed, although at one point in his writing Irenaeus does move from mention of redemption with the blood of the Lord to the cup of the eucharist as being communion in his blood,¹¹ he does not develop the link further. Like Justin, he sees the eucharistic body and blood of Jesus primarily in terms of nourishment for human flesh, and so giving it the hope of resurrection to eternal life, rather than as that which was sacrificed for human salvation. Thus he says: ‘as the bread, which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread but the eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection to eternity’ (Adversus haereses 4.18.5). And later he goes on to speak of our flesh being ‘nourished from the body and blood of the Lord’ and ‘nourished by the cup which is his blood, and receives increase from the bread which is his body’ (5.2.3).

North Africa: Tertullian and Cyprian

It is therefore not until we get to Tertullian in North Africa at the end of the second century that we find a Christian writer outside the New Testament who locates Jesus’ words in their paschal context and refers to the covenant, even if Tertullian does not mention either giving thanks or breaking the bread. He says: ‘Having taken bread and given it to the disciples, he made it his body by saying, “This is my body” . . . Similarly, when mentioning the cup and making the covenant to be sealed by his blood, he affirms the reality of his body’ (Adversus Marcionem 4.40.3).

His fellow countryman Cyprian in the middle of the third century goes further and quotes two of the New Testament accounts of the Last Supper in one of his letters. He first cites part of the Matthean version: ‘For, on the eve of his passion, taking the cup, he blessed, and gave (it) to his disciples, saying, “Drink of this, all [of you]; for this is the blood of the covenant, which will be poured out for many for forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I shall drink new wine with you in my Father’s kingdom.”’¹² A little later in the same letter, Cyprian quotes Paul’s account of the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11. ‘The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and gave thanks, and broke it, and said, “This is my body, which shall be given for you: do this in my remembrance.” In the same way also after supper, he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood: do this, as often as you drink it, in my remembrance.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.’¹³

Not only does Cyprian quote these texts in full, but the whole basis of the argument in the letter in which they are cited is that Christians are obliged to imitate Jesus when they celebrate the eucharist, and do exactly what he did at the Last Supper. This includes using wine and water mixed together and not just water alone, as some of his contemporaries were doing. Naturally this argument runs into some difficulties when it comes to the hour of celebration, for Cyprian’s church clearly has the eucharist in the morning and not the evening, but he does his best: ‘It was fitting for Christ to offer about the evening of the day, so that the very hour of sacrifice might show the setting and evening of the world, as it is written in Exodus, “And all the people of the synagogue of the children of Israel shall kill it in the evening”; and again in the Psalms, “the lifting up of my hands [as] an evening sacrifice”. But we celebrate the resurrection of the Lord in the morning’ (Epistula 63.16).

There appear to be two main reasons why Cyprian drew on the New Testament texts in this way when his predecessors had not. First, those texts were now coming to be regarded not merely as apostolic writings but as authoritative Scripture, which therefore tended to override whatever might be contained in other written or oral traditions. Second, Cyprian’s church faced a period of persecution, when some of its members might be required to offer the sacrifice of their lives. In this pastoral context, therefore, it was more important than ever to link the celebration of the eucharistic rite with Jesus’ own sacrificial oblation of his body and blood: ‘For if Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, is himself the high priest of God the Father and first offered himself as a sacrifice to the Father, and commanded this to be done in his remembrance, then that priest truly functions in the place of Christ who imitates what Christ did and then offers a true and full sacrifice in the church to God the Father, if he thus proceeds to offer according to what he sees Christ himself to have offered.’¹⁴

Continuing independent traditions?

On the basis of this admittedly limited evidence, it would appear that it was not until the third century that the New Testament texts came to dominate what was thought and said by Christians about the institution of the eucharist. Yet even after that, liturgical formulae did not always conform their wording of the narrative of the Last Supper precisely to what was recorded in those venerable documents, but variants continue to flourish.

Thus, the institution narrative in the eucharistic prayer of the so-called Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus¹⁵ begins by paralleling the form in Justin Martyr (‘taking bread, giving thanks to you, he said’), with its omission of the conjunction ‘and’ and with its lack of any explicit reference to the supper or to breaking the bread. But then, when it cites the words of Jesus himself, it has ‘Take, eat, this is my body that will be broken for you’ – a mixture of those found in Matthew (‘Take, eat, this is my body’) and those in some manuscripts of 1 Corinthians (‘This is my body that is broken for you’), but without the latter’s command to repeat the action. The use of the future tense, ‘will be broken’, is unusual in early Christian citations of the words of Jesus, although we have noted that ‘will be given up for you’ is found in Cyprian’s quotation of 1 Corinthians 11.24, and ‘will be broken’ also appears again in the institution narrative of the eucharistic prayer quoted by Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century (De sacramentis 4.21). The words over the cup (‘This is my blood that is shed for you. When you do this, you do my remembrance’) offer no precise parallel with any one of the canonical accounts, although ‘that is shed for you’ corresponds to what is found in the longer text of Luke, and the final command echoes 1 Corinthians 11.25. It should also be noted that the account lacks any statement that Jesus then distributed the bread and wine to his disciples.

On the other hand, the eucharistic prayer in the mid-fourth-century Sacramentary of Sarapion¹⁶ does mention the night when Jesus was betrayed, the supper, and also the breaking of the bread, although strangely omits any reference to Jesus ‘blessing’ or ‘giving thanks’. The narrative appears to be chiefly a combination of components from 1 Corinthians 11 and Matthew’s version, with words and phrases from the bread unit copied into the cup unit, and vice versa, so as to increase the parallelism of the two. However, as one construction that does not appear verbatim in any of the New Testament versions also turns up in some other earlier Christian writings, this suggests that at least part of it may again be drawn from an older independent tradition rather than having simply been manufactured out of the New Testament material. The words over the cup, ‘Take drink . . .’, a form that is found in none of the New Testament versions, might be thought to be simply an attempt to parallel the Matthean version of the words over the bread, ‘Take, eat, this is my body’. But because the same words are also found in the anonymous treatise In Sanctum Pascha, previously regarded as the work of Hippolytus but now thought to date from the second century,¹⁷ in writings of Origen in the third century before he went to Caesarea (Commentarius in Evangelium Ioannis 32.24; Homiliae in Jeremiam 12), in Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century (Demonstratio evangelica 8.1.28), and the Mystagogical Catecheses attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem (4.1), sources that are both geographically and temporally so disparate, this may well be yet another form of an independent sayings tradition.

Everything that we have examined so far would seem to point towards the conclusion that it was not the New Testament accounts of the Last Supper that originally shaped what Christians thought and said about Jesus’ words concerning his flesh and blood or body and blood, nor even an oral tradition that paralleled those written accounts, but a quite independent tradition or traditions. This strand did not at first link Jesus’ sayings specifically with the night before he died or the Last Supper, nor did it include the sort of interpretative phrases that we find in the New Testament versions, such as ‘body given for you’ or ‘blood poured out for you’, that relate them to his sacrificial death. And even when the New Testament did begin to be regarded as authoritative Scripture, it did not manage completely to efface some elements in these earlier independent catechetical versions from liturgical usage, but they continue to find a place in a number of eucharistic prayers.

This claim, however, may still sound improbable. Granted that other traditions may have existed prior to the books that came to make up the New Testament being written, nevertheless those books were widely known to Christians long before the third century. Not every one of them may have been current in every region of the ancient Christian world, but one or other of the written accounts of the Last Supper would surely have been known and would have affected how the story was told, would it not? An independent tradition of eucharistic sayings could surely not have survived and ignored the association of the words over bread and cup with Christ’s sacrificial death that is made both in the Synoptic Gospels and in 1 Corinthians as soon as these writings began to be disseminated.

That may seem a likely scenario, but is not perhaps exactly how things were in early Christianity. For instance, Paul’s letter to the Romans was obviously widely circulated and well known to Christians in many places, and so one might expect that the baptismal theology of chapter 6, of dying and rising with Christ, would have played a significant part in shaping the language and thought about the meaning of baptism in the early centuries. But that is not the case, and a baptismal theology of new birth, generally related to what we find in John 3, appears to have dominated the scene instead, as much in the West as in the East.¹⁸ In the light of this, it perhaps appears less remarkable that much Christian thinking about eucharistic presence in the first and second centuries also continued to follow what might be described as Johannine rather than Synoptic or Pauline paths. In this regard we may also note that pictorial representations of the eucharist found in the Roman catacombs allude to the feeding miracles of Jesus and not to the Last Supper.¹⁹

The New Testament accounts

In any case, the Last Supper version of the eucharistic sayings of Jesus may not have been as widespread or dominant even in first-century Christianity as the existence of four accounts of it in the New Testament books may lead us to suppose. Obviously the tradition that Jesus spoke these words on the night that he was betrayed was known to Paul when he wrote his first letter to the Corinthian Christians some twenty years after the death of Jesus, as he quotes them in the letter, with the interpretative phrases that relate them to that death and with the command to repeat the action in remembrance of Jesus (11.23–6). He does not, however, state specifically that the supper was a Passover meal. The narrative, he claims, he ‘received from the Lord’. New Testament scholars debate just what Paul means on the occasions when he says that certain traditions come from the Lord.²⁰ He cannot mean directly from the earthly Jesus, as he never knew him. The only possibilities, therefore, seem to be either from a Christian source that he believes to have preserved a trustworthy version of what Jesus actually said and did, or alternatively by some sort of direct revelation. But in either case we have no reason to jump to the conclusion that it was a universal or well-known tradition within early Christianity. Indeed, his Corinthian correspondents do not seem to be very familiar with it and need reminding, even though Paul says he had already told them it previously.

But what about the Synoptic Gospel accounts? Does not the fact that Jesus’ words are recorded in all three Gospels as having been uttered at the Last Supper show that this tradition was widespread in the first century? Let us take a closer look. New Testament scholars have long recognized that there is what has been called a ‘double strand’ within these Last Supper narratives: on the one hand, an eschatological focus, represented chiefly by the statement, ‘I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine . . .’, in the three Gospel texts, and on the other hand, the words over the bread and cup relating them to Jesus’ body and blood. While these scholars might disagree as to whether or not these words go back to the historical Last Supper, they generally share a consensus that they would already have been combined with the eschatological theme in the eucharistic practice of the Palestinian Christian communities prior to Pauline influence.²¹ However, over twenty years ago the French scholar Xavier Léon-Dufour, in a book to which too little attention has been paid, proposed that the two strands were transmitted through two distinct literary genres and he implied that their combination was actually the work of the evangelists themselves, although he did not develop the consequences of this latter thesis.²² He was not the first to suggest that the eucharistic sayings of Jesus had been interpolated into an earlier narrative of Jesus’ last Passover meal with his disciples,²³ but was the first to offer a plausible explanation for this phenomenon.

If we examine the Synoptic texts themselves, we can easily see some signs of the division to which Léon-Dufour and others have pointed. In Mark’s account, in chapter 14, there is the repetition of the phrase ‘as they were eating’ in verses 18 and 22, which might be thought to suggest a combination of two separate beginnings of a narrative. Equally odd in this text is the fact that the disciples are said to have drunk from the cup before Jesus says the words that interpret its meaning (14.23–4). And if we turn to Luke’s narrative, we find another oddity, at least if we accept the longer version of the text as authentic: not only are two cups mentioned, one before and one after supper (22.17, 20), but also there is the apparently contradictory situation of Jesus declaring in verse 18 that he will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine and then in verse 20 of his doing so.

So, then, let us follow the lead suggested by Léon-Dufour and attempt to untangle the two strands. If we separate the eucharistic sayings and the material in which they are embedded from the rest of the Last Supper narratives, what we have left are accounts of a Passover meal containing eschatological statements by Jesus that are complete in themselves, with no signs of dislocation, as follows (the eucharistic sayings strand being indicated by the use of italics and the longer version of Luke by square brackets):

MARK 14

¹⁷And when it was evening, he came with the twelve. ¹⁸And as they were at table eating, Jesus said, ‘Truly, I say to you that one of you will betray me, one eating with me.’ ¹⁹They began to be sorrowful and to say to him one by one, ‘Is it I?’ ²⁰He said to them, ‘(It is) one of the twelve, one dipping with me in the dish. ²¹For the Son of man goes as it is written concerning him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed. (It would have been) good for him if that man had not been born.’ ²²And as they were eating, having taken bread, having blessed, he broke (it) and gave (it) to them and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’ ²³And having taken a cup, having given thanks, he gave (it) to them, and they all drank from it. ²⁴And he said to them, ‘This is my blood of the [new] covenant, which (is) poured out for many. ²⁵Truly, I say to you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’

LUKE 22

¹⁴And when the hour came, he sat at table, and the apostles with him. ¹⁵And he said to them, ‘With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, ¹⁶for I say to you, I shall not/never again eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’ ¹⁷And having accepted a cup, having given thanks, he said, ‘Take this, and share it among you; ¹⁸for I say to you, I shall not drink from now on from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.’ ¹⁹And having taken bread, having given thanks, he broke (it) and gave (it) to them, saying, ‘This is my body [which (is) given for you. Do this in my remembrance.’ ²⁰And the cup likewise after the supper, saying, ‘This cup (is) the new covenant in my blood, which (is) poured out for you]. ²¹But behold the hand of the one betraying me (is) with me on the table. For the Son of man goes according to what has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed.’ ²²And they began to question one another, which of them . . .

Mark and Luke may have variations in the order in which the various sayings are arranged, but they are telling basically the same story. Mark has the conversation about betrayal first, while Luke begins with a statement by Jesus about not eating of the Passover again. Both then follow with Jesus taking a cup and saying he will also not drink of the cup again, and Luke has the conversation about betrayal afterwards. Thus the focus of these Supper narratives is on eschatology and upon impending betrayal. They make total sense without the body and blood sayings, and those sayings therefore look like secondary insertions.

In the case of Mark’s version, what seems to have happened is that the Evangelist has worked the eucharistic sayings material into this pre-existent narrative where he could best fit it. He thus inserted the bread saying unit immediately after the discussion on betrayal, and the blood saying after the existing reference to the cup. This has resulted, as I said earlier, in the repetition of a beginning, ‘as they were eating’, and of the cup being shared before the interpretative words are spoken. Matthew has tried to solve this difficulty in his version by applying an editorial hand to Mark’s text and converting the narrative statement, ‘they all drank of it’, into the command, ‘Drink of it, all’ (26.27–8).

Luke appears to have done something slightly different from Mark in combining the two sets of material. But here, things get somewhat complicated because of the existence of two quite different manuscript traditions of Luke’s narrative, a shorter and a longer one.²⁴ Since either of these might be the original one, we need to be able to account for the combination in both cases. If we assume first that the longer one is the original, then Luke appears to have acquired a separate version of the sayings narrative from Mark, as there are several differences between the two: Luke has ‘given thanks’ where Mark has ‘blessed’; Luke does not have ‘Take’ but does add ‘which is given for you. Do this in my remembrance’ to the saying, ‘This is my body’; and while Mark has, ‘This is my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for many’, as the words over the cup, Luke has the variant, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you.’ Luke also treats the material differently, and appears simply to have dropped the sayings narrative into the eschatological Last Supper as a single block, and it is this that has produced the two cups and the apparently contradictory situation of Jesus declaring in verse 18 that he will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine and then in verse 20 of his doing so.

On the other hand, the shorter version of Luke’s text may be the original, with the longer being an expansion by a later hand. This has a shorter saying over the bread, and lacks entirely the eucharistic saying over the cup. Although in the course of the twentieth century the weight of scholarly opinion has swung in favour of regarding the longer form as authentic, chiefly because of the strong manuscript support for it, it seems to me more likely that the shorter is what the Evangelist wrote, because otherwise there appears to be no good reason for the shorter ever to have existed at all. Who would have wanted to curtail the longer account? Moreover, while it was once commonly thought that it would have been anomalous for anyone to have composed a Last Supper account that placed cup first and bread second, because that would have contradicted the order followed in early Christian liturgical practice, there is now a growing body of opinion which believes that just such an order was not unknown among the earliest Christian practices.²⁵ If this were so, then it is easy to see how the Evangelist, with his eschatological narrative already containing a mention of the paschal meal and its cup with a saying over it, might have read Mark’s version and thought that he ought also to include the saying over the bread in his account, and so simply slipped in the saying copied from Mark, changing the verb ‘bless’ to the more familiar ‘give thanks’ as he did so.²⁶

Incidentally, this explanation also provides a solution to two perceived problems with the received text. First, some scholars have claimed that the Last Supper cannot have been a Passover meal because unleavened bread (azuma) would have been used on that occasion and not ordinary bread (artos). Against this, Joachim Jeremias argued strongly that the latter word could also be used for unleavened bread.²⁷ However, if the sayings were in truth a later interpolation into the narrative, no doubts can be cast on the Last Supper having been a Passover meal on the grounds of the choice of word. Second, there is the unusual ‘mixed’ usage of ‘bless’ over the bread but ‘give thanks’ over the cup that we find in Mark and Matthew. In spite of a persisting misconception among many New Testament scholars that these verbs are merely synonyms that might be employed interchangeably, they actually refer to two quite different Jewish liturgical constructions.²⁸ One might well have expected that a tradition that employed ‘bless’ over the bread would have done the same over the cup, just as the Lukan and Pauline versions use ‘thank’ for both. However, if Mark were grafting his sayings material on to a source where ‘thank’ was already in use for the eschatological saying over the cup, it would account for his retaining that verb in relation to the new cup saying that he added, while at the same time inserting the full unit concerning the bread from a source that had used the verb ‘bless’ for both.

In other words, according to this scenario, we do not really have four independent witnesses in the New Testament to the Last Supper tradition as containing the sayings of Jesus about body and blood. We have one witness, Paul, to a tradition that Mark also hears about, though it is not in his core narrative of the passion, and so he adds it rather clumsily, and it is then copied, to varying degrees, by Matthew and Luke. This suggests that, far from the two strands of the tradition having been integrated at a very early stage, there were Christian communities in the second half of the first century that still did not connect the tradition of the sayings of Jesus about his body and blood over bread and cup directly with a Passover meal at which he made an eschatological statement, nor even with the night before he died.

The emergence of the eucharist

How, then, do I think that the eucharistic sayings of Jesus developed and the early Christian eucharistic practices emerged? I believe that the regular sharing of food was fundamental to the common life of the first Christian communities, as it apparently had been to Jesus’ own mission. At these meals they would have experienced an eschatological anticipation of God’s kingdom, one of the primary marks of which was that the hungry are fed and many come from East and West to feast (Matthew 8.11; Luke 13.29), and they would have responded by calling upon Jesus to return, crying Marana tha (1 Corinthians 16.22; Didache 10.6; Revelation 22.20). They would have recalled stories of Jesus eating – not just with his disciples, but scandalously with tax-collectors and sinners. They would have recollected that he had miraculously fed large multitudes with small quantities of food. And they would have remembered that he had at least once, perhaps in relation to one of these feeding miracles, associated bread with his own flesh. At least some communities of impoverished Christians, whose staple food would have been bread and little else and whose meals generally did not include wine, came to associate what they called the breaking of bread²⁹ with feeding on the flesh of Jesus. In other cases, where wealthy members of the local congregation would entertain their brothers and sisters in the faith to a more substantial supper in their homes each week, either on the eve of the Sabbath or at its conclusion, the bread and wine of the meal might have been thought of as simply ‘spiritual food and drink’ (as in the Didache), or as the flesh and blood of Jesus, although in some Greek-speaking circles the expression ‘body and blood’ came to be preferred. In neither case, because they did not associate what they were doing specifically with the Last Supper or with the annual Passover meal, did they apparently experience any qualms about doing it much more often than once a year or feel the necessity to adhere strictly to the order of that meal in their own practices.

Someone, however, possibly even St Paul himself, did begin to associate the sayings of Jesus with the supper that took place on the night before he died, and interpreted them as referring to the sacrifice of his body and blood and to the new covenant that would be made through his death. This interpretation had some influence within the churches founded by Paul and possibly beyond. It certainly reached the author of Mark’s Gospel, who inserted a version of the sayings into his already existing supper narrative, perhaps because he was compiling his account of Jesus in Rome, where the Christians were particularly subject to sporadic persecution and so the association of their own spiritual meals with the sacrificed body and blood of their Saviour would have been especially encouraging to believers facing possible martyrdom themselves, however novel to them was this juxtaposition of the two traditions. But this combination does not otherwise seem to have been widely known in early Christianity. It was only much later, as the New Testament books gained currency and authority, that it began to shape both the catechesis and the liturgy of the churches, and to shift the focus of eucharistic thought from feeding to sacrifice.

Does any of this matter? Is it important whether the ultimate roots of Jesus’ sayings may lie in the life-giving feeding of those who were hungry rather than in primary association with his imminent death? Did not that sacrificial death also come to be viewed by Christians as life-giving, and therefore to an equal degree as spiritually nourishing? Was anything really lost? I think so. While I believe it was, and is, perfectly legitimate for Christians to interpret Jesus’ sayings in relation to his death, whenever and wherever they may have first been uttered, yet I believe a valuable balanced insight was lost by an excessive focus on the power of his sacrificed body and blood and a consequent diminishing of the value of his living and nourishing flesh and blood. In particular, it led in the course of time to a decline in the reception of communion, as that came to be seen as less important for believers than the offering of the eucharistic sacrifice – to a disproportionate emphasis, if you like, on altar rather than on table.

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  ¹  Some of the material in this chapter has already appeared in a different form in my book, Eucharistic Origins (SPCK, London/Oxford University Press, New York 2004), to which the reader is referred for further details on a number of points.

  ²  The earliest to suggest this seems to have been J. H. Bernard, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to John, International Critical Commentary 29 (T & T Clark, Edinburgh 1928), pp. [clxx–clxxi]; see also Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, i–xii, Anchor Bible Commentary (Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1966), p. 285: ‘it is possible that we have preserved in vi 51 the Johannine form of the words of institution’.

  ³  See, for example, Brown, The Gospel According to John, i–xii, p. 285.

  ⁴  For a summary of the debate, see Francis J. Moloney, The Johannine Son of Man (2nd edn, Libreria Ateneo Salesiano, Rome 1978), pp. 93ff.

  ⁵  For the Greek text and an English translation, see Kurt Niederwimmer, The Didache: A Commentary (Fortress Press, Minneapolis 1998), pp. 139–67. For the debate about the nature of the meal described in these particular chapters, see Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, ch. 2; and also below, pp. 39–44.

  ⁶  On early eucharistic practices where water was used rather than wine, see Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, pp. 51–5.

  ⁷  See Johannes Betz, ‘The Eucharist in the Didache’, in Jonathan A. Draper (ed.), The Didache in Modern Research (Brill, Leiden/New York 1996), pp. 244–75.

  ⁸  See Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (SCM Press, London 1990), pp. 360–402, esp. p. 365.

  ⁹  Justin also uses this same link word in reference to the bread and cup of the eucharist in his Dialogue with Trypho 41.3.

¹⁰  ‘When he had given thanks over the cup, and had drunk of it, and given it to the disciples, he said to them: “Drink of it, all [of you]: this is my blood of the new covenant, which will be poured out for many for forgiveness of sins. But I tell you, I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of this vine until that day when I will drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom”’ (Adversus haereses 5.33.1). We may note the use of the future tense here ‘which will be poured out’, a reading which recurs in a number of other renderings of the Matthean narrative, but also the description of Jesus drinking before giving the cup to the disciples or saying the words, something not otherwise found in Matthew.

¹¹  ‘Now if this flesh is not saved, neither did the Lord redeem us with his blood, nor is the cup of the eucharist communion in his blood, nor is the bread which we break communion in his body’ (Adversus haereses 5.2.2).

¹²  Epistula 63.9. There are two interesting variants here from the text of the Gospel as it is generally known to us. He uses the verb ‘bless’ over the cup instead of ‘give thanks’, a variant that also turns up in the Roman Canon of the Mass, and also the future tense ‘which will be poured out for you’, instead of the present tense. This second variant also occurs in Irenaeus’ citation of this passage and in what is known as the Old Latin translation of the Gospel.

¹³  Epistula 63.10. Here Cyprian has another variant, using the future in connection with the bread, ‘which will be given up (tradetur) for you’, against the usual text which has simply ‘which is for you’.

¹⁴  Epistula 63.14. See further Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, pp. 110–12.

¹⁵  See Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2002), pp. 37–48, and on the critical questions surrounding this church order also below, pp. 45–6.

¹⁶  See Maxwell E. Johnson, The Prayers of Sarapion of Thmuis: A Literary, Liturgical, and Theological Analysis, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 249 (Pontifico Istituto Orientale, Rome 1995), pp. 219–33.

¹⁷  Text in Pierre Nautin (ed.), Homélies pascales I, Sources chrétiennes 27 (Éditions du Cerf, Paris 1950), no. 49.

¹⁸  See Maxwell E. Johnson, ‘Baptism as “New Birth Ex Aqua et Spiritu”: A Preliminary Investigation of Western Liturgical Sources’, in Robert F. Taft and Gabriele Winkler (eds), Comparative Liturgy Fifty Years after Anton Baumstark, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 265 (Pontifico Istituto Orientale, Rome 2001), pp. 787–807, reprinted in Johnson, Worship: Rites, Feasts, and Reflections (Pastoral Press, Portland, OR 2004), pp. 37–62; Dominic Serra, ‘Baptism: Birth in the Spirit or Dying with Christ’, Ecclesia Orans 22 (2005), pp. 295–314.

¹⁹  See the examples described in Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology (Epworth Press, London 1971), pp. 42–3.

²⁰  Cf. Galatians 1.12; 1 Corinthians 7.10; and for a discussion of the question, see, for example, C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (A & C Black, London 1968), pp. 264–6.

²¹  See for example R. H. Fuller, ‘The Double Origin of the Eucharist’, Biblical Research 8 (1963), pp. 60–72; A. J. B. Higgins, The Lord’s Supper in the New Testament (SCM Press, London 1952), pp. 56–63; Eduard Schweizer, The Lord’s Supper according to the New Testament (Fortress Press, Philadelphia 1967), p. 25.

²²  Xavier Léon-Dufour, Le Partage du pain eucharistique selon le Nouveau Testament (Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1982); ET: Sharing the Eucharistic Bread (Paulist Press, New York 1987), pp. 82ff.

²³  See, for example, Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (Blackwell, Oxford 1963), p. 265; S. Dockx, ‘Le récit du repas pascal. Marc 14,17–26’, Biblica 46 (1965), pp. 445–53.

²⁴  For details, see Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (SCM Press, London 1966), pp. 139–52.

²⁵  See Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, ch. 3.

²⁶  The suggestion that Luke simply added Mark’s saying over the bread to his Passover material has already been made by others: see Henry Chadwick, ‘The Shorter Text of Luke xxii 15–20’, Harvard Theological Review 50 (1957), pp. 249–58; B. P. Robinson, ‘The Place of the Emmaus Story in Luke-Acts’, New Testament Studies 30 (1984), pp. 481–97, esp. pp. 488–90.

²⁷  Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, pp. 62–6.

²⁸  See further Paul F. Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church (SPCK, London 1981/Oxford University Press, New York 1982, reprinted Wipf & Stock, Eugene, OR 2008), pp. 11–16; idem, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, pp. 43–4.

²⁹  For a discussion of this term, see Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, pp. 55–9.