FT257

David Barrett’s review of our book Masks of Christ (FT248:59) addresses our claim that the evidence overwhelmingly backs our conclusions about the origins of the Christian Eucharist, and asks: “If it is so overwhelming, why do most scholars not agree with them?” That’s a very good question, and one worth exploring as an example of academic failure at joined-up thinking – as even on the scholars’ own data, they should agree with us!  

To set the scene, a startling quest­ion. Just how Jewish was Jesus? To most people, the question might seem ludicrous. Of course he was Jewish! The New Testament gospels portray him unequivocally as operating in a Jewish environment, aiming his message mainly at Jews, and claim for him the exclus­ively Jewish role of Messiah/Christ (before St Paul cannily gave it universal appeal, creating the Christian religion). And since Jesus became a permissible subject for historians, he is still seen as fundamentally Jewish – out to reform the religion, perhaps, or seeking polit­ical leadership as Messiah. [1]

However, some parts of the gospels – the very concept of Jesus as man-god, his supposed virgin birth, and so on – have far more in common with the pagan world. These inconvenient elements were explained away as later inventions, which makes sense, as most are conspicuously absent from the earliest gospel, Mark. However, one element is more problematical, largely because it does appear in Mark: Jesus’s supposed instigation, during the Last Supper, of the ritual known as the Eucharist (‘Thanksgiving’), the Christian Commun­ion, when he is said to have bidden his disciples to eat bread and drink wine as though it were his flesh and blood.

The fundamental Jewish prohibition on drinking any blood, let alone that of a human being, means that no convent­ional Jew could have advocated such a practice, even symbolically. Any holy man or would-be Messiah who did so would soon have found himself preaching to thin air, like Spike Milligan in The Life of Brian. And it is too similar to the ritual meals of the pagan myst­ery cults, in which a god’s flesh and blood were symbolically ingested as a myst­ical bonding between initiate and deity. Early Christians struggled with this, claiming the Devil had inspired pagans to ape the ritual before Jesus had even been born!

Modern historians are somewhat more logical. They argue that the Eucharist as we know it owes nothing to Jesus: the earliest communal meal, the ‘Lord’s Supper’, was purely a commemoration of Jesus’s last night with his disciples, and the mysticism was added when Gentiles joined the new religion, derived from their own mystery cults, with which they could identify. Many scholars finger St Paul as the spin-doctor who sexed up the Christian dossier in this way.

Neat though this solution was, there was no specific evidence for it – until a newly-discovered text was hailed as the long-missing proof. This was the Didache (‘Did-a-kay’), from Didache ton dodeka apostolon (The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), lost until a Greek manu­script was discovered in the 1870s. Although that copy dates from the 11th century, subsequently fragments of the work were found that could be dated to seven centuries earlier.

The Didache was an instruction manual for new converts to an early Christian community, probably Syrian. Naturally, it includes the Eucharist, and (as Barrett points out) this is generally agreed to be the earliest record of the rite. But the reason for this consensus is revealing: the Didache omits any reference to the bread and wine representing Christ’s body and blood. QED: it must have been written before Paul’s adulteration of the Lord’s Supper. All well and good, except that, with egregious circular reasoning, this dating of the Didache by reference to the theory is now used as evidence for the theory itself.

There’s an ironic contrast between scholarly attitudes to the Didache and the celebrated Gnostic Gospels. The physical evidence for both is remarkably similar – the earliest surviving versions of both date from the mid-fourth century and are Coptic translations of the Greek – but when faced with calculating a likely date for the originals, the same academics who happily assign a very early date to the Didache routinely dismiss the Gnostic texts as being too late to provide any useful insights about Jesus.

In fact, some specialists acknow­ledge that evidence in the Didache itself challenges the conventional view. While the ‘body and blood’ is missing, it refers to the Eucharist as a sacrificial rite – odd in terms of the ritual it describes. One of the leading authorities on the Didache, Jean-Paul Audet, has therefore proposed that the body-blood rite was indeed practised by the community but was deemed too sacred for a document given to would-be initiates.

Whatever else the Didache may be, it is certainly not definitive proof of the standard theory of the Eucharist’s origins. And in fact, the sum total of the evidence has never backed up the theory anyway.

The earliest description of the Eucharist is in Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians (mid-50s AD), where he attributes both the ‘in memoriam’ and ‘communion’ aspects to Jesus at the Last Supper: “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me… this cup [of wine] is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” [2]

The next description, in Mark’s Gospel (generally dated to the 70s AD, although possibly a decade earlier), uses almost exactly the same words – and it is very rare for there to be such a crossover between Paul and any of the Gospels – except for those that present it as a commemoration: Mark has only the communion element. [3]

But this isn’t because the writer of Mark adapted Paul. This was established in the classic study of the Euchar­ist’s origins by German theo­logian Joachim Jeremias, who showed that Paul’s and Mark’s accounts of Jesus’s words derived, neither one from the other, but both from a separate common source written in Aramaic, the everyday language of first-century Palestine (as opposed to Greek, that of the Gospels and Paul’s letters). [4]

Even more problematically, John’s Gospel (compiled in the 80s or later but drawing partly on earlier sources) has Jesus instigating the rite much earlier, in Galilee, implying it was a core feature of his practices long before the Last Supper and so lacked any commemorative element whatsoever. [5]  Not only is the mystical aspect even more specific – “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood will have eternal life” – but, sens­ation­ally, this Gospel describes how the ritual caused a mass desertion of disciples, horrified by the very idea of drinking ‘blood’. The writer is hardly likely to have invented this episode, especially as his Gospel is the keenest to portray Jesus as infallible: his superhero would never have chosen such incompatible disciples!

Even more unexpectedly, Jeremias demonstrated that, although at first glance Paul’s and John’s accounts seem very different, they too drew on a common source. [6]  And a British specialist on John’s Gospel, Professor Andrew T Lincoln, established that Mark’s and John’s wording of the ‘body-blood’ content also derives from a common source, and that John’s, too, was a translation of an Aramaic original. [7]

So, where the Eucharist is concerned, all three New Testament trad­itions – Paul’s letters, the ‘synoptic’ Gospel tradition (Mark, Matthew and Luke), and John’s Gospel – derive from a single source. It can’t be overstressed how rare and signific­ant such agreement is: anything the three share must have been deeply ingrained in Christian worship from the very beg­inning. The Aramaic also points to the source being, if not a record of Jesus’s actual words, at least very early.

But only Paul’s version possesses the ‘in memory’ aspect. What’s more – as pointed out as long ago as 1911 by the celebrated theologian and missionary Albert Schweitzer [8] – his own writings show that he struggled to reconcile the communion element with his image of Jesus as Christ. [9]  Although, for Paul, a mystical communion between Christian and Christ was central, this was achieved through baptism; continually renewing it through symbolically eating and drinking Jesus’s body and blood made no sense. However, Paul was forced to accept the rite because it was so deeply loved as central to Christian worship: his solution was to change the significance of the meal by adding Jesus’s injunction to remember him: that was the part he invented. This of course turns the usual reconstruction on its head.

So, returning to David Barrett’s strangely unfortean question, the evid­ence amassed by scholars completely fails to support their conclusions. Jeremias, for example, declared that “[T]he common core of the tradition of the account of the Lord’s Supper – what Jesus said at the Last Supper – is preserved to us in an essentially reliable form”, [10] and that it is most faithfully recorded in Mark (which, you may remember, only features the communion element). In short, not only did Jesus instigate the Eucharist, but his original words referred only to the symbolic eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood.

However, Jeremias still considered that the blood-drinking implication was a “misunderstanding” by the disciples, precisely because no Jew could have uttered such a “dark animistic abomination”. [11]  (In other words, although Jesus really said it, he can’t have meant it as the disciples understood him.) But even this conclus­ion is too much for modern academia. One New Testament scholar, while acknow­ledging Jeremias’s expertise, rejected his conclusions simply because it “seems impossible” that Jesus could have said it. [12]
So why do these specialists continue to cling to a position that is actually contradicted by their own studies? Obviously, in this case, acknowledging that Jesus did institute the communion ritual – so un-Jewish, so pagan – would undermine the basic assumption that he was a Jew pure and simple. And the implications of that are simply too big and too uncomfortable.

However, in the light of modern historical knowledge, squaring the Jewish and pagan sides of Jesus is by no means impossible, as we try to show in The Masks of Christ. For example, it is known that some Jewish sects – such as the Therapeutæ, the Egyptian cousins of the Essenes, and even, unexpectedly, the Qumran community itself – were experimenting with concepts borrowed from the mystery cults. Another fruitful avenue is in the religion of the Samaritans, which seems to have blended ‘Jewish’ and pagan ideas.

The whole background of twisted evidence and faulty logic is often depressing for us non-academic researchers. But wouldn’t it be nice if, for a change, the scholars in their ivory towers were to use the strict critical criteria they impose on the work of outsiders on their own findings?

Notes
1 As for the theory that Jesus never existed, it may be fashionable, but there’s really not much going for it. There are many gospel episodes – the institution of the Eucharist itself being one – that only make sense if Jesus was a real historical figure, because the writers simply didn’t understand them.
2 I Corinthians 11:24–25.
3 Mark 14:22–24.
4 Joachim Jeremias: The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, SCM Press, 1966, pp186–7.
5 John, 6:45–56.
6 Jeremias, op. cit., p108.
7 Andrew T Lincoln: The Gospel According to Saint John, Continuum, 2005, p232.
8 Albert Schweitzer: Paul and His Interpreters, A&C Black, 1912, pp199–200.
9 See I Corinthians 10:14–22 and 11:23–34 for Paul’s often desperate attempts to explain the significance of the Eucharist in his own theological terms.
10 Jeremias, op. cit., p203.
11 Ibid., p170.
12 Morna D Hooker: A Commentary on the Gospel According to St Mark, Continuum, 1992, p342.