effects the Eucharist was the Christian counterpart of these
two other forms of communion of which one, the heathen, was
excluded from the first, and the other, the Jewish, soon to disappear.
It is their analogue, and to understand it we must
understand them, not forgetting that Paul, as a Semite, and his
hearers, as converted pagans, were imbued with the sacrificial
ideas of the old world.
“A kin,” remarks W. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, 1894), “was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering.” “In later times,” observes the same writer (op. cit. p. 313), “we find the conception current that any food which two men partake of together, so that the same substance enters into their flesh and blood, is enough to establish some sacred unity of life between them; but in ancient times this significance seems to be always attached to participation in the flesh of a sacrosanct victim, and the solemn mystery of its death is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured, which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god. This cement is nothing else than the actual life of the sacred and kindred animal, which is conceived as residing in its flesh, but specially in its blood, and so, in the sacred meal, is actually distributed among all the participants, each of whom incorporates a particle of it with his own individual life.”
The above conveys the cycle of ideas within which Paul’s reflection worked. Christ who knew no sin (2 Cor. v. 21) had been made sin, and sacrificed for us, becoming as it were a new Passover (1 Cor. v. 7). By a mysterious sympathy the bread and wine over which the words, “This is my body which is for you,” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” had been uttered, became Christ’s body and blood; so that by partaking of these the faithful were united with each other and with Christ into one kinship. They became the body of Christ, and his blood or life was in them, and they were members of him. Participation in the Eucharist gave actual life, and it was due to their irregular attendance at it that many members of the Corinthian church “were weak and sickly and not a few slept” (i.e. had died). As the author already cited adds (p. 313): “The notion that by eating the flesh, or particularly by drinking the blood, of another living being, a man absorbs its nature or life into his own, is one which appears among primitive peoples in many forms.”
But this effect of participation in the bread and cup was not in Paul’s opinion automatic, was no mere opus operatum; it depended on the ethical co-operation of the believer, who must not eat and drink unworthily, that is, after refusing to share his meats with the poorer brethren, or with any other guilt in his soul. The phrases “discern the body” and “discern ourselves” in 1 Cor. xi. 29, 31 are obscure. Paul evidently plays on the verb, krinô, diakrinô, katakrinô (κρίνω, διακρίνω, κατακρίνω). The general sense is clear, that those who consume the holy food without a clear conscience, like those who handle sacred objects with impure hands, will suffer physical harm from its contact, as if they were undergoing the ordeal of touching a holy thing. The idea, therefore, seems to be that as we must distinguish the holy food over which the words “This is my body” have been uttered from common food, so we must separate ourselves before eating it from all that is guilty and impure. The food that is taboo must only be consumed by persons who are equally taboo or pure. If they are not pure, it condemns them.
The “one” loaf has many parallels in ancient sacrifices, e.g. the Latin tribes when they met annually at their common temple partook of a “single” bull. And in Greek Panegureis or festivals the sacrificial wine had to be dispensed from one common bowl: “Unto a common cup they come together, and from it pour libations as well as sacrifice,” says Aristides Rhetor in his Isthmica in Neptunum, p. 45. To ensure the continued unity of the bread, the Roman church ever leaves over from a preceding consecration half a holy wafer, called fermentum, which is added in the next celebration.
With what awe Paul regarded the elements mystically identified with Christ’s body and life is clear from his declaration in 1 Cor. xi. 27, that he who consumes them unworthily is guilty or holden of the Lord’s body and blood. This is the language of the ancient ordeal which as a test of innocence required the accused to touch or still better to eat a holy element. A wife who drank the holy water in which the dust of the Sanctuary was mingled (Num. v. 17 foll.) offended so deeply against it, if unfaithful, that she was punished with dropsy and wasting. The very point is paralleled in the Acts of Thomas, ch. xlviii. A youth who has murdered his mistress takes the bread of the Eucharist in his mouth, and his two hands are at once withered up. The apostle immediately invites him to confess the crime he must have committed, “for, he says, the Eucharist of the Lord hath convicted thee.”
It has been necessary to consider at such length St Paul’s account of the Eucharist, both because it antedates nearly by half a century that of the gospels, and because it explains the significance which the rite had no less for the Gnostics than for the great church. The synoptists’ account is to be understood thus: Jesus, conscious that he now for the last time lies down to eat with his disciples a meal which, if not the Paschal, was anyhow anticipatory of the Millennial Regeneration (Matt. xix. 28), institutes, as it were, a blood-brotherhood between himself and them. It is a covenant similar to that of Exodus xxiv., when after the peace-offering of oxen, Moses took the blood in basins and sprinkled half of it on the altar and on twelve pillars erected after the twelve tribes, and the other half on the people, to whom he had first read out the writing of the covenant and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words.”
But the covenant instituted by Jesus on the eve of his death was hardly intended as a new covenant with God, superseding the old. This reconstruction of its meaning seems to have been the peculiar revelation of the Lord to Paul, who viewed Christ’s crucifixion and death as an atoning sacrifice, liberating by its grace mankind from bonds of sin which the law, far from snapping, only made more sensible and grievous. This must have been the gist of the special revelation which he had received from Christ as to the inner character of a supper which he already found a ritual observance among believers. The Eucharist of the synoptists is rather a covenant or tie of communion between Jesus and the twelve, such as will cause his life to survive in them after he has been parted from them in the flesh. An older prophet would have slain an animal and drunk its blood in common with his followers, or they would all alike have smeared themselves with it. In the East, even now, one who wishes to create a blood tie between himself and his followers and cement them to himself, makes under his left breast an incision from which they each in turn suck his blood. Such barbarisms was alien to the spirit of the Founder, who substitutes bread and wine for his own flesh and blood, only imparting to these his own quality by the declaration that they are himself. He broke the bread not in token of his approaching death, but in order to its equal distribution. Wine he rather chose than water as a surrogate for his actual blood, because it already in Hebrew sacrifices passed as such. “The Hebrews,” says Robertson Smith (op. cit. p. 230), “treated it like the blood, pouring it out at the base of the altar.” As a red liquid it was a ready symbol of the blood which is the life. It was itself the covenant, for the genitive τῆς διαθήκης in Mark xiv. 24 is epexegetic, and Luke and Paul rightly substitute the nominative. It was, as J. Wellhausen remarks,[1] a better cement than the bread, because through the drinking of it the very blood of Jesus coursed through the veins of the disciples, and that is why more stress is laid on it than on the bread. To the apostles, as Jews bred and born, the action and words of their master formed a solemn and
- ↑ Das Evangelium Marci, p. 121.
