Apognophos,
I do have tucked far away in the back of my mind a Study that addresses Paul as a mystic. I should read what Maccoby writes as well as Tabor. Paul was the earliest writer. He gave his own new mystical ideas to baptism and the communal meal. He was given these in visions; they did not come from any eye-witness. The gospels were not penned by any eye-witness. (I have my doubts that Jesus literally died at Passover; I sense that the idea developed from Paul's relating Jesus' death to it sacrificially.) I have touched on the chasm between Paul and the Jerusalem Church in other Studies. The ideas come from him. I scanned the following pages as they better express the ideas. They are from pages 91-92 of "Christian Beginnings" by the recently deceased Geza Vermes (Google for him.)
Doug
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The Lord's Supper
In addition to baptism, the first and unrepeatable Christian rite, Paul inherited from his predecessors a second great cult practice, the communal meal, referred to as the 'breaking of the bread' as well as `thanksgiving' or eucharist in Greek. As in the case of baptism, Paul supplied a new meaning to the community meal and turned it into an imitation and repetition of the 'Lord's Supper' — Jesus' last Passover dinner with his apostles on the evening before his crucifixion.
Paul implies that the mythical significance of this meal was revealed to him directly by Christ: 'I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you' (1 Cor. 11:23 ). He does not say that it came to him through apostolic tradition as the story of the death, burial and resurrection of the Saviour: 'I handed over to you what I in turn had received' (1 Cor. 15:3 ). If my understanding is correct, the mystical significance of the Last Supper must not be attributed to the Synoptic evangelists composing their accounts between AD 70 and 100, but to Paul writing in the early 50s. It seems that the idea entered the tradition of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew through Luke, Paul's disciple, whose Last Supper account mirrors that of his teacher. Only Paul and Luke mention Jesus' command relating to the repetition of the ritual. For Paul the rite comprised a twofold allegory: the participation of the believers in the redemptive acts of the death and resurrection of Christ, and their assimilation into the mystical body of Jesus and the church. In Paul's view, those who partook of the bread and drank from the cup were in the first instance united, mystically and sacramentally, with the redeeming death of Christ.
“The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.' For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” (1 Cor. 11:23-6)
Moreover, as the bread was the symbol of Jesus' flesh, the many who consumed it were in addition spiritually transformed into a single body, that of the church: 'The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake in the same bread' (1 Cor. 10:16-17; Rom. 12:4-5).
Having invested the communal meal with such superhuman qualities, it is not surprising that Paul's plebeian followers in Corinth fell short of the required standard both in thought and in behaviour. He complained that the members of the congregation, far from being united, were split into factions along social lines (1 Cor. 11:18; see 1:12) and they behaved in a disorderly fashion during the ceremony itself. Instead of all sharing the same meal, each family brought along their own food, and while the less well off felt humiliated and remained hungry, the wealthy gorged themselves on delicacies and got drunk (1 Cor. 11:21-2, 33-4). Paul paints an odd portrait of the company making up the Corinthian church when he prohibits table fellowship with drunkards, idolaters, revilers and robbers and with the sexually immoral and greedy (1 Cor. 5:11).
Be this as it may, the breaking of the bread or the `Lord's Supper', as perceived through Paul's eyes, became the cornerstone of the cultic edifice of Gentile Christianity in his day and has remained so ever since.