Early Christian Worship

by the_classicist 63 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  the_classicist

  Ok, first if i said (I may have)that the eucharist meal was a creation of Paul i misspoke. The Eucharist meal reflects a sabbatical Seder meal practiced by Pharisaic Jews. It appears that the Didache demonstrates the early christian adoption of these meals of thanksgiving. Notably in the Didache form there is no mention that Jesus shared a last meal or initiated a sacrement to be repeated nor any mention of sacrificial ransoms or covenants. It was a meal to celebrate the blessings and teachings of Jesus. Sometimes the silence is deafening.

  Of course, the Eucharist reflects the seder meal. The seder meal was a part of the home Passover service! The Passover and the Eucharist are link as the Passover sacrificial meal is the prefigurement of the Eucharist sacrificial meal as was the sacrifice of bread and wine done by Melchizedek, for as the Psalmist was quoted by St. Paul: "You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek" (Ps. 110:4). A similarity in prayer or worship is made manifest because Christians received their liturgical traditions, at the start, from the Jews.

  And the Didache does mention the sacrificial nature of this Sunday worship/meal: "On the Lord's own day, when you gather together, break bread and give thanks [Or: celebrate the Eucharist] after you have confessed your unlawful deeds, that your sacrifice may be pure. Let no one quarreling with his neighbor join you until they are reconciled, that your sacrifice may not be defilied. For this is the sacrifice mentioned by the Lord: "In every place and time, bring me a pure sacrifice. For I am a great King, says the Lord, and my name is considered marvelous among the Gentiles"" (Didache 14).

  Also a eucharist appears to have existed in Ur Mark that was later slightly modified to harmonize with Corinthians. Matt simply expanded a few things and Luke (using an early form of Mark) likewise has a meal but was later interpolated using language of Corinthians. So to say that the eucharist (as a meal) was inserted into the texts is not correct.

  How does it appear to be slightly modified to harmonize with Corinthians? (curious)

  There is a pretty horrible fallacy in modern scholarship that similarity equals a link. This is not always so, but among some Biblical scholars, I have seen magnificently horrible leaps in logic just to "show" said links.
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  peacefulpete

  
  
  
  
  

  Classicist, read the discussion at the threads I provided, if that seems to you to be worthless then, ok. Mind you, there were certain point sof contact between the developed Wisdom and Son of God of Philo and other Hellenized Jews and the Mystery cult godmen, the PrePassover thnaksgiving (not Passover)Seder of bread and wine of the Phrarisees and the use of similar wine/water and bread as sacrements symbolic of a slain savior in the Mysteries, these connections facilitated this marriage tween the two. However the two gatherings were separate until Pauline styled Christianity came along. The Jewish Christians had meals together thanking God for Jesus, Paul ate Jesus to be one with him.
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  peacefulpete

  And the Didache does mention the sacrificial nature of this Sunday worship/meal: "On the Lord's own day, when you gather together, break bread and give thanks [Or: celebrate the Eucharist] after you have confessed your unlawful deeds, that your sacrifice may be pure. Let no one quarreling with his neighbor join you until they are reconciled, that your sacrifice may not be defilied. For this is the sacrifice mentioned by the Lord: "In every place and time, bring me a pure sacrifice. For I am a great King, says the Lord, and my name is considered marvelous among the Gentiles"" (Didache 14).

  The Didache sacrifice was of a sacrifice of praise, hence the need to keep the mouth clean to prevent the sacrifice from becoming tainted.
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  peacefulpete

  
  
  
  
  

  I believe the interpretation of the bread and wine that Paul gives in 1 Corinthians and the synoptics (derived from Mithraism, focusing on the partaking of the dying-rising god) is Paul's own, or that of his group, but that the eucharist itself is a continuation of similar meals in Pharisaic Judaism, where benedictions are also given over the bread and wine. I believe the Didache preserves a pre-Pauline version of the benedictions which were very far removed from the "this is my body" formula, and instead likened the bread to the gospel message being spread and the church being gathered together in the kingdom. This fits well with other metaphors in the sapiential and narrative tradition (cf. Mark
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  peacefulpete

  I believe the interpretation of the bread and wine that Paul gives in 1 Corinthians and the synoptics (derived from Mithraism, focusing on the partaking of the dying-rising god) is Paul's own, or that of his group, but that the eucharist itself is a continuation of similar meals in Pharisaic Judaism, where benedictions are also given over the bread and wine. I believe the Didache preserves a pre-Pauline version of the benedictions which were very far removed from the " this is my body " formula, and instead likened the bread to the gospel message being spread and the church being gathered together in the kingdom. This fits well with other metaphors in the sapiential and narrative tradition (cf. Mark
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  peacefulpete

  I don't know why but I can't copy the comments in there entirety to repost here. Go back to the threads and read leolaia's posts.
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  the_classicist

  (derived from Mithraism, focusing on the partaking of the dying-rising god)

  The scholarship I've seen, besides the polemical work the Pagan Origins of Christianity, says thus (Mithraism and Christianity: How are They Related? by Donald Morse; Journal of Religion & Psychical Research 1999) :

  The Mithraist sacramental sacramental communion of bread and wine and the Eucharistic meal are most likely derived from the Mithra and the sun god feasting together. They apparently ate bread, wine and meat after Mithra had sacrificed the bull (Duchesne-Guillemin, 1967). The Mithraic inscription show before, "He who will eat not of my body, nor drink of my blood so that he may be one with me and I with him, shall not be saved" is quite similar to the Catholic statement from Vatican II, " ...in the Eucharist we become partakers in the body and blood of God's only Son... (and) the partaking of the body and blood of Christ has no less effect than to change us into what we have received" (Tarkowski, 1996). The two quotations are uncannily similar and make one think that perhaps the Christian concept had been derived from Mithraism. Nevertheless, the eating of bread (unlevened type, matzah) and wine is apparently derived from the Jewish Passover, which is undoubtedly the Passover Seder that has been glorified as "The Last Supper." Be that as it may, it must be emphasized that the Christian leaders of the first century A.D. were so upset about the similarities of baptism and Eucharist service between Mithraism and Christianity that they judged them undoubtedly the work of Satan, who had them deliberately precede Christianity (Gnoli, 1987 Mithraic Miracles, 1998).

  Now in the above quotation, Leolaia unfortunately falls into a common scholarly fallacy. She represents the link between Mithraism and Christianity with regards to the Eucharist as a fact of the derivation of one from the other. It is not fact, it is simply a hypothesis which should be shown as such. It is similar to the mistake that Cumont makes in his study of Mithraism where he assumes that Mithraism develops fully from Iranian religion by using comparisons, but as Gordon correctly points out that we must reject " any theory which assumes that it is valid to look at Iranian religion... in order to explain the significance and function of symbols in the Western mystery religion of Mithras" (1975, 225 Ulansey 1987, 106).

  The Didache sacrifice was of a sacrifice of praise, hence the need to keep the mouth clean to prevent the sacrifice from becoming tainted.

  As I wrote in my interpretation of the text, it could refer to either worship as sacrifice or eucharist as sacrifice (I probably should have been less nuanced); a case can be made for either, I would think.
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  peacefulpete

  First Mr. Morse is a dentist who believes in supernatural psychic mubo jumbo but anyway his comment reflects the standard Christian casual denial. There is no jewish precedent for a savior's body being ingested. Leolaia does not need me to defend her, she's far more capable than me to do so. It may interest you to know that the Jesus Seminar concluded that the Eucharist evolved as we have here presented, so this is not the opinion of just radical scholarship.
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  Midget-Sasquatch

  To say that the Didache does not include the "traditional view of the eucharist" is a bit of a false exegesis given that it doesn't say much at all, doctrinally, about the Eucharist, or "Thanksgiving meal." What we see in the Didache is a liturgical prayer and practical instructions about Christian liturgical practices (in it's earliest form).

  While the Didache is a manual of sorts, the contents of the relevant prayers still do talk about the symbols of the Thanksgiving meal. I find it interesting that the symbols there aren't linked with the body and blood of the christ. At least it clearly hasn't been tainted with Mithraism.

  If we supplement the record of the Didache along with the contemporary views of the Fathers from that period, we see belief among the orthodox, that the Eucharist is indeed the flesh of Christ.

  Inquiry: Is the Didache more of a Jewish-Christian work?
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  the_classicist

  First Mr. Morse is a dentist who believes in supernatural psychic mubo jumbo but anyway his comment reflects the standard Christian casual denial.

  I'm not here to defend this Dr. Morse fellow, but if you actually read the entire paper you would find that A) it's not a Christian work and B) it's researched well. I judge a work on it's own merits, not an ad hominem attack.

  There is no jewish precedent for a savior's body being ingested

  (off on a tangent: I'm wondering if the concept of ingesting a saviour is from Roman Mithraism or Iranian Mithraism, and whether or not it is a result of Cumont's scholarship). I would disagree that Judaism has no precedent for a saviour's body being ingested. As I stated above, the Eucharist is prefigured by the Passover. The slaughter of the lamb and it's eating had salvific connotations with the Jews, indeed, all types of sacrifices were salvific in nature as they forgave sins or averted disaster (in the case of the Exodus 12 narrative).

  I also noticed there was some take with regards to 1 Corinthians. Here's an excerpt from an article I found (The Eucharist and the Mystery Religions by John McConnell; Catholic Biblical Quarterly 10.1):

  Paul's object in this part of the Epistle (cc. 11-14) is to restore the liturgical traditions common to all the churches founded by him. It is not therefore likely that he invented such traditions in the early days of his apostolate...

  It is hardly probable that Paul desired to lay any stress on the fact that he himself had received the same Eucharistic doctrine that he taught. And when we compare the paralabon apo tou kyriou ho kai paredoka of our text with the extremely close parallel text of the same Epistle, the paredoka... ho kai parelabon in 15:1.3, which certainly makes Paul a link in that chain of apostolic tradition regarding the Resurrection, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he is using the same words in the same way with regard to the institution of the Eucharist.

  that the symbols there aren't linked with the body and blood of the christ.

  I'll cover two things at once. Yes the Didache is a Jewish-Christian work. The lack of the words of institution could be a result of the fact that the Jewish Christians found such a cannabalistic ritualism to be unpallatible. Catholic scholars tend to hold that the prayers in the Didache are thanksgiving after consecration and after communion. There would seem to be *some* evidence for this as the first prayer over the bread is "with respect to the fragment of bread," suggesting that it had already been broken into pieces. Now during the words of institution, Jesus is said to take bread into his hands, bread it, then he said the words of institution for the bread.

  Given the simplicity of the words of institution, and their prominent place in Paul's epistle to the Corinthians (and given the wide circulation of said epistle), it is possible that words could have been left out, yet used. Indeed, the instructions in the Didache for the Eucharist seem quite incomplete in the sense that it is not a whole rite for the Eucharist, but just prayers of thanksgiving and some practical observations.