A Short History of Christianity: Second Edition, Revised, With AdditionsRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
History
A Short History of Christianity: Second Edition, Revised, With Additions
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Church history
But mere poverty on the one hand, and on the other the then
common ascetic instinct (which in some cases put water for wine),
would tell among Gentiles against the eating of actual flesh even
when the pretence was to eat flesh and drink blood. In some early
Christian groups accordingly the sacrificial food took the shape of
a model of a lamb in bread [8] (a kind of device often resorted to in
pagan worship with a special form of animal sacrifice), while others
actually ate a lamb and drank its blood, as did some of the Mithraists
and some of the Egyptian worshippers of Ammon. The Pauline phrase,
"Our Passover also has been sacrificed, Christ"--which may or may
not be an interpolation--would square with either practice. But that
Jews who had been wont to make much of a paschal lamb, and who held
Jesus to have represented that lamb, should pass at once to a sacred
meal of simple bread and wine or water, is unlikely; and the gospels
themselves indicate that a dish of another kind preceded the bread
and wine formality in the traditional Supper.
Light is thrown on the original nature of the Jesuist rite by the
Paschal controversy in which the Eastern and Western churches are found
embroiled towards the end of the second century. It turned nominally
on the different accounts of the crucifixion in the synoptics and the
fourth gospel. Whereas the synoptics make Jesus take the Passover with
his disciples in due course, and die on the cross on the first day
(the Jewish day being reckoned from evening to evening), the fourth
gospel makes him sup informally with his disciples on the day before
the Passover, and die at the very hour of the paschal meal. The idea
obviously is that implied in the Pauline phrase already quoted--that
he is henceforth the substitute for the lamb; and in actual fact the
Eastern Christians of the second century are found breaking their
Easter fast on the Passover day, while the Westerns did not break it
till the Sunday of the resurrection. Evidently the Eastern Christians
had all along preserved an immemorial usage of eating their eucharist
on the Passover. They did not do this as orthodox Jews, for they
called their meal one of "salvation" in a Christist sense, and their
opponents did not charge them with Judaizing; but they argued that they
must take the eucharist at the time at which Jesus took it with his
disciples; while the Westerns contended that the time for rejoicing and
commemoration was the day of resurrection. The explanation is that the
story of Jesus eating with his disciples is a myth of the kind always
framed to account for an ancient ritual practice; that the Jewish
circumstances naturally gave the story a form which made Jesus obey a
Judaic ordinance; and that the Westerns, coming newly into the cult,
either recoiled from the procedure of a banquet on the very eve of
the Lord's betrayal, or followed an Adonisian or Attisian usage, in
which the original sacrificial banquet, though perhaps not abandoned,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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