The recognition of this fact does not make his sacramental doctrine any clearer. It is a question of fulfilling the demand of sound scholarship that we should respect the text, and not interpret it on the basis of inferences which the Apostle neither drew nor could draw. His fundamental view that the feast effects or maintains fellowship with the exalted Christ is perfectly clear. What is not clear is how he brought this view into relation with the historic words of Jesus about the bread and wine as being His body and blood, and interpreted it in accordance therewith. Did it arise out of these words, or did he receive it from some other quarter and afterwards make use of it for the interpretation of the historic words? The difficulty lies in the fact that for Paul the body and blood of the historic Christ no longer exist, and that, on the other hand, while the glorified Christ has, indeed, a body, it is not a body through which blood flows and which is capable of being consumed on earth. To speak of the body and blood of Christ is, from the stand-point of the Apostle’s doctrine, an absurdity. He cannot in his doctrine of the Supper bring the historic words into harmony with his Christology, and yet is obliged to do so. The compromise remains for us obscure. It is certain, however, that neither he nor the primitive Christian community held that the body and blood of Christ was partaken of in the Supper. That is evident from the fact that the historic words of Jesus did not form part of the service, and this is the case down to a later date. No kind of consecration of the elements as the body and blood of the Lord occurred in the liturgy. If there is anything which may be considered as a definite result of recent research, it is that the view of primitive and early Christianity regarding the Lord’s [pg 200] Supper was not arrived at by way of inference from the words of Jesus about bread and wine and flesh and blood, but, strange as it may appear, arose from a different quarter. The Church’s celebration was not shaped by the “words of institution” at the historic Supper; it was the latter, on the contrary, which were explained in accordance with the significance of the celebration. It is a no less serious error when Dieterich asserts that the Gospel of John in chapter vi. proclaims the Pauline doctrine “only in a still more corporeal fashion.”