If there is one theme, therefore, in his work on Eucharistic Origins (2004) it is that liturgists must never assume that there is one narrative, one origin, and that they must always be alert to the great diversity of practice and hence the potential for a great diversity of origins. In this he follows very closely on the work of McGowan, but takes McGowan’s conclusions, such as they are, much further. Apart from the radical nature of the conclusions, however, the structure of the book is far more conventional and tends to disguise the radical use of the sociological material that it contains. Bradshaw begins by looking at the Last Supper and the institution narratives and moves on from there to look in turn at the Didache, other early Christian meals, and Justin, taking a textually based starting point for each chapter.
The first chapter in particular, on the Last Supper and the institution narrative, follows through the very limited evidence for the use of the institution narrative in either forming the ritual of the Eucharist or having a role within that ritual. In relation to the first question, Bradshaw can say, ‘we do not possess one scrap of direct testimony that the earliest Christian Eucharist ever conformed itself to the model of the Last Supper, with a bread ritual before the meal and a cup ritual afterwards’ (2004, p. 13). Even the example from 1 Corinthians is dismissed in this assessment as Paul does not say, or even suggest, that the meal he is critiquing follows the model of the tradition that he recounts. While many other authors quote from, or use traditions related to, the institution narrative when discussing the Eucharist it is not until the Sacramentary of Serapion that the narrative actually appears within a Eucharistic Prayer. The other point that Bradshaw makes is that very few of those who do refer to an institution narrative actually quote directly from any of those found in the Gospels or in Paul.
Bradshaw then provides a very detailed discussion of the various scholarly treatments of the Didache, emphasizing the Jewish roots but refusing to draw any conclusions from the text for the origin or development of the Eucharist as such:
If the meal in the Didache were thought of simply as one of a number of different patterns that existed side-by-side in early Christianity, each being the practice belonging to a particular community or group of communities, then there would be no pressure to slot it into an especially early time frame. (2004, p. 32)
It is this same principle that is picked up in the following chapter on other early Christian ritual meals. Each of these – Paul’s account of the meal at Corinth, wineless Eucharists, the ‘breaking of bread’, etc. – exist, for Bradshaw, as alternative forms with no obvious or necessary connection between them. What is more, he concludes by suggesting that ‘a number of different combinations’ of bread, wine, water and other foodstuffs ‘might have existed in the first 250 years of Christianity’s history’ and not just the few examples that are represented within the remaining literature (2004, p. 60).
This takes Bradshaw to a discussion of Justin Martyr, which has often been seen as the traditional end point of whatever development the Eucharist may have undertaken in the first hundred years or so of its development. In Justin there is a rite with bread and wine, held in the morning and linked with the reading of scripture, a sermon and prayers of intercession. Bradshaw, therefore, uses a discussion of Justin’s accounts of the Eucharist to challenge accepted notions of the separation of the bread and wine from the rest of the meal, the issue of timing, the move from a sevenfold to a fourfold shape and the proposed link with a synagogue-type liturgy of the word. In much of this Bradshaw is actually challenging Dix’s theories rather than engaging with a wider range of possibilities, but he draws on a selection of authors and a significant amount of sociological style analysis to make his own points. In the following chapters, however, he tends to move back towards a more text-based and theological understanding of the development of the rite in the second, third and fourth centuries.
What can be seen in all these different approaches, therefore, along with many others that have not been mentioned in this survey but will find a place at the appropriate point in the following text, is that there are almost as many ways of understanding the origins of the Eucharist as there are scholars who write about it. There will never be a definitive answer to this question, but that does not mean that there are not new things to say, alternative ways of looking at the evidence, and new questions that can be asked from slightly different perspectives.
Principles underlying the current text
Anton Baumstark, in his study of Comparative Liturgy, sets out six laws for the development of liturgy (1958). Richardson in his further enquiry into Lietzmann’s Mass and the Lord’s Supper sets out six principles and probabilities for any satisfactory account of eucharistic origins (1979, p. 220). Paul Bradshaw, in the first edition of his work Search for the Origins of Christian Worship outlines ten principles for interpreting early Christian liturgical evidence (1992, pp. 63–78), although these were reduced to three warnings in the second edition (2002, pp. 17–20). Many of these principles or rules I happen to agree with, others I find extremely problematic. It would be very tempting, therefore, for me to lay out my own seven, eight or twelve principles on which the following text is based. In their place I want to set three parameters. These are not rules or principles that all those who study eucharistic origins should be expected to follow, they are self-imposed limits to my own work that enable me to make the following text more manageable and to provide a clearer perspective on what it is that I am doing and, perhaps more importantly, what it is that I am not doing.
The first parameter that I want to set is in relation to the kind of activity that I wish to discuss. Most, if not all, of the studies that have been discussed in this chapter talk throughout of the ‘Eucharist’, even when they are dealing with a series of meal practices that may not have been given that title by those who practised them. The more sophisticated do distinguish between that which they consider to be truly ‘eucharistic’ – that is, those activities that involved bread and wine, and/or a reference to the body and blood of Jesus – from other kinds of meals. As McGowan (2004) has clearly shown, however, such a distinction does not really work for much of the evidence that is available. When does a sharing of bread (with or without any further accompaniment) cease to be ‘eucharistic’? Others are very clear to distinguish between Eucharists proper and what has generally been termed the agape. Again the question of boundaries remains problematic. A significant number of the more recent accounts blur these boundaries completely and simply refer to all meals held within the early Christian communities as Eucharists, so following a standard position among biblical scholars to see any reference to eating or drinking in the New Testament as ‘eucharistic’. What interests me within the following study, however, is any activity that involves shared eating and drinking among early Christian communities. So far I would position myself with McGowan and those who follow him. Where I would want to differ, however, is that I do not want to presuppose that the communities concerned saw all these activities, or even the majority of them, as ‘eucharistic’, even if they did have such a concept to work with. Throughout the text, therefore, I will be careful to refrain from using the term ‘Eucharist’ in any way, unless it is clearly used by the evidence that I am considering – and then I will want to be very careful about how the word is interpreted – or by modern authors that I am engaging with. I will also do all that I can to prevent myself, and the reader of this text, from assuming that we know what ‘eucharistic’ means.
The second parameter is related to this, and focuses on the difference between action and meaning. Almost all the studies that have been discussed, even the most sociological, have been primarily concerned with the meaning that communal meals had for the early Christian community. Even Smith, who is interested in seeing the roots of the early Christian meals in the wider Graeco-Roman symposia, is using Douglas to develop what she describes as the ‘social code’ of the meal and hence bringing the discussion back round to one of meaning and even theology (Smith 2003). Meanings are, of course, important and a study of the development of imagery and ideas surrounding eating and drinking in the first 150 years of Christian existence could be very interesting. That, however, is not what this study is about. Having