Eucharist: Encyclopedia II - Eucharist - Alleged pre-Christian origins

Eucharist - Alleged pre-Christian origins

Some scholars note the connection of the idea of feeding on the life-force of a mystical entity being characteristic of the central rites of Greco-Roman and Near-Eastern mystery religions, the context in which the acts and ordinances of Jesus and his apostles came to be memorialized. In a spiritual sense, Christianity promoted the idea that their "unbloody mysteries" [cf. Basil the Great (c. 329-379), John Chrysostom (c. 347-407), Council of Trent (1546-1563), Theses of Bonn(date?)] conveyed in actuality the purported mystical benefits of flesh-eating and blood-drinking that were proclaimed by the proponents of cannibalism and of animal sacrifices among the mystery cults who are said to have promoted Omophagy, the ritual eating of raw flesh and organs of conquered leaders to absorb their power. Accordingly, it has been argued by scholars that Christianity presents in this respect the vestiges of ancient ritualisic cannibalism transferred into modern times.

On the other hand, the first Christians were Jews or people - referred to as "those who fear God" (cf. Acts of the Apostles 13:16, 26) - who often attended synagogue services but held back from taking the step of becoming Jews. Christianity thus began among people who would normally exclude any idea of eating human flesh and drinking blood of any kind, who had nothing to do with pagan mystery cults, and who would completely exclude a cannibalistic interpretation of their "eating this bread and drinking this cup" (1 Corinthians 12:28), a rite which they nevertheless believed brought them into relationship with the body and blood of Christ.

Thus, when, in the year 57, Paul of Tarsus, writing of the Eucharist as dating from the beginning of Christianity, even before it began to spread outside Judaism, stated that "anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be behaving unworthily towards the body and blood of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 11:27) and "until the Lord comes, every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming his death" (1 Corinthians 11:26), he need not be thought to declare that the Eucharist originated as an anthropophagic mystery rite or anything like it. Rather, he was instead expressing the ideas that were later made more explicit as the non-cannibalistic doctrines of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and of the intimate association of the Eucharist with the death of Christ on Calvary, a death that the Letter to the Hebrews interpreted as the one truly efficacious sacrifice (Hebrews 10:1-14).

Though Christian teachers of a later period used the ideas of the mystery religions as analogies to explain to people familiar with those ideas the significance of the Christian "mystery" or sacrament, the earliest descriptions of the rite, such as that of Justin Martyr, give no hint whatever of any relationship or similarity with practices of mystery religions. Some writers doubt that mystery religions, before coming in the second century to be influenced by the rites of rapidly spreading Christianity, held any Eucharist-like ritual whatever.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Alleged pre-Christian origins", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki