Paul and Jesus

Sacred meals involving the blessings of bread and wine were also common in Judaism, and were thus part of the communal meals of the early followers of Jesus. Within apocalyptic groups, such as the Jesus movement and the sect that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, such sacred meals were considered anticipatory of the messianic age to come. When the Messiah arrived, his followers expected to gather around his table in fellowship, with Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets joining them. Paul’s innovation, that one was thereby eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine at the Eucharist or Holy Communion, has no parallels in any Jewish sources of the period. Three of our New Testament gospels record Jesus’ Last Supper, in which he tells his disciples over bread and wine: “This is my body,” and “This is my blood,” and in the gospel of John, Jesus speaks of “eating my flesh” and “drinking my blood.” These writers based their accounts of Jesus’ final meal on Paul, directly quoting what he had written in his letters almost word for word (Mark 14:22–25; Matthew 26:26–29; Luke 22:15–20; John 6:52–56; 1 Corinthians 11:23–26). This is one of the strongest indications that the New Testament gospels are essentially Pauline documents, with underlying elements of the earlier Jesus tradition.

As a Jew living in a Jewish culture, Jesus would have considered this sort of language about eating flesh and drinking blood, even taken symbolically, as utterly reprehensible, akin to magic or ritual cannibalism. Despite what Paul asserts, it is extremely improbable that Jesus ever said these words. They are Paul’s own interpretation of the meaning and significance of the Eucharist ceremony that he claims he received from the heavenly Christ by a revelation. For Paul eating bread and drinking wine was no simple memorial meal, but it was quite literally a “participation” in the spiritual body of the glorified heavenly Christ. This meal connected those who eat and drink through the Spirit with the embryonic nurturing life they needed as developing offspring of God (1 Corinthians 10:16). In contrast, as we will see, there is solid evidence that the Christians before Paul, and outside of his influence, celebrated a Eucharist with an entirely different understanding of the wine and the bread, one that reflects a practice much closer to what Jesus inaugurated at his Last Supper with his disciples. Fortunately, there are fragmented traces of this earlier view embedded in our New Testament gospels.

4. Already but Not Yet. Paul operated with a strongly apocalyptic perspective that influenced all he said or did. He was quite sure that he and his followers would live to see the return of Christ from heaven. Life in the world would go on, but not for long. Everything was soon to be transformed. At the same time there was a sense in which everything continued as it was. As Paul tried to work out the practical ethical and social implications of these ideas, he pressed hard against the realities of time and history. Paul states emphatically that the “appointed time has grown very short,” and he advised his followers not to marry, begin a new business, or worry if they were slaves, since everything in the world was about to be turned upside down and all social relations were terminal. Right up until the end of his life he expected to live to see the great event—what he called the “Arrival” (Greek parousia)—the visible appearance of the heavenly Christ in the clouds of heaven to usher in the events of the final Judgment. He tried to inspire his followers to live as if the new spiritual transformation had already arrived, all the time knowing that its full realization was not yet. The tensions of life in the world, with its inarguable realities of sex and marriage, birth and death, and ethnic and social identities, were difficult to negotiate as if they no longer were operative. It was one thing to say that in Christ all such demarcations had passed, but it was quite another to try to live one’s life in a world that remained the same.