Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: 17 November 1998

Eating with Publicans and Sinners

Levi, son of Alphaeus is recruited sitting at the receipt of custom and therefore assumed to be a the tax-collector, although for all anyone knows he might have been waiting in a queue to pay his tax. However, since Jesus was aiming to save lost Jews, it is reasonable to assume that Levi was indeed the publican. It mirrors the recruitment of the earlier apostles by the Sea of Galilee, the command by Jesus being obeyed hypnotically by the disciple. We can conclude that it is written thus for harmony and it was not the real recruitment of Levi, which we take to have been the incident of the paralytic. It is added here to provide an explicit link to the next story which is about Jesus dining with sinners because Levi in the previous pericope was depicted as a physical paralytic and so could not have also held down a responsible job. In reality he could well have been a tax collector because his paralysis was metaphorical.

A tax collector here is a customs official collecting duty for Herod Antipas. (If we are in Judaea he is collecting tribute.) Coin was unclean and Levi was therefore a Herodian or a Sadduccee and therefore not well regarded by the Jews in general and the Pharisees and Essenes in particular. Tax collectors were dishonest, keeping a proportion of the taxes collected for themselves and extorting money from people. Someone like Levi must have been regarded as the lowest of the low and certainly, as a collaborator with the foreign ruler, an impossible man to recruit for the Jewish nationalist cause. Whence his paralysis in the previous story.

References to tax collectors (or publicans) and sinners in the gospels mean respectively collaborating Jews and Hellenised and therefore apostate Jews. Jesus wanted to give them a last chance to enter God’s kingdom before it suddenly arrived and its gates were shut to all except the righteous.

As Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him. And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners? When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

Mark 2:15-2:17

Taxgatherers were agents of the High Priest, supporters of the Sadducee party of collaborators with the Herodians and the Roman rulers of Judaea. They were among the most hated people in the land yet Jesus, the prospective leader of God’s revolution was dining with them and evidently urging them to join the Nazarenes. The sinners were ordinary Jews, the men of the land, who were not fastidiously observant of the law of Moses, and perhaps also those who were influenced by Greek culture and fashions.

Pharisees shunned such people. Pious Jews in general did not consort with the impious. Essenes and Pharisees alike felt this way in particular because both regarded themselves as separated out. For Jesus impenitent publicans were just as bad as the gentiles (in Mt 18:17, he equates the two), but they were still God’s chosen and therefore worth saving. When C G Montefiore, a Jewish scholar, wrote:

He did not avoid sinners, but sought them out—they were still children of God,

he expressed the sentiment of the Nazarene militants led by Jesus and before him by John, but these sinners had to repent and be baptized to be accepted by the Nazarenes—they could not continue their sinful work. Levi and the publicans and sinners in this episode had repented and had been baptized into God’s army. The meat they were eating was the bread and wine of the messianic meal of the Essenes which signified acceptance among the elect of God.

Mark has placed this episode after the recruitment of Levi to make it sound as if Jesus simply entertained the tax-collector, taking him home to dinner with masses of his friends. Jesus must have had a huge house and resources for a poor man. Can anyone seriously believe that this was merely a banquet? This is a separate incident depicting, not a feast but the messianic meal, called by Christians, the eucharist. It is an instance, like the mass feedings, of the spiritual filling of his converts, not charity or gluttony. Jesus explains:

I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.

Jesus is not charitably feeding down and outs in his mansion but converting Jews who had abandoned their religion by offering them spiritual food, the messianic meal in anticipation of the coming kingdom. The house will have been an Essene communal refrectory—a Bethsaida (House of Food). In the corresponding part of Matthew 9:13 Jesus adds:

I will have mercy and not sacrifice,

quoting Hosea 6:6:

For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings,

as if to demonstrate that he was an Essene, for whom this and Proverbs 15:8:

The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord: but the prayer of the upright is his delight,

a quotation which appears several times in the scrolls, express their beliefs. Matthew repeats the quotation from Hosea later (Mt 12:7). Now Jesus could only have given this quotation in answer to some question. As it is, it is a non sequitur. Some of the repentant, possibly Sadducees, wanted to know why the sinners were not offering a suitable sacrifice of purification—a sin offering—rather than having a simple meal.

Jesus’s reply fully and concisely expresses the Nazarene attitude to the sinners of the children of Israel and it is expressed in a way which perfectly explains the healing miracles as metaphors for those who have repented of their sins. They are healed metaphorically and the physical sicknesses which are healed are really spiritual sicknesses. By winning over some of the opposition your foes are weakened and your own cause is strengthened. Jesus’s mission was to win over the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He wanted as many people among the elect as he could get both to save the lost sheep and to succeed in establishing God’s kingdom. Although it is absent in Mark and placed in different parts of the other gospels (Mt 18:11-14; Lk 15:1-10), the parable of the lost sheep should be placed here: the shepherd rejoices when he finds the one sheep that had strayed of his flock of a hundred. The ninety nine which did not stray are the righteous. They are already in the fold. Luke attaches to his version an equivalent parable, that of the woman who lost one of her ten pieces of silver and sought it diligently until it was found.

The righteous are the elect—the Essenes, who are already saved and will enter the kingdom. There is no need to convert them—they already are prepared. Jesus wanted to save some of those—as many as possible—who were heading for the fires of Gehenna. They were children of God and they were potential fighters for the kingdom in the coming struggle. God would win the war but the immediate battle had first to be won and that needed soldiers—Jews who had repented their sins and were ready to fight for God’s cause.

Luke elsewhere (19:1-10) tries to indicate that Jesus was forgiving the sins of those who continued in the sinful way of collaboration, with his story about Zacchaeus the head of taxgatherers in Jericho, which interpreted correctly has quite a different meaning from that related. Zacchaeus is observing Jesus from a sycomore, a Pharaoh’s fig-tree. The fig-tree in the gospels is a symbol for Rome—Zacchaeus had climbed high in the service of the oppressors. Jesus invites himself to the house of this very rich publican and gives him salvation simply for giving half his goods to the poor and offering reparations to those he has robbed. Yet half was insufficient—it had to be all as Luke himself had already told us (18:21)—and so it remained after the crucifixion—that was still the rule in the Acts of the Apostles. The watering down of the ordinances of the original Jerusalem church is demonstrated here clearly in Luke. The aim was to make Jesus seem tolerant of the friends of Rome and to make Christianity acceptable to rich gentiles in the wider Empire. The story is made into a rehash of the recruitment of Levi.

The scribes and the Pharisees could not have been present in the house with these sinners so one looks at this phrase with suspicion. In reality we can see here dissension in the camp of the Nazarenes. Jesus is recruiting lots of Hellenized Jews, people who were despised by more orthodox Jews. Yet some of Jesus’s followers were orthodox Jews. It is these who question the attention Jesus is paying to the sinners. Thus the question comes to Jesus from members of his own party not from the Pharisaic party. Later it was changed to conform with Christian vilification of Judaism.

Mass Feedings

In Mark, the return of the disciples from their mission is dismissed in a single verse. In fact the woes to the unrepentant cities belong here.

Mark also tells us that Jesus becomes one of the barjonim, having escaped hurriedly to the desert in a boat. To get to the desert by boat from Galilee implies crossing the Sea of Galilee to Decapolis as he had done earlier to cure the Demoniac of Gerasa. But the word used for a lonely or desert place is used in the Septuagint to mean the wilderness which usually meant the Judaean wilderness. If it is considered that the gospel sets the story in Galilee to account for Jesus and his followers being called Galilaeans—rebel followers of the philosophy of Judas the Galilaean—then we can conclude that some of the Galilaean ministry probably happened elsewhere. As an Essene Jesus would have trained his new volunteers at Qumran.

Many people, the simple of Ephraim, had responded to the appeal of the Nazarenes—they had repented and accepted baptism. In the feeding of the five thousand we are told they came out to the desert, probably the wilderness of Judaea, to join his band—they had to be introduced to Essene disciplines. The miracle of the loaves and fishes, an explicit allegory of a training camp, follows. The crowd assemble in companies, they sit down in ranks by hundreds and by fifties an expression reminiscent of the Essenes who, following Exodus 18:21,25, spoke of their ranks as “by thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens”. The Greek implies they look like a well tended vegetable patch, in other words neatly paraded in rows according to military discipline. There is nothing symbolic here—the crowd is explicitly drawn up in military order.

Later, in Mark 8:1-10, is the feeding of the four thousand. There are too many similarities in the two stories to be accidental, not just with the action described but with the whole arrangement of their respective sections—Mark 8:1 to 26 is an almost exact reflection of Mark 6:35 to 7:37. It is just as if some pages of an earlier draft by mishap had been gathered with a later one and have remained there ever since because no one felt able to change the holy book.

These two feeding incidents look like the same one slightly distorted in the telling, especially since the disciples on the second occasion behave as if it had never happened before. In Christian tradition, they are so stupid that even though they had just taken part in an identical miracle, they had forgotten all about it—struck with collective amnesia. Only the stupid could believe such stupidity.

The second account has no mention of assembling in military-like ranks as the other did suggesting deliberate editing. Writing around the time of the Jewish War, Mark would not have wanted to implicate Jesus in soldiering and the edited version was circulated. A few years later after the Jewish capital had been destroyed feelings were not running so high and the fuller version could be reintroduced with no concern about the implication of soldiering because the first Christians had established Jesus’s character as pacific. An editor of Mark found himself with both accounts of a mass messianic meal in the desert, and by intention or error both were bound into the gospel. The authors of the later gospels found mustering in ranks too explicitly military and out of character for their Jesus, so again they omitted it, except in the vestigial form of Luke 9:14.

Once introduced, the second miraculous feeding had to be given a meaning and subsequent editors made sense out of the two by introducing minor symbolic differences, and adding a spurious quizzing—which must be an invention if the two accounts are of the same incident—of the disciples about them by Jesus (Mk 8:14-21). They were made to indicate that Israel, the party to God’s Old Covenant, had been superseded. In its place was the Christian church, party to God’s New Covenant—later translated as New Testament—represented by the seven churches of Asia. The numbers of hampers filled were written in explicitly, and a different Greek word was used for the hamper in each miracle, to imply a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference. After the five thousand were fed twelve hampers of crumbs were gathered. In the parallel feeding of the four thousand, seven hampers of crumbs were gathered. The reading was that the five loaves were the five books of the Torah and the twelve baskets were the twelve tribes of Israel. In the second miracle, theologians deliberately changed both to the number seven symbolically representing the seven churches of Asia and the seventy gentile nations of earth.

The result of the feedings is that more bread remained than they began with. How did Jesus do it? He did not—they weren’t miracles. Though it is something of a convention to denote miracles or other remarkable events with expressions of astonishment, the gospel gives us none—Mark does not explicitly tag the feedings as miraculous. On completion of the muster, Jesus conducted a mass communion. The massed volunteers were received into the company of Essenes with their sacred meal—the messianic meal in which everyone received a small portion of bread and the 4000 or 5000 were spiritually filled. The original incident has been adapted along the lines of 2 Kings 4:43-44 where Elisha carries out a miracle in which small quantities of food suffice for many, with some remaining.

Mark is describing the Pentecostal Essene festival of the renewal of the covenant. This occurred on the feast of weeks, the feast of the new wheat, the Jewish Shavuot, which for Essenes was held on Sunday on the fifteenth day of the third month, Sivan (about the end of May). It celebrated the ingathering of the wheat harvest and naturally would be symbolized by ceremonies involving loaves. The two feedings in the gospel just might represent two separate annual Pentecostal festivals of the renewal of the covenant, suggesting that Jesus campaigned for over one year but less than three years. There is no mention of wine—unless the fish were originally jars of wine—possibly because Christians suppressed it as being too allied in characteristics to the eucharist. However, the vine harvest was not yet due for several more weeks which might account for the absence of wine—Essenes using only grape juice. When unfermented wine was out of season the Essenes, who had immense faith in the purifying power of water, will have used water instead of wine.

The Essenes treated wine with some disdain as a Nazarite sect would. When they made their scriptural interpretations, the Essenes read hyyn which is wine as hwn which is wealth. As they were the poor, they rejected wine as having connotations of wealth, substituting water normally or grape juice in season. The miracle of Cana, given only in John, is a trace of this—because grape juice was unseasonal, water was ritually converted into new wine for ceremonial purposes (the wedding was the eschatological symbol of the uniting of God with Israel). For most of its first four centuries the Christian eucharist was celebrated with bread and water not wine! In 140 AD, Justin Martyr relates how the deacons administer the eucharist to the faithful, giving them bread and water representing the body and blood of Christ! The early Christians were continuing the traditions of of the Essenes whose new wine often meant water.

The association of the Essenes and bread (hw’) is clear in their choice of this festival as their principle one. The Essenes were preparing for the cosmic battle that would inaugurate the kingdom of God by way of God’s miracle on the mount of Olives. The whole event was seen as a re-run of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt into the Promised Land under Moses and completed by Joshua. In this story, the Israelites were nourished by the manna from heaven, a bread of life supernaturally sent by God from heaven. Bread symbolizes life and we can be certain that it is a metaphor for the new life to come in God’s kingdom. John repeatedly (Jn 6:33;35;48;51) has Jesus calling himself the bread of life.

Now, not only does Paul confirm this in 1 Corinthians 10:1-5, where he begins by alluding to Moses, making a reference to the supernatural food and drink provided to the Israelites in the wilderness (Ex 13:21; 14:22; 16:4-35; 17:6; Num 14:29-30; 20:7-11), but quickly turning to Christ, referred to as a rock because he was the “corner stone.” He amazingly concludes with:

For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ. But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted.

Christian commentators claim the Christ mentioned here is the pre-existent Christ but it is much more reasonably taken as the real Jesus. Paul seeks to distance himself and the Christian converts from rumours of the Nazarene followers of Jesus who were overthrown when the Romans counter attacked. Paul relieves Jesus of the blame and puts it on his followers who lusted after evil things.

At the feast of the renewal of the covenant, the mass feedings, the people gathered were being fed in a purely spiritual way as a sacrament. It is identical to the Last Supper but written large—both are descriptions of a symbolic Essene messianic meal. A tiny fragment of bread would serve for a symbolic spiritual feeding, just as it does in the Christian eucharist, and the recipients would have been satisfied because they had been spiritually filled—received into the company of the Nazarenes and the elect of God. The spiritual nature of the feeding is even clear in one of the Christian gospels. Matthew has:

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Mt 5:6

The mass feeding was to fill the Nazarenes’ hunger for righteousness, not to fill their bellies. The clergy have known this for at least a hundred years (since Albert Schweitzer) but they are not keen to tell it to their flock—it would spoil the miracle.

In feeding the five thousand there are two fish. The feeding of the four thousand merely says some fish implying that the number is unimportant, and, since legendary information accumulates with time, confirming that the feeding of the 4000 is the earlier tradition. Nor does Jesus mention fish in the parabolic passage (Mk 8:17-21). He mentions only the five loaves, five thousand and twelve hampers, and the seven loaves, four thousand and seven hampers. “Having eyes, see ye not; having ears, hear ye not?”, Jesus asks them—but does not explain. Apparently the fish do not matter. The symbol of the fish became important to Christians later and is being imported anachronistically into Mark’s gospel. At some stage in the tradition the original seven loaves are varied into five loaves and two fish possibly because someone who saw no symbolism in the feeding felt it inconceivable that fishermen in Galilee would have no fish. Curiously fish and grain in Hebrew are closely related words, possibly inviting confusion. John 6:9 adds the detail that the loaves were of barley, the grain of the poor, tying in with the Ebionim, though the festival was that of wheat.

The twelve baskets of crumbs (morsels of bread, akin to the wafers of the eucharist) were present at the start of the feeding. God had divided His people into twelve tribes and Jesus reflected this in his choice of twelve apostles. It signifies the children of Israel, the original chosen of God—the Old Covenant. Jesus, conducting the ritual, brandishes seven loaves, representing the perfect of God—the New Covenant. The loaves and baskets were explained by Jesus in terms of the end of the world, and using the analogy of Elisha. The twelve tribes of Israel reach the kingdom of God (everlasting life) portrayed as bread provided in twelve baskets, by the action of the remnant of Israel, the elect of God, the Essenes, indicated by the seven loaves. Seven is the Old Testament number of perfection and so represents the Essenes, who attempted to be perfect like God—the New Covenant. They would have noticed that 5 + 7 = 12 meaning that the Pentateuch and the perfect of God—the law and the prophets (it seems Essenes also thought of themselves as prophets)—added up to the saving of the children of Israel in the kingdom to come. At some stage the perfect number seven became implicit and the Pentateuch explicit leading to the variant tradition which is recorded in the earlier feeding. Soon afterwards the Nazarenes had appointed seven deacons (Acts 6:3), and later the Christians had seven churches.

Note, though they were supposed to be at a lonely place in the desert to the east of the lake, people were able to walk there quicker than Jesus could get there by boat, and they were sufficiently near some adequate source of food because the disciples offered to go buy some. These are Mark’s way of decorating the story. He had no knowledge of the area or assumed his readers had none.

Among the scrolls the rules of the festival of the renewal of the covenant have not survived, and so we do not know what the proceedings were in detail. But we know the elect were mustered and had to account for themselves, finally being assessed and regraded. It must have taken several days. Here there is the suggestion that the ritual feeding takes place after three days (Mk 8:2), not a long time for assessing 4000 people, assuming that the feeding was the termination of the proceedings, unless the assessment was perfunctory for most. Since the kingdom was imminent, the grading will have become perfunctory, sincere repentance being acceptable to the Master and to God. If people were not sincere, God would judge them accordingly.

Interpreting the Feedings

In Mark 8:14-8:21, a speech of Jesus in which he likens the kingdom of God to bread is used by the evangelist as another occasion to denigrate the chosen disciples as idiots. Inserted as it is here, it seems to occur on a boat but of course it did not.

Disciples who supposedly have just witnessed two miraculous mass feedings squabble because they have only one loaf of bread with them. You have to admit that this is laying it on a bit thick. Jesus spoke about leaven as part of the mass registration of the Nazarenes. Many of these people would have been Hellenized Jews—Jews who had largely lapsed in Jewish practice under the influence of Romano-Greek culture—but, in view of the coming kingdom, glad to be accepted as part of the chosen. These were the sinners and tax collectors. They could not be expected necessarily to understand common scriptural symbolism let alone the arcane speeches of the Nazarene. (Where genuine misunderstandings are recorded in Mark they are not the misunderstandings of the apostles but of ordinary disciples.)

Note that Mark expressly says that an underlying meaning is to be perceived here—Jesus tells us so—proving once again that allegorical meanings have to be sought in the parables. Mark records a trace of Jesus’s parabolic speech. It is about the kingdom of God expressed as baskets of the life giving bread and the tiny remnant of God, the elect or perfect, the seven loaves which will trigger its introduction. First he warns against Pharisaism and Sadducaism, inevitably using a bread and growth metaphor.

Leaven is a small piece of dough used to prove the new bread—to make it rise. It has not been baked so is corruptible—it can ferment or become fusty. (Leaven therefore represents evil in the surviving Jewish tradition—the rabbinic.) The leaven of the Pharisees and the Herodians (Sadducees) is corrupt and can yield no bread of life—no entry to the kingdom of God. So it is with their teaching of the kingdom. Matthew gives the correct interpretation in 16:12. By mentioning two of Josephus’s philosophies of the Jews, Mark implies that Jesus belongs to the third main philosophy, the Essenes.

Whereas Mark has been keen to explain parables for his readers, he fails to do so here because to do so would remove the miraculous elements from the feeding miracles. It is because the true interpretation is so much at variance with the Marcan illusion that Christian scholars label this as a particularly difficult passage. Being interpreted, this means they can make no sense of it as scholars that does not impinge upon their beliefs as Christians.

The Last Supper

The Romans had counter attacked, the temple was lost, Galilaeans were killed and the Tower of Siloam had collapsed. The Nazarenes had been beaten but Jesus was not about to surrender. He had done all he thought was necessary and now expected God’s miracle, prophesied in Zechariah 14:4. It was likely to happen on the anniversary of the previous visitation—Passover night. Shortly they would go armed to the Mount of Olives overlooking the city to wait for it. The Nazarenes had temporarily freed the Holy City from its enemies. Now it was up to God to complete the task as he had promised. Jesus wants his men to wait and watch for the signs of the miracle.

The basic tradition here is genuine. Jesus withdrew to take a meal with his closest associates. We know it as the “Last Supper.” If the meal was a Passover meal, it was an unusual one. There is no mention of lamb being served, and, indeed, how would fugitives have got the lamb sacrificed by the Levites at the temple ready for a Passover supper in a secret location. Nor is there mention of bitter herbs or the dip called “haroseth,” though this might be implied (Mk 14:20). These problems do not arise in both John’s gospel and the Talmud because they say that Jesus was hanged on the day before the Passover.

The Essene ritual meal was for only the pure and Jesus believed that God would intervene only if they were all sufficiently pure of spirit. The community, whether in the monastery or the camps, was bonded by this common meal. Only the perfect were allowed to partake of it and, in particular, to partake of the new wine which is to say the unfermented grape juice of the congregation. The Community Rule says that whenever as many as ten members of the community gathered for a meal they took their seats in the order of their rank, and the priest presided. No one could touch the bread or new wine until the priest had stretched out his hand to bless them.

But in the Rule of the Congregation at a meeting of ten or more “men of renown,” leaders of the council of the community, the messiah is present and takes bread and wine after the priest but before the others did according to their seniority. Since the sacred meal anticipates the banquet in the kingdom at the end of days, they assume the participation of the messiah to be symbolic—he was present only in spirit. But, from the description, it sounds as if the messiah were really there—the Nasi, on ceremonial occasions playing the role of the messiah.

Jesus, the prophet, priest and prince, treats the Last Supper as a messianic meal not a Passover meal, though for an Essene it was both. It was the last chance and the best one for a miracle, and so he was, for once, sure that God’s appointed time for the visitation had come and pledges to his disciples:

Verily, I say unto you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

The statement Luke puts in the mouth of Jesus on the cross belongs here:

Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

A Jewish day begins at sunset, and the Essene one might have begun at sun up, so a miracle which happened in the early hours of the morning, as Jesus expected, would have been on the same day. Jesus would not partake in another ritual meal before the miracle happens. His next meal would be the prophesied messianic meal in the kingdom, after the general resurrection.

The messianic meal comes from Isaiah 25:6 where only two items of the menu are mentioned—fat things full of marrow and wine on the lees. As a priest in the service of God, Jesus was not allowed wine (Lev 10:9) and prophets could drink no wine according to Amos 2:12 because they were Nazarites, dedicated to God. Jesus was both priest and prophet. In Mark, the fruit of the vine is unfermented grape juice not alcoholic wine and one suspects that is what “wine on the lees” means. It is unracked and probably unfermented wine. Essenes were a priestly order and were Nazarites: they did not drink wine.

Now if the Nazarene leadership were to accept the prophet’s description of the messianic meal, lamb would have been included as a fat thing full of marrow but in fact the Essenes went by Hosea’s dictum (Hos 6:6):

I desire mercy not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

This is echoed several times in the Dead Sea literature. For the Nazarenes, the Passover meal probably did not include the fat thing anyway for the Passover meal and the messianic meal on this occasion were one and the same thing, but governed by Essene observances not rabbinic. The Last Supper is not the Passover meal of rabbinic Judaism but an Essene messianic meal dressed up later by Christians according to Paul’s prescription in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26:

The Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread and when he had given thanks, he break it and said: Take, Eat: This is my body which is broken for you: This do in remembrance of me. After the same manner he also took the cup when he had supped, saying, This cup is the New Testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink, in remembrance of me.

Paul was writing about 20 years before Mark so the symbolism of the tradition came from Paul—who had never known Jesus when he was alive—though not the idea of the meal itself.

Luke 22:19 follows Mark 14:22 except in some words which are close to Paul’s wording in 1 Corinthians 11:24, specifically using “eucharisteo,” “gave thanks,” instead of the “blessed” of Mark and Mathew. Luke also elaborates Mark in verse 20: “and the cup in like manner after supper” following 1 Corinthians 11:25. Some copyists saw the implication that these instructions had come from Paul not Jesus and deliberately omitted “after supper” from the verse.

Paul gives no clue that the meal was originally the Passover meal whereas it’s close affinity with the Essene messianic meal is undeniable. Jesus could have had no purpose in devising such a ritual because, for him, the miracle inaugurating the kingdom was due within hours.

Paul’s liturgy seems to follow Essene ritual quite closely, which would suggest that Paul knew it well. It is quite likely Paul trained as an Essene himself. His New Testament is not the collection of books that Christians revere but the “New Covenant” that God made with his “elect,” the Essenes. The word “testament” is the same as “covenant” in Greek. The Old Covenant was that of God with the Israelites and was sanctified with a sprinkling of blood (Ex 24:8).

In 2 Corinthians 3:1-3, Paul sneers at people arriving in Corinth with letters of recommendation authorizing them to preach the gospel. Plainly these are emissaries from the Essene Jerusalem Church intent on correcting Paul’s errors. Paul alludes to Jeremiah 31:33, the passage that suggested the founding of a New Covenant in which the law would be inscribed on the hearts of God’s people—the Essenes. He implies that because the Corinthian converts have had Christ written on their hearts through Paul’s preaching, no other letters were necessary. Paul quite often uses the beliefs of the Essenes, suitably turned, to score points off the envoys of the Jerusalem Church. Paul effectively redefines the New Covenant as the New Testament, neatly pinching it from the Essenes. It all shows that Paul was totally familiar with Essene ways of thinking, a result of his three years in “Arabia.”

Paul’s blood of the New Covenant in the liturgy of the eucharist must therefore go back to the messianic meal, but he Paganized it to make it closer to the practices that gentiles understood. Essenes before Jesus sanctified the New Covenant with the new wine symbolizing the blood of the Old Covenant, not the blood of Jesus. In Jeremiah 31:30-31, sour grapes, which set your teeth on edge, are used as a metaphor for sin. That might be why the New Covenanters drank new wine—unfermented grape juice. It symbolized their sin and reminded them that they had to strive for perfection. It is doubtful though that this “blood,” even symbolically, would have been drunk by Jews for whom such a thought would have been abhorrent. Some wine would simply have been sprinkled to symbolize the covenant, but it would have been drunk simply as wine. Paul introduced the drinking of it in the Pagan fashion.

The meal as an institution therefore preceded the Last Supper and evidence occurs in the gospels in the ritual nature of eating and drinking in several passages, some of which precede the last supper. They use the same ritual formula involving the same four verbs “took,” “blessed,” “broke” and “gave,” used in order. They appear, unsurprisingly in the Last Supper accounts beginning with Mark 14:22:

And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body.

Matthew 26:26 repeats the formula exactly and Luke 22:19 with evident regard to Paul, as we noted. But they had also appeared in Mark 6:41—during the mass feeding!

And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all.

Matthew 14:19 and Luke 9:16 have exactly the same formula. In Luke 24:30, Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, after the crucifixion meets two Nazarenes:

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.

The liturgical formula appears again in the non-canonical Gospel of the Hebrews 9 in which Jesus and James the Just partake of the bread and wine.

Plainly, a fixed liturgy is associated with a special meal and, because it was used at the mass feedings, it preceded the Last Supper and was not instituted in the way that Christians believed, but was inherited by the Nazarenes from the Essenes. The two Nazarenes did not recognize “Jesus” until he performed the ritual associated with the messianic meal! Yet, they were not present at the Last Supper nor could have known about Christ’s instructions.

Both the Community Rule (1QS 6:5) and the Messianic Rule (1QSa 2:20) are explicit that the presiding priest at the messianic meal takes the bread first and blesses it before anyone else can take any. The first two verbs in the ritual are therefore certain in the Essene ritual. The others might be inferred since the obvious way to ensure that no one else takes the bread improperly is for the presiding priest to give portions to the others lower in rank, and so on down the line.

Typically, the scholars quibble about whether the source was Pagan or Jewish, rarely considering that both had their influence, through Paul. Much scholarly opinion agrees that the eucharistic ritual grew out of Jewish sources rather than Pagan ones, though similar rituals occurred in Pagan religions too, but scholarship typically neglects the obvious source, the Essenes, because it is too likely to provide the answers. E J Kilmartin says all the elements of the eucharist were “native to Jewish thought and hence point to a Palestinian origin completely independent of Greek mystery religions,” except that Paul’s words put an unmistakeably Pagan interpretation on to the otherwise Essene “elements”. So, R Bultmann, who finds the origin of the eucharistic words in the gentile Church, is also correct.

In 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Paul gives no indication of the origin of the words he proposes and authoritative scholars agree that they were used in conjunction with the derivative of the messianic meal celebrated by the first gentile Christians, and the myth of their institution at the Last Supper was invented to account for them. Paul shows negligible interest in the teachings of Jesus except for this one significant example, so this too will be Paul’s not Jesus’s invention.

The Didache

The apostles were still teaching of the coming kingdom after the death of Jesus when the converts partook of their joyful eschatological breaking of bread in Acts 2:42,46. The meal was then still the messianic meal of the Essenes, though the new wine is not mentioned, perhaps because it was merely blessed water. Bruce Chilton agrees that the pre-Pauline primitive eucharists were celebrations of purity in anticipation of the kingdom of God.

Soon, beyond Palestine, the faithful of the newly founded gentile Christian religion were also meeting to eat a meal together in anticipation of the return of their god. This was the messianic meal of the apocalyptic Essenes transferred into the wider Empire by the apocalyptic Christians, but shortly to acquire a distinctly Pagan interpretation. That this “body and blood” interpretation was a Hellenistic invention is confirmed by the lack of evidence for it in Palestinian and Syrian Christian texts.

The reconstruction of the gospel source Q shows Jesus as a redeemer but makes no reference to the cross or to the body and blood sacrament. The same is true of the Gospel of Thomas. There is no hint of the eucharist in the Epistle of James, which is accepted by most as genuinely early, and is probably Essene. Christians have rejected almost everything written in the first century except the books of the New Testament and the epistles of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp.

Only one other work is admitted as authentic, the Didache or Doctrine of the Apostles, which teaches the Way of Life and the Way of Death (The Two Ways). Parts of it are closely parallelled by passages in the Talmud, suggesting a pre-Christian Jewish source. It was written before 90 AD and indeed some Christian scholars freely admit that the sections dealing with the eucharistic meal are so early that they must stem from the immediate post-crucifixion period. Harnack thought it was Jewish. The CE says:

Beyond doubt we must look upon the writer as living at a very early period when Jewish influence was still important in the Church.

The truth is that a work, certainly in part this early and apocalyptic in theme, seems likely to be originally Essene not Christian, but slightly edited for early Christians, after the Jewish War. The earliest version does not mention Jesus, but Christians, perhaps initially of the Jerusalem Church, wrote Jesus into it before the Jewish War and added some rules of Christian worship. Like Mark and the early versions of Matthew, the Didache has no virgin birth or miracles, although Jesus is called a Son of God. Christian revision will have been completed around 120 AD, and thereafter it served a Christian community in Syria as a “Church Order”.

The twelve apostles of the title of the Didache are not the accepted apostles of Jesus, but are the original twelve sons of Jacob who in the Jewish foundation myth founded the twelve tribes of Israel. The apostles discussed in the text are an order of itinerant preachers, along with prophets and doctors (or teachers), but Christianity, if it had followed Paul from the start could not have had an order of apostles other than the Twelve and Paul and a few who had seen Jesus and been “called by him”. Here apostles seem more general and more common than these privileged few since any Christian community could expect visits from them:

Let every apostle who cometh unto you be received as the Lord.

Didache 11:4

An earlier passage says the same of true teachers who…

…come to add to your righteousness, and the knowledge of the Lord, receive him as the Lord.

Didache 11:2

This is precisely how the Cathars regarded their Perfects. The Didache says:

If thou art able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord, thou wilt be perfect, but if thou art not able, what thou art able, that do.

Didache 6:2

It is a concise description of the Cathar division into Perfecti and Credentes, and reflects the Essenes’ division into the celibate order of Perfectly Holy Ones or Saints, and village Essenes who married and led a family life. The Didache allows apostles, doctors (didaskaloi) and prophets to be received into a household, but for no more than two days, and forbids them to order a meal and eat of it themselves, or ask for gifts or money, though they can ask for charity for others who are needy. Any supposed apostle who does any of these things is a false prophet—a sponger. However, those who have skills or crafts can justifiably be employed, though they must work for their living, not sponge on their reputation, since those who do are “Christ-mongers” (Christemporos, those who profit in the name of Christ—a condemnation of most Christian churches and preachers)! Here is another link with the peripatetic Cathars and Waldenses of the middle ages. Many were travelling craftsmen, and seemed to have been important in starting the crafts guilds.

In the last days false prophets and seducers shall be multiplied, and the sheep shall be turned into wolves, and love shall be turned into hate, and because iniquity aboundeth they shall hate each other, and persecute each other, and deliver each other up, and then shall the Deceiver of the world appear as the Son of God, and shall do signs and wonders, and the earth shall be delivered into his hands, and he shall do unlawful things, such as have never happened since the beginning of the world.

Didache 16:3-4

This astonishing passage could easily be read as that the Jesus of the gospels could be the Deceiver of the World—Satan. Jesus was himself preaching the end of the world, but it never came as he expected. Essenes and Ebionites could have respected him as a brave leader who died for their cause, but the basic premise, that the last days were due, still pertained for Essenes after Jesus was crucified. The archangel Michael was thought by the Essenes to lead the hosts of God at the End. Hellenized Jews and gentiles gave this role to the crucified man, but now returning, or coming again! Essenes and Ebionites could not accept this, and were marginalised, then expunged—unless they survived as the Bogomiles and Cathars. The few references to Jesus and the gospels in the Didache could have been interpolated to Christianize it, but it sounds much more like Catharism.

The Didache also tells its readers not to eat food offered to idols, assumed to mean the flesh of animals. The connexion with idols refers to meat eating generally. Most poor people could not afford meat, and only had it when sacrifices were being offered, when either joints of the sacrificed animals were sold off in butchers or a feast was given in the temple. Indeed, if the document had originally been Jewish, an Essene manual, then the reference must have been to sacrifice in the Jewish temple, rejected by the Essenes. Paul argues that to eat meat is commended by God as neither good nor bad but to be seen eating it does not give a good example to weaker members of the sect. He concludes:

Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend. 

1 Cor 8:13

Paul unquestionably says the same in Romans:

One indeed believes to eat all things but being weak, another one eats vegetables. The one eating, do not despise the one not eating. And the one not eating, do not judge the one eating, for God received him.

Rom 14:2 Lit

The conventional translation makes the weak one the vegetable eater, but it is a matter of punctuation. The verbs used for eating (“esthio”) in the next verse all are the one used for the herb eater, so the verb used of the meat eater (“phago”), a flesh eater, makes him stand out. The subsequent verbs imply that members of the community would not be flesh eaters (phagocites!) but would be eating herbs. The point is that they must not judge the convert who joins though he is eating flesh. God had received him, and he would learn. Interestingly, some animal bones, found at Qumran seem out of character for a sect that had rejected temple sacrifice. It was assumed that these were items of food. Perhaps so, but there were relatively few of them, and they might simply have been for passers by, who were not converted to the order and still ate meat. Perhaps some village Essenes still did. It ought to be a problem for Christians in the western world who are fond of steaks and joints, but it is not.

The Eucharist

The Didache gives instructions for the meal which was held, it says, on Sundays.

But concerning the Eucharist, after this fashion give ye thanks. First, concerning the cup. We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine, David thy Son, which thou hast made known unto us through Jesus Christ thy Son; to thee be the glory for ever. And concerning the broken bread. We thank thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou hast made known unto us through Jesus thy Son; to thee be the glory for ever.

Didache 9:1-3

The eucharistic ritual, like the baptismal one, was simple. Only at the end of the first century had both become complicated, the baptism in being a preparation for the catechumens, a reversion to Essene intiatiation once the idea of the End Time had passed over, and the eucharist lacked the later elaborate prayers. Here, the End was still expected, and those conducting the eucharist were allowed to extemporize the liturgy. A cup of the “holy wine of David” was passed round, no reference being made to Christ’s blood. In parallel passages elsewhere, we read of the blood of the vine of David:

It is [Christ] who has poured out the Wine, the Blood of the Vine of David, upon our wounded souls.

Clement of Alexandria, Quis div

Before we are inebriated with the Blood of the True Vine which ascends from the root of David.

Origen

Then the bread described as the “life and knowledge made known to us by Jesus” was handed out. Then the group ate heartily, giving thanks at the end. The division between wine and bread is known in the Essene holy meal, and the Didache suggests that the wine is associated with the king and so the Essenic kingly messiah, while the bread was associated with the saviour (Jesus, God’s Saviour), perhaps the priestly messiah. Christians believed Jesus was both, and the Essene writings suggest that a single messiah incorporating both roles was possible. Interestingly, David becomes a type of Dionysos, the wine god, and Jesus a type of Ceres, the grain goddess. At Eleusis, the two were honoured together, Dionysos originally having been a grain god, until everyone took to drinking wine instead of beer. The question is, “Was David originally the Jewish Dionysos, not a tenth century BC king?”.

Evidently, the Christians had adopted the Essenic messianic meal, but Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11:21, complained that some regarded it as a free meal and an opportunity to get drunk—literally believing David was Dionysos? Even so early it had degenerated into an unruly occasion—you could not expect Romans to stick to “new” wine. The simple truth is that years after the Last Supper no miracle had occurred and the messianic meal of the Essenes had degenerated among the gentiles into a free for all. Paul had to give them a deeply venerable way of thinking about it. Urging decorum, Paul tells them it is a sacred meal involving the body of Christ and explains its origins at the Last Supper when, he gives his new interpretation of Essene liturgy. Jesus instructed his disciples to break bread and pass a cup in remembrance of him.

Indeed, Paul did more than that. The messianic meal was a brotherly communion for the Essenes, who considered themselves the New Covenant with God, and a celebration of the expectation of the coming life with God in the kingdom. But the popular religions among the gentiles of the Roman Empire at that time were the mystery religions which all involved some sort of communion rite whereby the mystai partook of something symbolising the body of a sacrificed god and thereby became a part of him. Paul simply introduces exactly the same rite into Christianity using the, already established, messianic meal as its basis. He uses the word communion (1 Cor 10:16) of the blood and the body of Christ:

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?

He warns against similar ceremonies for pagan gods whom he calls devils. Here is the Christian origin of the eucharist or sacrament.

This rite is of pagan origin many centuries before the Christian era. Communion with their god to achieve immortality we saw was a feature of the mystery religions. The purpose of the pagan meal was as a communion—consuming food symbolising the body of the god to unite the god with the worshipper. The concept of eating human flesh and blood, even symbolically, is disgustingly primitive, a huge step back from the celebration of future rewards for the righteous. Primitive societies believe that cannibalism can be used to confer the qualities of the person eaten to the person eating. It is a slight step to eating a person assumed to be a god incarnate to get the qualities of the god himself. If cannibalism had died out in the Roman Empire by the time of Christ, rites that imitated it were very common. Ceres, the goddess of corn, gave her flesh to eat, and Bacchus, the God of wine, gave blood to drink. In the mysteries of Dionysus the baked image of a child was eaten. The first Christians must have been quite familiar with such cannibalistic rituals. Words like John 6:53:

Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood shall have eternal life,

were written by someone who regarded eating human flesh as normal, at least symbolically—an initiate into the mysteries of Dionysus who ate raw flesh as a communion?

For Jews consuming blood was taboo, even symbolically. A devout Jew like Jesus could not possibly have said such things. He did not—it was Paul, who, if he was Jewish as he claimed, was a proselyte. Later, Paul’s instructions appear as real history, as if they had come from Jesus at the Last Supper. While distributing bread to his disciples, Jesus supposedly said, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Mt 26:26). While handing round the consecrated cup, he enjoined, “Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Mt 26:27). And the legend grows with time. The references to Jesus’s blood are slight in Mark and Luke, have “for the remission of sins” added in Matthew, and are extensive in John.

Around 100 AD the Christian meal of remembrance was a sacramental rite in which water was used not wine. Pliny speaks of the meal in 112 AD saying that it was quite innocent. In 140 AD, Justin Martyr describes how the faithful receive bread and water representing the body and blood of Christ from the deacons. The use of water reflected the Essene use of water as new wine, but at the suppression of paganism at the end of the fourth century, water was forbidden because of its pagan associations.

Christian writers have had to explain the similarity of the eucharist to pagan sacraments such as those of Mithras. Just as in the early Christian eucharist, bread and water were his sacred victuals. The Persians, Pythagoreans, Essenes and Gnostics used water not wine. The sighnificance of the bread and wine or water seems not to have differed for pagans or Christians. It was symbolic for both, although a Christian writer avows:

in the sacrament of the altar are the natural body and blood of Christ, verily and indeed.

Cicero, some forty years before the birth of Christ, asked (De Natura Deorum 3:16:41):

How can a man be so stupid as to imagine that which he eats to be a God?

Being written in Latin, it might be rendered:

Is anyone so mad as to believe that the food which he eats is actually a god?

Cicero was using Posidonius and the Stoic writers and will have taken the idea from them. In pre-Christian days it will have referred to the initiation of the Orphics, who ate the raw flesh of a goat, considered to be the god, before they rejected flesh forever and became vegetarians. Under Christianity, we have not progressed far, have we?

The ancient Brahmins are said to have had a kind of eucharist called “prajadam.” Indeed, the Mass or Holy Communion, involving the sacrifice of bread and water or wine, was common to many ancient religious orders and nations. The early Church Fathers Justin Martyr and Tertullian tried to denigrate the sacred meals of the pagans by saying that demons had copied the Lord’s Supper from Christianity—only evil supernatural entities would want to pre-empt God’s institutions:

The devil led the heathen to anticipate Christ with respect to several things, as the mysteries of the Eucharist.

Tibullus wrote, “The pagan appeased the divinity with holy bread,” and, in a panegyric on Marcella, wrote, “A little cake, a little morsel of bread, appeased the divinities.”

Paul copied, as a part of his professedly new and spiritual system, an old pagan rite, one of the most ancient and widely-extended formulas they had. Yet, though it existed long before among Jews and pagans, the Christian church persists in saying Christ started this rite to remind Christians of his sufferings and sacrifice, The Old Testament itself admits the ritual of bread and wine is age old and therefore did not first come from Christ and cannot be Christian in origin:

And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine, and he was the priest of the Most High God.

Gen 14:18

Because this Melchizedek is a priest of the Most High God, and showed so much respect to Abraham, it is assumed by Christian writers, that he was a Jewish priest and king. He is an incarnation of the son of God, but throughout the Jewish Scriptures the Jews never had a king or priest by that name. Curiously, Eupolemus tells us that the temple of Melchizedek was the temple of Jupiter in which Pythagoras studied philosophy. According to some writers, the name is synonymous with Moloch, the Phoenician God of war. Strange, then, that Melchizedek should be claimed as a priest and king among the Jews. Be this as it may, the case proves that the ceremony of offering bread and wine existed long before the era of Jesus Christ.

The original messianic meal of the Nazarene tradition was altered by Paul into a communion after pagan models. The aspect of the eucharist of a rehearsal for a messianic banquet shortly to be held diminished when the end of the world did not come, and the idea of mystic communion gained importance as Christianity developed in its pagan environment. As a mystic communion it did not need to be a meal, it needed only to symbolise the sacrifice of the dead god, and so the bread and new wine of the original meal came to symbolize the body and blood of the god as Paul had instructed.

From this the idea of transubstantiation developed so that real bread and wine became actual flesh and blood. Loaves were even made in the image of a man and the faithful had different parts depending on their social rank, a practice eventually forbidden. Of course the reason why the bread always looked and tasted like bread was because God realised how awful it would be for humans to eat human flesh so he successfully hid its real nature from the communicants. This whole nonsense is because of the adoption by Christianity of pagan sacraments.

The ceremony, the Paschal supper, the Lord’s supper of the Christians, began in antiquity as a festival of joy to celebrate the passage of the sun across the equinox of spring. At the crossing of the celestial equator, the cruel winter sun was crucified and the benigh summer sun ascended into the heavens to warm and fertilize the earth. But Christians are sensitive over any suggestion that the sacrament othe eucharist has its percursors or parallels in the mystery religions. They claim that it is not clear “that the sacred meals of the mysteries were media of communion with the deity” and nor were they “theophagic” meals. The omophagia of the Dionysus cult, whatever it represented in ancient times, was not seen in the same light in the founding years of Christianity, Christians assert. And just in case that fails to convince, they tell us, in any case it had died out except by peasants in remote and uncivilised places like Crete, a remote and uncivilised spot for the sake of this argument, until the fourth century!

From Brad

I find it interesting that Christianity can deny having pagan influences when the New Testament itself has an excellent example of one being incorporated into the Jesus story. Jesus, in a new ritual of salvation, commands his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood (Jn 6:53-54). This directly contradicts Yehouah who clearly states that the consumption of blood in any form is abomination in the eyes of the Lord (Lev 17:10,12). Christians would have the world believe that a God, who ordered a man put to death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath, would abandon his own perfect (Ps 19:7) and eternal (Ps 119:152,160) laws and start advocating the very practice he told people never to do. The standard apologetic that the blood Jesus told his followers to drink was really only wine also falls flat. Christians don’t get any help from Jesus in escaping the contradiction because Jesus declared that symbolic sin was real sin (Mt 5:28). The idea that God of the Old Testament would throw out his prior instructions to his people and then endorse the drinking of wine, pretending it was the blood of a human sacrifice, ruins the moral credibility of the bible God. If an act which is abomination in one time period becomes endorsed and advocated in another, that is the essence of moral relativism, or ethics based on situation. This issue illustrates with scriptural evidence that there was “borrowing” by Christianity from some type of Pagan mystery religion. This new blood (symbolic or otherwise) drinking ritual which the New Testament introduces, is certainly not anything the God of the Old Testament would instruct his people to do.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History