The Messianic Meal 3

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: 17 November 1998

Abstract

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 | Jesus is a Myth | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | 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

Page Tags: Messianic Meal, Eucharist, Communicating with God, Communion, Last Supper, Bread, Wine, Eating with Publicans, Publicans and Sinners, Mass Feedings, Interpreting the Feedings, Blood, Jesus, Christ, Christian, Christians, Covenant, Essene, Essenes, Jewish, Jews, Kingdom, Mark, Messianic, Paul, Supper

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