MetaCatholic

Michael Bird has drawn attention to an interesting series of posts on Darrell Pursiful’s blog, which I’d not come across before, but shall be adding to my feedreader. He discusses the separation of Eucharist and Agape, and has a lot of useful comment on the topic. He is quite right to state that:

It is universally agreed that the earliest forms of Christian worship were integrally related to the congregation’s communal meal or agape.

I do find myself wondering, however, whether that universal agreement is one that imposes a clearer shape on the evidence than it really admits, even while it seems the most likely overall pattern. I enter the following observations:

• The clearest NT evidence comes from 1 Corinthians. The problem is that in many respects this seems to have been a very atypical church, both in Paul’s day, and at the end of the first century when we encounter it via Clement. Given that the social mores of eating seem to have been a significant problem, how much should we assume about Eucharistic patterns elsewhere?
• The evidence of Jesus’ meals as sacramental of inclusion, forgiveness and the bonds of fictive kinship should not be overlooked as giving some force to the importance of a communal meal. There is no clarity, however, on how these relate to the Last Supper, nor on what seems to have led, quite early on, to a Sunday observance of Jesus’ actions with the bread and wine, taken out of the annual Passover context in which they originated.
• The Didache seems to talk about a eucharistic gathering which comes at the beginning of a meal (Did 9, 10), although exactly what it is describing is not as clear as we would like. But there is another eucharistic reference in Didache 14, which seems not to relate to a meal, but be a more cultic observance (and the first mention of Malachi’s pure sacrifice in relation to the Eucharist).
• I find the evidence of Pliny useful but not unambiguous. While it is most reasonable to assume that the Eucharist was part of their evening meal, it is not impossible that the ritual remembrance of Jesus with bread and wine was connected to the morning oath, and that may be why the evening meal is referred to as food “but ordinary and innocent food”. It is, after all, this latter evening meal that they appear to have given up on Pliny’s direction.

The way Darrell read the evidence, is that the separation of Eucharist and Agape begins to happen sometime between Pliny and Justin. This would be the near universal consensus. But he wants to give far more stress to the continuing pattern of conjoined Eucharist and Agape running alongside the increasingly widespread separation.

What I would suggest may be worth further consideration, however, is the possibility that the pattern of separate Eucharists and Agapes was pretty much always there — perhaps as a function of numbers, perhaps of persecution. At first it was unusual, but later it became more common, before finally displacing the conjoined celebration.