might have celebrated Passover, especially in the Diaspora. Even whether Paul, in his rejection of many Jewish laws and practices, would have celebrated Passover at all has to be guessed at. At one level this does not matter, and I will come back to the detail of the question in the next chapter. Paul, having been brought up as a devout Jew, and having been a Pharisee for much of his adult life, would have celebrated the Passover regularly before his conversion, and even if he did not continue to do so as a Christian, the way in which he conceived of time would still have been firmly rooted in the Jewish calendar, so the time of year, of itself, would have brought to mind Paschal imagery and practices, even if he was not celebrating them himself. I would want to suggest, however, that Paul probably had celebrated some form of Christian Passover with the community in Ephesus, and what is more, that the meal he refers to in 1 Corinthians was probably a Paschal meal celebrated by the community in Corinth.
Obviously this cannot be proved. Conzelmann, among others, goes out of his way to stress that, unlike Mark and the other Synoptic Gospels, Paul makes no reference to the Passover in his account of the Last Supper (1975, p. 197). However, if it were the case that the meal in question were a Paschal meal, then this would explain, first, the range of Paschal imagery throughout the letter, second, the particular association of the meal with the account of the Last Supper, which, I will argue in the following chapter, may have formed a part of a Christian Passover narrative that Paul may have heard once again in Ephesus, and third, it would explain the eschatological thinking that Paul associates with the meal, as for the Christians the Passover would have been associated with the death and resurrection of Christ rather than, or perhaps as well as, the liberation of the Jews from Egypt (Bruce 1971, pp. 113–14; Segal 1984). What is more, it may explain why the Corinthian community, many of whom were non-Jews, had such difficulties engaging with the meal. They did not really know how to celebrate it, and hence created such difficulties for themselves, with each person or household providing their own food and some even going without. It may also explain why those who were Jews were so offended by this behaviour and reported it to Paul. This does, at the very least, provide a plausible reading of the information contained within the letter.
The rest of Paul’s letters
This explanation would also answer one other very puzzling element of Paul’s other writings. If the meal, with its emphasis on bread and the cup, and its link in some way with the narrative of the Last Supper, was a regular, even weekly event that Paul had established in all the communities he founded and that he also shared in each week wherever he happened to be based (although probably not in prison or while travelling), then why is it that the only reference to it is in the first letter to the Corinthians? Not only does 1 Corinthians provide the only account of what happened at this meal (although it does not even do that), it is also the only direct reference to any kind of communal meal within the whole of Paul’s output (whether that is measured by the traditional attributions or those of recent scholarship). Paul does mention baptism on more than one occasion, and makes a big play of the different ways of understanding baptism and the role it plays within the community and in the lives of individual Christians (Johnson 1999, pp. 22–32). Of course there would have been more baptisms at this time of expansion and evangelical activity than at many other times in the Church’s history. However, baptism would not have been held as frequently as a regular weekly meal. Why is there no other mention of the meal? There is no easy answer to this question except to suggest that there was no regular weekly meal within the communities that Paul founded.
There are three other sections of the letters attributed to Paul where references to a weekly meal might be expected if it existed. The first two raise the question of who can eat with whom: the account of the divisions at Antioch that Paul provides in his letter to the Galatians (2.11–21) and a brief reference to a similar issue in Romans (14.1–23). The third relates to the issues raised by the Pastoral Epistles.
The Galatians material raises a number of complex issues. First, it is necessary to reconcile the account of the dispute at Antioch, as recounted by Paul, with the account in Acts. Having done that, it is important to decide what the real issues were in this dispute. It looks, on the surface, as if the issue concerned the question of whether Jews could share a meal with non-Jews (Esler 1987). Paul said that they could, his opponents argued that they could not. There is scholarly literature to suggest that both positions reflected the accepted position of the time, but the more general view in recent scholarship is that ordinary Jews in the first century, whether in Palestine or the Diaspora, would actually have shared meals with non-Jews with little concern (Sanders 1992, pp. 214–17; Barclay 2001). They would have become unclean in doing so, but this was easy to remedy. It would only be the nature of the food that would have caused problems, and if the Jews and non-Jews each brought their own food then even this could be avoided. It would only be the strictest Jewish groups that would have seen any real problem with this and so, once again, it is necessary to go back and ask what the real issues were in the Antiochene dispute. Unfortunately that is beyond the scope of this particular discussion and I will come back to it in Chapter 5.
Whatever the real issues, however, what is very striking in relation to the discussion in this chapter is that there is no mention of the ‘Lord’s Supper’, or of any other regular cultic meal that the community is obliged to celebrate. The reference in Galatians 2.12 simply says ‘before certain men came from James, he [Peter] used to eat with the Gentiles’. There is no further reference to indicate the context in which this eating takes place. This would be the ideal place to make reference to the regular weekly meal if such existed. Smith takes it for granted that the ‘eating’ in question represents the same basic meal tradition as at Corinth; ‘in other words, what Paul calls “the Lord’s Supper” at Corinth is also what was being practiced at Antioch’ (Smith 2003, p. 174). However, if that is the case then why is this not mentioned explicitly in the text? If Jesus really did institute a regular weekly meal, and if there were some in Antioch who found sharing food with others difficult if not impossible, then once again some reference to Jesus’ command would surely have settled the issue once and for all.
The same argument can also be raised in relation to Romans 14, although this also relates back to the discussions in 1 Corinthians 8—10. As with Galatians 2, however, there is no reference to a specific meal within which, or around which, this discussion takes place. Once again Smith states, ‘in Romans Paul also refers to a church fellowship meal’ (Smith 2003, p. 177), except that he does not. He talks about what individuals feel it is appropriate to eat. At no point in the argument does Paul say that the Roman community should eat any particular thing at any particular meal, and the question that is raised over the wine in verse 21 (it is better not to eat meat or drink wine) would sit very strangely with the Lord’s Supper as outlined in 1 Corinthians. Finally, there is reference in verses 5–6 to days kept sacred or not, depending on the consideration of each individual, making any suggestion that either Paul or the Roman community kept one day a week special with a celebration of a fellowship meal highly problematic.
Unlike the discussion of Galatians or Romans, there is very little scholarly discussion about the place of what might have become the ‘Eucharist’ in the Pastoral Epistles. This is not surprising as there is no direct mention of any meal, or anything that might be considered remotely eucharistic, within these texts. It is generally accepted by modern scholarship that these letters are not by Paul and represent a later development of a Pauline school or community (Pietersen 2004, pp. 4–26). They have features that indicate that the communities they represent are becoming more formal and more highly organized. In particular there is considerable discussion about the role of the overseers, deacons and elders within these texts (MacDonald 1988). Some have argued that these texts are proto-church orders (Pietersen 2004, p. 3), others suggest that this is misleading and that the texts are essentially written to challenge certain factions within the community and to bolster the position of Timothy and Titus (Pietersen 2004). If, however, these texts are concerned, in whatever way, with the role and practice of the leaders of the community, including their role in prayer (1 Tim. 2.1–8), in the public reading of scripture and teaching (1 Tim. 4.13; 2 Tim. 4.2) and in pastoral care (1 Tim. 5.1–25; Titus 2.1–15), why is it that they say nothing about meals (Rowland 1985, pp. 242–3)?
