of the ‘hypocritical liars’ who abstain from certain foods (1 Tim. 4.3) and a comment that if any food is ‘received with thanksgiving’ (εuχαριστíας) then it should be considered good. This is not developed, however, into a statement about any kind of regular meal within the community. Timothy is also encouraged to ‘stop drinking only water’ (1 Tim. 5.23), which suggests that some of the ascetic practices that McGowan identifies in a later generation are already present here (McGowan 1999a, pp. 231–3). If a regular meal was taking place within this community, therefore, what might it have consisted of, and would wine have played any part in it?
The overwhelming lack of evidence for regular meals, with ritual significance, in the corpus of Paul’s work, and those other texts that are a product of the school or community associated with him, must be important. I cannot accept that this silence is coincidental and that meals were occurring that had a special place for bread and a cup, blessings, and an eschatological or paschal meaning, but that they were not infringing on Paul’s thinking enough to be mentioned in more than one letter. The only real solution is that they were not a regular or frequent part of the life of the communities Paul founded, or, by implication, of Paul’s own practice. In my view at least, this lack of evidence suggests even more strongly that the meal in 1 Corinthians was probably an event that occurred less frequently than once a week and could possibly have been an annual event associated with the Passover. What I am proposing, therefore, is that the Lord’s Supper was probably a part of the Passover celebrations of the Corinthian community. To justify this assertion, however, the Christian communities beyond Paul’s own orbit need to be looked at much more closely, along with any evidence about the possible celebrations of the Passover within Christianity as a whole at this very early date. That will form the basis for the next chapter.
2
The Passion
At the end of the previous chapter I raised the possibility that the meal presented by Paul in 1 Corinthians was an early form of Christian Passover. This is not the first time that this has been presented, but the idea is usually dismissed, partly because there is very little positive evidence to support it, and partly because the presentation of the idea has often been too specific or too detailed. I am not, in this book, aiming to suggest that the form of an early Christian celebration at the time of the Jewish Passover can ever be known. I am not even suggesting that every Christian community in the middle of the first century must have celebrated a Passover. I am simply offering the possibility that the Lord’s Supper, as outlined in 1 Corinthians, was an annual event, most probably associated with the time of the Jewish Passover. What I hope to do in this chapter, therefore, is to investigate the various texts and ideas that would be needed to support such a minimal contention.
There is one text in particular that is central to this argument and that is the text of the Last Supper. Paul quotes from this text when discussing the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11.23–25), suggesting that such a text, or at least an oral narrative that underlies the text, was available to him in the mid 50s of the first century. The various Gospel versions of the text were compiled, at the earliest, much later in the first century. So what was the source of Paul’s quotation? If it is assumed that the meal was a celebration at the time of the Passover, in some way associated with the death and resurrection of Jesus, then the quotation may have come from a larger narrative of the Passion recounted within the context of the celebration. One writer who has suggested this possibility is Etiene Trocmé in his 1965 book, The Passion as a Paschal Liturgy (1983). Trocmé’s attempt to reconstruct a primitive form of the Paschal liturgy based on much later Christian and Jewish models must be rejected. However, the first half of the book, where he argues that the Passion narrative had an earlier life, before it was combined with other texts to form the Gospels, does deserve further investigation. If this presentation is considered to be possible, or even desirable, as an explanation of the narrative then that has consequences not just for the account in 1 Corinthians, but also for an understanding of the Gospel narratives of the Last Supper.
If Paul is quoting from a larger Passion narrative, whether that existed in textual form or as an oral presentation, then that Passion narrative must have included, even at this early stage, an account of the Last Supper. This probably suggests that the story of the Last Supper developed as part of the larger narrative and may never have existed in its own right as a separate unit. Practically all the studies of the ‘institution narrative’ within liturgical writing have tended to assume the opposite, that in some way the story of the Last Supper is related to the origins of a cultic meal within the Christian community which, while clearly linked to the death and resurrection of Jesus, only comes to be attached to the longer narrative because it has already established itself as the warrant for a weekly event. In this chapter, therefore, I want to propose that the narrative of the Last Supper must be seen as an integral and essential part of the Passion narrative, which in turn is probably independent of the later and longer Gospel accounts. If this can be demonstrated as a plausible reading of the evidence then the possibility of the Passion narrative being developed as part of a very early Christian celebration at the time of the Passover becomes more acceptable. It is in this light, I would suggest, that the accounts of the Last Supper in the various Gospels, as well as in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, need to be analysed.
In this chapter, therefore, I am going to begin with Trocmé’s theory that the Passion narrative existed as a separate unit before the final editing of the Gospels. In particular it is necessary to look at the development and construction of Mark’s Gospel, as this, according to Trocmé, is the place where the Passion narrative and the other elements of the Gospel first come together. I will then go on to look at the range of evidence that is available for the understanding of the Passover within the first-century Jewish and Christian communities. Unfortunately there is very little evidence for either community at this time, and the danger of reading back into this period material that relates to later developments must always be avoided. I will end the chapter by looking at the Last Supper stories as an integral part of the wider Passion narrative and ask what this says about the way in which they should both be understood from a textual and historical point of view.
Trocmé on the Gospel of Mark
Trocmé begins his analysis of The Formation of the Gospel According to Mark by looking at the possible sources of the material contained in the Gospel (1975, pp. 8–86). Having rejected various theories of a ‘proto-Mark’, Trocmé moves on to look at the kind of material that has gone to make up the current text. He identifies a series of sayings, which could be derived from the tradition (pp. 44–5). He notes the miracle stories, which Trocmé argues could only have come from eyewitness accounts or stories circulating among the Christian communities of Galilee (pp. 51–4). The legends surrounding John the Baptist probably come from the same source (pp. 54–6). There are then a series of narratives that contain sayings-type material: the baptism, the transfiguration and the entry into Jerusalem. These sayings are presented either in the form of a word from God or as commentary on Hebrew Bible sources (pp. 56–9). All this leaves the narrative of the Passion, chapters 14–16, which most commentators recognize as being a single coherent unit of a kind very different from the short, almost disconnected, elements of the first 13 chapters (pp. 59–63).
In discussing the Passion, Trocmé refers to the work of Carrington and Schille in order to explore a possible source for the narrative (Trocmé, 1975, pp. 60–1). Carrington argues that the Passion was ‘put together as the megillah, or scroll for reading aloud in public, that was used by the primitive Church for the Christian Easter’ (Trocmé, 1975, p. 61), while Schille ‘thinks that it was the annual commemoration in Jerusalem of Good Friday and Easter that made it necessary to crystallize the memories of the passion’ (Trocmé, 1975, p. 61). Both of these authors, as Trocmé rightly comments, provide too much detail for their theories, which are based on later Jewish or Christian models, and do not really fit the religious and social situation of the first Christian communities. However, Schille does suggest that the first day of the celebration may have consisted of an annual meal accompanied by an account of the last night of Jesus before the betrayal and crucifixion.
