figures within this tradition were Gerd Theissen and Wayne Meeks, both of whom undertook detailed sociological analysis of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (Theissen 1982; Meeks 1983). In their work both scholars explored the social context of the meal described in chapter 11 of the letter and both developed theories about the nature and form of the community and the meal itself. Neither, however, went so far as to speculate as to the origins of the meal within the early Christian communities. I will come back to look at their work in more detail in Chapter 1. Their approach, however, and the tradition of social-scientific criticism that developed out of it, did inspire a number of authors who have asked more direct questions about the origin of the Eucharist, what Rouwhorst describes as the new paradigm in origins studies (Rouwhorst 2007). In this section I want to focus on just three of those who have been particularly influential, Andrew McGowan (1999a), Dennis Smith (2003) and Paul Bradshaw (2004).
In some ways McGowan’s book Ascetic Eucharists (1999a) does not belong in this survey, as he is not strictly speaking aiming to provide a theory of origins. In fact he makes clear on a number of occasions that he is not going to discuss the question of the origins of the Eucharist at all. However, he is exploring what he calls ‘eucharistic meals’ in the first few centuries of the Christian community and he establishes two basic principles that are central to all the texts that follow him. First, McGowan begins with an exploration of food and society. He stresses that any investigation of meals within the Christian communities of the first three or four centuries have to be set within the food culture of the period, most specifically that of the Graeco-Roman world. Second, he stresses that it is important to look at all the texts as they stand rather than try to link them all together, and takes the possibility of diversity within Christian practice as a starting point. His interest is primarily in those eucharistic meals that appear in the literature to involve bread and water rather than bread and wine. Others, including Lietzmann, have discussed these texts in passing but have either seen them as anomalous or as heretical and therefore have not focused on them as a specific eucharistic tradition. For McGowan the bread and water tradition is as important and as interesting as the bread and wine tradition, and this forms the focus of his work.
McGowan starts with a theoretical chapter focusing on the cultures of food, drawing primarily on the work of Mary Douglas (1966, 1970, 1972), and the idea of diversity. He then moves on to look more closely at the food culture of the Graeco-Roman world. He focuses specifically on the eating of meat and the drinking of wine and associates this with what he calls the ‘cuisine of sacrifice’ (1999a, pp. 60–7). In identifying a code of food practices that are associated with sacrifice McGowan can then look at those who reject this code, both in relation to Jewish meals and to what he calls ‘ascetic meals’ (1999a, p. 67) among certain philosophical schools within the Graeco-Roman world. Asceticism, he stresses, is not just about the rejection of all food, it has to be constructed within the wider food culture and can only be understood in terms of what is rejected from that culture. In the Graeco-Roman world McGowan sees asceticism as primarily a rejection of the cuisine of sacrifice and therefore as a rejection of meat and wine. It is in this context that he moves on to look at Christian meals.
An important central chapter provides a survey of foodstuffs mentioned by Christian texts in the first three or four centuries and he identifies the sharing of bread, wine, oil, cheese, vegetables and other foodstuffs among specific communities and sometimes more generally within communal meals. Out of this he identifies a specifically bread and water tradition of eucharistic meals that is associated with a number of texts, primarily the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles but also other related texts from the eastern empire and beyond. What McGowan identifies through a close analysis of these texts is a similar rejection of the cuisine of sacrifice that he had already identified among Cynics and other groups within the wider Graeco-Roman culture. What he argues, therefore, is that this ascetic tradition, developing in Palestine or Syria from a very early date within the Christian community, can be traced through a series of examples and probably forms the base for later monastic asceticism in the same part of the world.
It is only in the last two chapters that McGowan traces this tradition back into the New Testament texts, where he sees a number of instances in which the authors appear to be arguing against this tradition, but little evidence for the tradition itself, and then, in the final chapter, to ask about the sources of the bread and water tradition. It is possible, he argues, that there might have been Jewish precedents, but there is in fact very little evidence for this. There is nothing specifically within the Christian tradition that can form the basis for these practices and so he has to argue that it is the wider prevalence of the cuisine of sacrifice and the recognized rejection of this by a number of different groups that forms the discursive context for the development of this tradition. What is important, therefore, is not that the bread and water tradition should be seen as an ‘origin’ of the Eucharist, or even a second strand of eucharistic development as Lietzmann appears to suggest, but that it is a distinct tradition within the eucharistic meals of the early Christian community and probably one of a number of such traditions within a much more diverse range of practices than previous scholars were sometimes willing to accept.
Smith’s book, From Symposium to Eucharist (2003), builds on many of the ideas in McGowan’s text and is probably the most overtly sociological of the three works that I am looking at in this section. Along with Matthias Klinghardt, Smith initiated a seminar within the Society for Biblical Literature to explore Graeco-Roman meals and their associations with early Christian practices (Alikin 2009, p. 3). Smith’s own work builds on that of Klinghardt who had published a similar theory in German in 1996 (Klinghardt 1996). In his own book Smith sets out to argue that ‘although there were many minor differences in the meal customs as practiced in different regions and social groups, the evidence suggests that meals took similar forms and shared similar meanings and interpretations across a broad range of the ancient world’ (2003, p. 2). This includes Jewish and early Christian meals as well as those of the wider Graeco-Roman world. Smith argues that earlier writers on the origins of the Eucharist, particularly Lietzmann and Jeremias, despite their differences, all ‘construct a model for analysing the ancient data based on the form of the Eucharist in the later church’ (2003, p. 4). Alternatively, Smith proposes that the Eucharist developed out of a range of early Christian meals that were themselves part of the common banqueting tradition of the ancient world.
Smith then goes on to explore this common banqueting tradition through an exploration of Graeco-Roman banquets, Jewish banquets and finally banquets in the writings of Paul and in the Gospel traditions. He is specifically working within a sociological tradition that, like McGowan, he associates with the work of Douglas. This leads Smith to identify idealized models which he claims are presupposed by the ancient literature and which, using Douglas’ terminology, can be linked to the ‘social codes’ that they represent (Smith 2003, pp. 8–9; Douglas 1970). The two specific idealized models that he chooses to explore are the symposium and the messianic banquet. These come together within the meal tradition of the early Christian communities and, according to Smith, do not simply determine the structure of the meal but also, through the codes contained within them, determine much of early Christian theology.
Smith argues that the earliest references to Christian meals come from the writings of Paul and refer specifically to meal traditions at Antioch, Corinth and Rome. All of these must, Smith argues, predate Paul’s own writing and yet it is the ideology of the meal, or to use Douglas’s term their ‘social code’, that informs Paul’s own theology. The emphasis on boundaries, for example, is seen in the discussion of the meal at Antioch in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, community identity, ethics and social equality are developed in relation to the meal at Corinth, and ideas of hospitality and fellowship are developed with reference to the meal in Rome (2003, pp. 216–17). It is not only the wider social code of the Graeco-Roman banquet that informs the meals within the Pauline churches, however. Smith also claims that the shape of the meal, as outlined in 1 Corinthians, is also modelled on the wider social norms. The meal begins with ‘a benediction over the food, represented by the bread’ and ends with ‘a benediction over the wine marking the transition from deipnon to symposium’ (2003, p. 188). It is the symposium that is seen in chapter 14 of Paul’s letter.
The
