Eucharist and Lord's Supper

62 THE SHAPE OF THE LITURGY
text' (D, a, fj2, i, l) must certainly have existed in the early second
century, as did also the 'longer text'. The 'Western text' reads very oddly,
thus: (19 a ) 'And He took bread and gave thanks and brake it, and gave
unto them saying, This is My Body. (21) But behold the hand of him that
betrayeth Me is with Me on the table.' Various attempts seem to have been
made both in ancient times (e.g., bye; b; Syr. Sin.; Syr. Cur.) and by some
modern scholars to amend the impossibly harsh transition from 19 a to
21. But it looks as though all the ancient alternative forms of the 'shorter
text' are secondary, despite the attempts made to defend some of them by
various contemporary scholars.
We can, I think, dismiss the attempt to explain away the 'shorter text'
in all its forms as a deliberately manufactured version made in very early
times to support the Encratite practice ofwineless eucharists. Such a mutilation
would hardly have omitted the words 'which is given for you. Do
this for the re-calling of Me' over the bread, unless it was made with
excessivecarelessness.
It seems sufficient at this point (in view of what we shall say later) to
point out that whether this be what S. Luke wrote or not, it cannot as it
stands be a complete account of what happened at the supper. From the
first the eucharist was always a corporate, not a private observance. These
'bread eucharists' themselves are everywhere represented as essentially a
rite of the christian society and not for the christian individual. But our
Lord could nothave been understood to be giving such a corporate meaning
to the bread-breaking alone without associating the breaking of bread £n
some way w£th thecupof blessing at the end of the meal, since it was the use
of the cup of blessing alone which distinguished the chaburah meal from an
ordinary meal, and not the breaking of bread, which happened every time
any pious jew ate, even alone. It cannot be entirely accidental that it is S.
Luke alone, the only gentile writer among the New Testament authorities,
who ignores the special importance and place of the cup of blessing at a
chaburah meal from the jewish point of view. 1
(3) What, finally, of the clinching point, the use of the term 'breaking of
bread' alone to describe the whole rite of the eucharist in the Jerusalem
church? Does that by its mere form exclude the use of the supposedly
'Pauline' cup? The argument from silence could hardly appear more
fragile. But in any case Acts xx. II describes S. Paul's celebration of the
eucharist at Troas, in what purport to be the words of an eye-witness. And
1 This does not account for the existence of the 'shorter text'. I hesitate to put
forward a personal view on a matter in which I have no real competence. But it does
look as though the 'shorter text' in its 'Western' form were that from which all the
other extant variants developed as attempts to amend it. Yet I cannot persuade myself
that it represents exactly what the author originally wrote. Rather, we have
to do with a textual corruption almost at the fountain-head, which means that the
problem is insoluble with our present materials. This is a very unsatisfactory conclusion.
Nevertheless, if we do not know certainly what an author wrote, we can
hardly hope to discern what he meant.