Eucharist and Lord's Supper

7° THE SHAPE OF THE LITURGY
words of our Lord Himself have ever established such an idea in the filce
of the persisting inhibitions exemplifiedin Acts x. 14;xi. 8; xv. 29; etc.?
The Jerusalem church displayed many of the conservative virtues. But
those who like to think that that old bottle actually generated the new wine
will find little encouragement in the somewhat questioning reception it
offered to new ideas when they were put before it by SS. Peter and Paul.
The Meaning ofthe Last Supper
The 'liberal' investigation of the New Testament conducted during
the last two generations with such immense thoroughness and ingenuity
usually found itself arriving at the disconcerting conclusion that on every
point of importance the primitive church was more vitally creative for the
future history of christianity than was Jesus of Nazareth Himself. It is the
irrationality of such results which more than anything else has brought
about the various contemporary revolts against the whole liberal outlook
in theology. These are directed not so much against its methods, which are
being superseded rather than discarded, as against its basic assumptions
and the conclusions to which they inevitably led; for it is now plain that
despite all the deference to critical methods which liberal scholars sincerely
endeavoured to pay, their conclusions were as often dictated by their presuppositions
as by their actual handling of the evidence.
So in this case. The liberal thesis about the origins of the christian eucharist
was that it had little or no direct connection with the last supper of
Jesus, Who if He did then perform any symbolic action and utter any symbolic
words in connection with bread (and a cup also, which is even more
natural to a Jew, but a step not difficult to imagine in a cosmopolitan community
like the Christian community at Antioch' (p. 19). So it was as easy as that! But
unfortunately there subsist certain difficulties in that case, requiring further 'conjectures'
which are not made by Dr. Hunkin, but which 1 will venture to supply.
Presumably Barnabas, the jewish levite specially sent from Jerusalem to take charge
of the Antiochene church (Acts xi. 22), warned his assistant Saul of Tarsus 'They
may not like this very much at Jerusalem'. But S. Paul, who though 'of the straitest
sect of the pharisees' did not share this jewish prejudice about blood, had got hold
of a cock-and-bull story about the last supper off the Antiochene gentile converts;
into which story the chabzll'ah customs had been so cunningly worked that it completely
convinced Barnabas that that was how it must have happened; drinking
blood was not really a new idea at all, but what the Jerusalem church had meant all
along. And so when Peter came down to Antioch Barnabas convinced him, too, that
that was really what had happened at the last supper. And when Peter and Barnabas
and 'all the jews' at Antioch disagreed violently with Paul (Gal. ii. 11-13) actually
about the question of 'table-fellowship' (which involved the eucharist) in that particular
church, they none of them felt any longer that there was anything 'unnatural
to a jew' about this strange idea that S. Paul had taken up with there, and
did not think of mentioning the matter to him. And it was their silence on this
occasion which led him to tell the Corinthians that he had 'received' the whole
story 'by tradition from the Lord'. (I choose this particular example of liberal
scholarship, not to single it out as exceptional-it seems typical of the methods which
have been pursued in some cases to elucidate the whole question-but because any
reader can easily check the whole matter for himself in this case.)