Eucharist and Lord's Supper

EUCHARIST AND LORD'S SUPPER 95
gether, just as the laity, met at the Lord's supper without a cleric,are bidden
to do by Hippolytus a century before. What is interesting is to find the
whole technical terminology of the liturgical eucharist, 'eucharistising',
'hallowing', 'We give thanks unto Thee .. .', 'breaking the bread', 'the
bread set forth' (prokeimenon-the regular word for the liturgical oblation)
-still unhesitatingly applied to this obviously purely domestic meal of
women alone, in the fourth century when there can be no question of any
confusion of ideas between agape and eucharist. It is a warning not to
build theories on the 'eucharistic' terminology applied to the agape in
earlier documents.
We are now in a position to come to our conclusions about the Lord's
supper or agape, and its relation to the eucharist. There is no evidence
whatever that these are really parallel developments of the same thing, a
'Jerusalem type' of non-sacramental fellowship meal, and a 'Pauline type'
of eucharistic oblation, as Lietzmann and others have supposed. Both
derive from the chabi'trah supper. But the eucharist consists of those two
elements in the chabi'trah customs to which our Lord Himself at the last
supper had attached a new meaning for the future with reference to His
own death. These have been carefully extracted from their setting, and
continued in use apart from the rest of the chabi'trah meal for obvious
reasons. The Lord's supper or agape consists precisely of what was left of
the chabi'trah meal when the eucharist had been removed. In fact we may
say that while the eucharist was derived directly from the last supper and
from nothing else, the agape derived really from the previousmeetings of
our Lord's chabi'trah before the last supper, though the separation between
them wasnot made in practice before a generation had passed. And just as
the berakah at the end of the supper, the only prayer of the jewish rite
which was transferred to the new christian rite, furnished it with its new
name by direct translation into Greek as eucharistia, so what was left of
the supper seems to have furnished the Greek name of the Lord's
supper. Dr. Oesterley seems justified in his suggestion 'that the name
Agape was intended as a Greek equivalent to the neo-Hebrew Chabi'trah
... which means "fellowship", almost "love".'!
The permanent mark of the separation of the two rites was the complete
absence of the 'cup of blessing' and the accompanying berakah from all
known forms of the Lord's supper or agape. In this the christian continuation
of the chabi'trah supper differed notably from its jewish parent, where
these two things were the central point and formal characteristic of a
chabi'trah meeting. The transference of just those two elements in the supper
ritual to which our Lord had assigned a new meaning connected with
His own death to a new and separate rite is in itself a strong indication of
the way in which the liturgical eucharist was regarded by those who first
made the separation. This is especially striking when we consider the
1 Jewish Background of the Christian Sacraments, p. 204.