Eucharist and Lord's Supper

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THE SHAPE OF THE LITURGY
must have continued uninterruptedly throughout the second century if
only as a private observance-at Rome as well as elsewhere·-for so much
jewish custom in connection with it to have been handed down by tradition
to the days of Hippolytus and other later writers. In the form of charitable
'treats' for the poorer christians it lasted into the fifth century in most
churches, and in association with old pagan customs of funeral feasts it is
not wholly extinct to this day in the East,! and in Abyssinia, while its more
indirect survival in the pain binit of French churches (which are a survival
of unconsecrated offertory breads) is wellknown.
The word agape by the end of the second century had acquired for
Tertullian in the West just as much as for Clement of Alexandria in the
East the purely christian technical sense of a religious supper apart from
the eucharist, just as clearly as the word eucharistia had acquired for them
both the equally technical sense of the rite of the New Covenant, the
bread and cup pronounced to be the Lord's Body and Blood, celebrated
apart from a supper. Ifwe can fix with any precision the period in which
these two words were first accepted among christians generally as conveying
their particular technical meanings, which do not by any means suggest
themselves from ordinary Greek usage, then we shall have established the
date of the separation of eucharist and agape. The two technical terms
would not have existed without the need for distinguishing the two things.
'The Lord's supper' would have sufficedto describe them in combination,
as it had for S. Paul.
In Ignatius (c. A.D. lIS) the word eucharistia has everywhere without
doubt its technical meaning of a rite. This strengthens the conclusion that
when he tells the Smyrnaeans that neither 'eucharist' nor 'agape' is to be
celebrated apart from the bishop, he means two different rites, and that
'agape' no less than 'eucharist' is here a technical term, as it also appears
to be in Jude 12. The abrupt use ofthe word without explanation in both
documents argues a general familiarity with it, and since the term implies
the thing, the agape apart from the eucharist must have been familiar, in
Syria and Asia Minor at all events, by A.D. 100. If we may take it that the
two rites had not been separated when S. Paul wrote I Cor. xi. (c. A.D. 54)
-he never uses either eucharistia or agape as terms for a rite-we have
thus a period of about fifty years in which we must place both the separation
of the two rites and the establishment of that 'four-action shape' of the
eucharistic liturgy which was universal in the second century and ever
after.
The direct evidence will not allow us to press the question any closer,
but in estimating the probabilities there are certain points to be weighed.
1 For a late collection of prayers for the agape in this form used among ~he
Nestorians cf. Dom M. Wolff, Ostsyrische Tisch- lind Abendmahlsgebete, Orlens
Christianus, III. ii. I (1927),PP. 70 sq. For the better known traces of the agape in the
Eastern Churches see Tischgebete und Abendmahlsgebete in der Altchristlichen und in
der Griechischen Kirche, E. v. der Goltz, Leip7;g, 1905 (T.U. xxix. ii).