Origin of the Eucharist

Common card · No. 447718

Some Christian denominations place the origin of the Eucharist in the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, at which he is believed to have taken bread and given it to his disciples, telling them to eat of it, because it was his body, and to have taken a cup and given it to his disciples, telling them to drink of it because it was the cup of the covenant in his blood. The earliest extant written account of a Christian eucharistia (Greek for 'thanksgiving') is that in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (around AD 55), in which Paul the Apostle relates "eating the bread and drinking the cup of the Lord" in the celebration of a "Supper of the Lord" to the Last Supper of Jesus some 25 years earlier. Paul considers that in celebrating the rite they were fulfilling a mandate to do so. The Acts of the Apostles presents the early Christians as meeting for "the breaking of bread" as some sort of ceremony. Writing around the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr gives the oldest descriptions...

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