Subversive Meals: An Analysis of the Lord’s Supper under Roman Domination during the First Century. By R. AlanStreet. Pp. xi, 327, Cambridge, James Clarke, 2016, £25.00.

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-381
Author(s):  
Nicholas King
Keyword(s):  
Lord's Supper ◽  
First Century ◽  
Roman Domination

scholarly journals The Adoption and Use of the Word ἘΚΚΛΗΣΊΑ in the Early Christ-Movement

Ecclesiology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-130
Author(s):  
Philip F. Esler
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
Lord's Supper ◽  
First Century ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Christ Followers ◽  
Table Fellowship ◽  
The One ◽  
Mixed Groups

Abstract This article engages with two recent monographs and three shorter publications to offer a fresh approach to the origin and some aspects of the use of the word ἐκκλησία in the Christ-movement of the first century ce. It argues that the word was first used as a collective designation by mixed groups of Greek-speaking Judean and non-Judean Christ-followers who were persecuted by Paul. Their intimate table-fellowship (especially of the one loaf and one cup of the Lord’s Supper) was regarded as involving or risking idolatry and thus imperilling the ethnic integrity of the Judean people. These Christ-followers adopted the word ἐκκλησία from instances in the Septuagint where it meant not ‘assembly’ but ‘multitude’ or ‘group’, most importantly of all in 1 Sam. 19.20. As Paul founded new communities in the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean that were recognisably similar to Greco-Roman voluntary associations, the word acquired new connotations that reverberated with the role of ἐκκλησίαι as civic voting assemblies in the Greek cities. Paul’s groups were not anti-Roman, nor did he believe that the Christ-movement would replace ethnic Israel, but rather that the two would co-exist until the End. The Pauline view on this matter finds theological endorsement in a 2015 document from the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews.

The Presence of God in the Community: The Eucharist in its Early Christian Cultic Context

1976 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 451-459
Author(s):  
David E. Aune
Keyword(s):  
Lord's Supper ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
First Century ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Presence Of God ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Essential Form ◽  
Christian Literature

Every religion has an overall structure which both gives meaning to and derives it from each of its constituent parts. Ordinarily, this structure may be seen in its most essential form in cultic worship where religious experience both is determined by and itself determines the shape and meaning of religious traditions. In contemporary Roman Catholicism, for example, the Eucharist is understood in several ways due to the variety of possible contexts in which the Mass may be experienced; a religious community and a parish church are examples of widely diverging contexts. However, if we wish to understand the significance and place of the Eucharist in a period as remote and as different from our own as that of first century Christianity, we are faced with a radically different problem. One popular approach to such an inquiry would carefully examine the theme of the Lord's Supper throughout the New Testament and other early Christian literature so that the results of the study could be used to compare and contrast the Eucharist (s) of early Christianity with that of one or another modern Christian denomination. The all but unavoidable result of this approach would be the tendency of each theological tradition to retroject its own understanding of the Eucharist back into the early Church, whether it would find itself at home there or not.

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