tians with the Last Supper of the Lord. But it seems by no means improbable that the words imply merely that he had received it from the Lord through tradition. There is no indication of any disagreement between St. Paul and the other apostles on this subject. And it has been pointed out that it is most improbable that we owe to St. Paul the mention of Christ's Body and Blood. If he had himself been inventing his terms, he would in all probability have spoken of Flesh and Blood.* He seems to be lollowing tradition, or, at any rate, to be under the impression that he is following tradition, in his account of the Eucharist. The idea that St. Paul's own views Avere much influenced by conceptions current among Corinthian Christians has no support in our authorities. He explicitly states that the account of the institution is no new teaching, but that he has taught it himself to the Corinthians before ; and it is on this account of the institution that his doctrine is based.
Moreover, the theory that St. Paul's doctrine of the Eucharist was peculiar to himself, and arose in the first place owing to purely local causes at Corinth, fails to account for the universality of the Eucharist. If it was only St. Paul and some of his converts for whom the Eucharist was a real religious rite — if, that is to say, it was St. Paul who gave a religious significance to what was at first merely a social meal — the universal adoption of St. Paul's ideas constitutes a serious historical problem. Other doctrines of St. Paul by no means met with such wide-spread acceptance. His doc- trine of justification was hardly understood at all by anyone until the time of St. Augustine. But we know of no church without a Eucharist. Even in the Didache it is a definite rite, though its significance is doubtful. It stands with Baptism as one of the two rites which belong to Christianity. Development no doubt there was. The ' breaking of the bread' in the primitive community at Jerusalem did not carry with it all the ideas which were associated with the Eucharist at Corinth. But even there it is a religious rite, and not a mere social meal.
The Didache appears to show us a community where the doctrine of the Eucharist had not developed on Pauline lines. There is no clear re- ference to its connexion with the Last Supper. It is tempting to bring into line with this the 'break- ing of the bread ' in the Acts, and to suppose that there too there was no thought of the Last Supper, And in favour of this view might be alleged the fact that there is no mention of the Eucharistic cup in the Acts of the Apostles, which may be sup- posed to indicate an absence of sacrificial concep- tions. But all this is a most dangerous form of the argument a silentio. For the writer of the Acts has no occasion to speak of the ideas which Christians associated with the 'breaking of the bread.' So his silence on the matter is absolutely worthless as negative evidence. And, though there is no mention of a Eucharistic cup, it is extremely unlikely that at Troas there was no such cup, in view of the fact that Troas was a Pauline church. The Acts makes no mention of a cup. This is natural enough, for the writer is not giving a full account of the proceedings. But exactly the same consideration aijplies to the ' breaking of the bread ' at Jerusalem. The fact that no cup is mentioned is no sort of evidence that the meal did not include the blessing and partaking of a cup. If it did so, the writer of the Acts could hardly have framed his sentence so as to include a mention of it ; and there is no reason why he should have done so. As has been pointed out above, if it had not been for accidental circumstances at Corinth, we should not have heard anything about the Eucharist in • Heitmiiller, op. eit. p. 26.
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St. Paul's Epistles, and should have supposed that the Pauline churches in St. Paul's time knew of no such rite. This fact is in itself a sufficient warning against the danger of drawing conclusions from the silence of a "writer.
In the absence of more definite evidence, no theory can be more than a hypotliesis. But the facts are best accounted for by the hypothesis that the ' breaking of bread ' was from the beginning a religious rite associated with a social meal, in which Christians commemorated the Last Supper of our Lord with His apostles. As Cliristians came in- creasingly to realize the significance of our Lord's Death as a sacrifice, a conception which was popu- larized bj' St. Paul, but which had its roots in the consciousness and teaching of Jesus about the necessity of His Death for the coming of the King- dom, they came to realize increasingly the signifi- cance of this rite, and of the words which Jesus had spoken at the Last Supper. These words could not be understood until the sacrificial aspect of the Lord's Death was realized. But, when that was understood, then the rite of the ' breaking of the bread ' was bound to be seen by Christians to have the significance which St. Paul attached to it and which was implicit in it from the first, although not fully understood — the significance of the parti- cipation by the communicant in Christ, conceived of as the sacrificial Victim. It may be supposed that the Church represented by the Didache had not attained to the understanding of the sacrificial character of Christ's Death, and therefore had failed to appreciate the meaning of the Eucharist. S. The Greek mystery-religions. — The view which has been widely held, that St. Paul derived his conceptions about the Eucharist from the Greek mystery-religions, is excluded by the hypothesis which has just been put forward. No doubt there is a real sense in which Christianity is a mystery- religion. It meets and satisfies the same needs which are met by mystery-religions in the Graeco- Roman world, and it is certainly possible that St. Paul may have been influenced by the intellectual and religious atmosphere of the world in which he was born and in which he laboured. But it must be remembered that he was educated in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel. And his Rabbinical training certainly exercised a great influence upon his mind. It is hardly conceivable that the author of the 1st chapter of Romans would have allowed himself to be directly influenced by any particular heathen cult. It is true that he treats the Eucha- rist as analogous to the heathen sacrificial feasts, but it is only to emphasize the contrast between them. H e is certainly unconscious of any borrowing from them.