Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth > Pagan Origins

Christians share a sacred meal with their God -- because eating WAS fellowship

"I'll have a Happy Meal."
[Jimmy, Manhattan, Book 4, line 5]

Was Christianity new? Was Christianity unique? Here's a better question: Was eating a meal for fellowship new or unique? NO.

We all like to get together for meals and have a good time, and the ancients were no different. Even as today (except where there is a TV on in the house) a meal was a time for close-knit family and friends to get together and celebrate their relationship. There's some sort of socio-psychological mumbo-jumbo behind all of this, but we don't need the details. The point is that "sacred meals" -- including the Eucharist -- are just common acts of fellowship of the sort that have been around since eating. And thus another of Pikachu's asinine claims falls to the ground.

It's no surprise that Mithra's faithful celebrated a sacred meal with their god, nor would it be surprising that followers of Adonis, Attis, Osiris and so on did the same. It's part of human nature. The kid graduates from dental school; we all go out to eat to celebrate. What's the "surprise" here? Is Pikachu expecting Jesus to say, "Darn. I'd like to institute a sacred meal so that my followers can enjoy and celebrate fellowship just like everyone else, but that stupid Osiris already has one. I guess they'll just have to not fellowship that way." How stupid. Celebratory meals were eaten by religious groups, by secular groups, by families, by friends -- it's just a cultural universal, folks. "Borrowing" is a plumb STUPID explanation. If anything, think of it as McDonald's offering the Happy Meal in competition to Burger King's Kid's Meal. People got to eat; people got kids; you want them to be comfortable and get to know one another, so is the Happy Meal "borrowed" from Burger King's "Kid's Meal"? Of course not. Don't be ridiculous. Unfortunately Pikachu digs himself so deep on this one -- because meals are so common -- that's he's forced into the absurd position of claiming that the Romans "borrowed" their sacred meals from the Greeks! Sure, and the Romans just sat around starving until the Greeks gave them the idea to eat; and never observed anything at all until the Greeks showed them one of their social programs. What an idiocy!

So once again, we really don't need to give every cite of Pikachu's the atom treatment (especially since once again, Judaism -- with its own ritual meals like Passover -- provide a much closer antecedent). The "who had it first" argument is just plain stupid. Who really had it first? The first people who ever ate together, that's who. Good grief!

The next time you're with Lurch
ask yourself:"Pikachu is really scraping barrel bottom this time, isn't he? Social meals are just part of human nature. To say that a sacred meal was 'borrowed' is just plain ridiculous."

Next time you're in church... When they get to the part about eating a sacred meal in remembrance of the God, remember that eating and fellowship together are universals -- whether in secular or religious contexts -- and that adding a memorial function to them is just part of that package.

You'll know that Pikachu is just blowing smoke out of his pazoo, yet again -- and needs a good course in critical thinking.

Uhhhhhhhhh!

The Greeks' Theoxenia
Since observational meals are such a universal, in order to maintain his "Christians borrowed it" thesis Pikachu is forced into the remarkable claim that the Romans' lectisternia was copied from the Greeks. Now that's just plain dumb. The Romans were obviously eating without help from the Greeks, and they sure as heck didn't need to get the idea for social exchange at meals from the Greeks either. Pikachu is squirming and struggling to explain why "borrowing" is a better explanation than that a universal motif and practice was adapted and vested with specific meaning in accordance with a group's identity.

But if he is one of the immortals come down from heaven, then is this some new thing which the gods are planning; for ever heretofore have they been wont to appear to us in manifest form, when we sacrifice to them glorious hecatombs, and they feast among us, sitting even where we sit.
[Homer, Odyssey, Book 7, line 198] By the way, Christianity holds to nothing like this. Not even close. The "Real Presence" accepted by some denominations is a close as it gets, but it's not like Jesus is actually sitting at the table.

Christians share a sacred meal with their God -- because sharing a meal is a natural act of camaraderie

Eating the Flesh of the God
Pikachu tries to wheedle his way into claiming that the notion that the meal involved eating the God's flesh was not new with Christianity. He says that the Roman God Liber (aka Dionysus preceded Christ in this respect. But hold that phone. The scholar of Dionysus, Obbink, tells us, "we cannot even be sure that the Greeks equated Dionysus with any of his sacrificial animals." Otto, another scholar of Dionysus, adds: "...in everything which has come down to us about Dionysus and his cults we find nowhere the intimation that his flesh might have been eaten by a society which wanted to appropriate his divine power." There is also no evidence of sacramentalism in the official Dionysian civic cult. And as for this:

"he was intercepted and killed," and his murderers, "chopped his members up into pieces and...devoured them." An event which his worshipers celebrate in "recurring sacred rites celebrated every two years," in which, "They tear a live bull with their teeth, representing the cruel banquet [ at which the God was eaten.]"
[Firmicus Maternus, The Error of the Pagan Religions, Ch 6.2] -- think this means zit? It doesn't. Firmicus writes around 400 years after Jesus -- so by that reckoning, who is likely to have "borrowed" from whom, if at all? But be careful: as noted by Obbink, it's not even clear that this bull was equated with Dionysus.

Christians eat a sacred meal that represents the flesh and blood of their God -- which NO ONE ELSE did until after Christianity was predominant

Modern Scholarship Abused
Other Eucharist "theologies" read into silence

The Lord's supper commemorates Jesus' last meal with his disciples. The wine is His blood. The bread is His body. That's plain as day and not disputable. It's in the Gospels; it's in Paul.

So where the heck does Pikachu get the idiotic idea that "it wasn't always so?" He gets it from an argument from silence is where. Having apparently picked up a copy of The Didache off the floor, Pikachu has reached the remarkably leaped-to conclusion that at least some first century Christians celebrated the Eucharist without remembering the meal Jesus shared... without equating the wine with his blood or the bread with his body or without even mentioning Jesus' saving death. Wow, how many logical leaps can you make from silence?

It is precisely because Pikachu is "just some guy on the wacky web" that he can't be trusted on this one.

Pikachu tries to fuddle a bit by saying that the Didache is a handbook -- a book of instructions first century Christians used away back before the New Testament was a twinkle in Bishop Athanasius' eye. For starters, the Diadche is usually dated to between 90-100 -- and that, while before the final declaration of the canon in Athy's time, is quite after even the latest dates assigned both to Paul and the canonical Gospels. So if the Didache is a witness to a variable practice of the Eucharist, it's just plain too late to be of any consequence.

But as it happens, it's just a case of Pikachu and his sources not having a clue what they're actually reading. Chapters 9 and 10 of the Didache did tell newly baptized Christians about how to celebrate the Eucharist -- what to do, and what to say. But here's what may be forgotten: When Jesus institiuted the Eucharist, he did not indicate that it ought to be accompanied by any particular prayer. So from the very start, any instruction of "what to say" ought to be regarded as complimentary to the practice and the meaning ascribed to it, and unless what is told is in contradiction to what Jesus did, to claim that there is evidence of a "different value" is just a presumption fathered by an assumption.

But here's a reading of Chapter 9 > >

Chapter 9. The Eucharist. Now concerning the Eucharist, give thanks as follows.

(2) First, concerning the cup:
We give you thanks, our Father,
for the holy vine of David your servant,
which you have made known to us
through Jesus your servant,
to you be the glory forever.

(3) And concerning the broken bread:
We give you thanks, our Father,
for the life and knowledge you have made known to us
through Jesus, your servant;
to you be the glory forever.

[Didache, Chapters 9 (1st century AD -- 90-100, actually)]

Now, if you're smarter than Pikachu, which isn't hard, you'll notice:
	When the Didache-using-Christians celebrated the Eucharist they equated the wine with the holy vine of David . Pikachu is so dumb that he says, whatever the hell that means, and doesn't see that this is an equation with Jesus' blood. Jesus was of the lineage of David, and that meant (in context) that he carried David's blood in his veins. And if you're even more knowledgable, you'll see in the reference to the bread with the life and knowledge made known through Jesus a quite clear allusion to Jesus' body -- bearing in mind the Gospel of John in which Jesus calls himself the "bread from heaven" which he will give people to eat, at the same time he speaks of himself in terms of being one whose flesh must be eaten and blood must be drunk to be saved. See how simple it is once you contextualize properly?
Thus the body and blood of Jesus are already there in the text, and there were NOT Christians who did not link the Eucharist with the story about Jesus' last supper with His disciples as Pikachu claims. Wow. What a Danny Dumb Bell!

Not that we can blame Pikachu entirely. He gets this line from one of scholarship's classic Danny Dumb Bells, Helmut Koester, who despite being from Harvard has made some seriously dumb errors in other works (see entry on him here) that make you wonder what sort of things he smokes in his spare time. And what he says here is a classic example of how his "logic" works: > >

Koester comes up with the idea that, "The Eucharist prayers [in the Didache] also have their origin in Hellenistic Judaism. ... In their Christian form they relate the cup to the covenant of David and understand the bread as the symbol of the oneness of the congregation. There is no attempt to connect wine and bread... to the death of Jesus." Haw haw. Yeah, right! Make the connection that lineage = blood, and the bread = life as in John, and hey presto, the "connection" appears right before your very eyes. Koester just doesn't know where to look.….

Since he can't have it any other way, Koester goes way out on a limb and invents fictitious "communities of Syria" who allegedly didn't follow "the same eucharistic practice and formulae that are attested in 1 Cor 11:23- 26." Of course, like Pikachu he misses that "This is my body, this is my blood, etc." was said by Jesus, but was by no means prescribed as a formula to be recited again and again -- obviously, since Jesus would not be present in the first person. Based on this, and on his hugely-begged trajectories thesis, Koester makes the wild claim that the later Didache, as he badly reads it, may well belong to a direct continuation of the fellowship meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples and friends while Paul and the Gospels were just shooting in the dark. It's this kind of pompous excuse-making that you need when the evidence of what is earlier just won't cooperate.

In other words, there were NOT other early Christian Eucharist theologies that were completely different from ours. This is Pikachu's fantasy based on Koester's wooden reading of the Didache.

Now, let me ask you a question. Which do you think is more likely:
	that as attested by the earliest documents, and by the Gospels, the earliest Eucharist really was given to the disciples by Jesus, complete with the do-this-in-remembrance-of me instruction, and the Didache-Christians didn't miss that detail at all, or
	that the Didache-Christian's Eucharist, really reading as Koester and Pikachu says, and dating as it does 40-50 years after Paul and 20-30 years after the Gospel, descended as it allegedly was from the Hellenistic culture (not Jewish Palestine, which was the background of Paul's education and of John) was the original, and somebody somewhere for whom we have no evidence conspired to later on add the story about Jesus' last meal?

Here's what I think -- Pikachu needs a basic course in critical thinking. The Christian Eucharist descends, by way of Palestinian Judaism and the cultural mores of the day, from sacred fellowship meals that were practiced UNIVERSALLY as means of communities of common interest getting together. And now you really know how it happened. Wow, that Pikachu is deluded.

The next time you're with Lurch
ask yourself:"What sort of gullible nitwit does Pikachu think he's talking to? I've read what REAL scholars of Dionysus say, and they disagree."

Next time you're in church... When they get to the part about the Holy Eucharist being the blood and body of Jesus, remember the sacred meal of the Roman God Liber came hundreds of years later.

You'll know you're celebrating a typical form of fellowship that was invested with new meaning by every group that performed it -- in a culture where people had to eat and socialize, darn it.

Uhhhhhhhh!