The Collapse of the Eucharist, Part 5

“Let us all take up our sacrifices, observing distribution to the poor…” — (Athanasius, Festal Letter 45)

With this post, we conclude our series on the creative but unconscionable rewriting of the early liturgies to make them conform to the late-4th century novelty in which Christ is said to be offered to the Father in the Eucharist. From the earliest days of the Church, the Eucharist was a sacrifice of thanks and praise to the Lord, a tithe offering. It was followed by an “Amen” (1 Corinthians 14:16) and then bread and wine from the thank offering were taken and consecrated for the Lord’s Supper. The moment of Consecration originated as a simple recitation of Christ’s words of institution: “This is My body, broken. … This is My blood, shed…”. It later came to be called “the Epiclesis,” literally, the Invocation, the liturgical moment when God—the Spirit, the Son or the Trinity—is asked to make the bread and wine into a spiritual meal for His people. And thus, a very simple liturgy prevailed for three hundred years: A Eucharist. An Amen. An Epiclesis. At the end of the 4th century, the order changed and the Epiclesis was moved before the Eucharist offering, which changed a simple tithe offering for the poor into a sacrifice of consecrated bread and wine. Thus was born the abominable Roman Catholic liturgical sacrifice of Christ’s body and blood. That discontinuity in the history of the liturgy puzzled and confounded scholars, historians, translators and apologists who could not explain why the early liturgy was so fundamentally different from the medieval one. Attempting to establish retroactive continuity, the academic community therefore engaged in a reprehensible campaign to edit, redact, mistranslate and subvert the early liturgies to “correct” the ancient writers and force them into conformity with the late 4th-century novelty. The effect of the historical revision has been to make the ancient Eucharist consecratory, essentially collapsing the ancient Eucharist into the Epiclesis, and thus creating the appearance that the ancient Eucharist offering of the early church was itself the Consecration.

Continue reading The Collapse of the Eucharist, Part 5