Hello

I was raised Roman Catholic. Among questioning the Trinity, I also question the nature of the Eucharist.

If you consider the standards of the time, I believe that Jesus objected to the ritual of sacrificing animals in the temple as necessary.
I don't believe he intended the wine to "represent" HIS blood and the bread to "represent" HIS flesh, rather the blood and bread was his sacrafice that he shared with his "family."

--

It reads to me as if Jesus was asking us to remember him, and hence, God every time (at least a few/ day) we ate even simple everyday food like bread and wine. (guess we're in trouble now with the lo carb thing! I don't think it was about transmogrification (sp?) but about using common acts to remind us of God. Rather like the kosher laws.

Does anyone else read it this way?

Hey I like the wine part. Riunite Lamrusco is my favorite.

Another interesting possibility is that Jesus was simply asking his followers to remember him at Passover . We often forget that "Christianity" did not exist at this time and that Jesus and his followers were all Jewish. At the" last supper", they were having the Jewish passover meal. The synoptic gospels were written 30 to 50 years after Christ was crucified, plenty of time to ask the question "why was Jesus crucified""?One obvious school of thought and enduring idea was that Jesus was as the passover lamb. Just as the blood of the passover lamb spared the ancient Israelites from death in Egypt, the blood of Jesus now spared his followers from eternal death. As the passover lamb was a sacrifice, so was JesusThus a nice tie in by the Jewish writers of the gospels who at the time had no idea that a new religion was in the making.

I am not on board with this idea, by the way. I think Christ was crucified for what he was doing, healing the sick, speaking truth to power, and challenging religious orthodoxy. I don't think an angry blood thristy male God in the sky demanded blood sacrifice to atone for sins that I hadn't committed yet.

I like the Center's interpretation of communion.

I see the Eucharist as symbolic.

To eat my flesh and drink my blood means to eat and drink the wisdom of the anointed.

'My' is the first person pronoun that refers to the god I which includes everyone and the anointed are those who are anointed in the gnosis (experiential knowledge) of harmony. It is simply a ritual that invites us to redirect our wisdom into producing a more harmonious society.

I have to be honest, I have never heard of this word before, so I looked it up. After discovering the meaning, I don;t see how it relates to the discussion of the meaning of the Eucharist.
Defintion: "To change or alter greatly and often with grotesque or humorous effect."
Can you explain what you mean?

As I understand it, this is the Catholic belief that the bread and wine literally transform into the body and blood of Christ. That was my intended usage!

Later/

Oops - my bad. I did a bit of research and realized that the word I was reaching for is:

Transubstantiation (in Latin, transsubstantiatio) is the change of the substance of bread and wine into that of the body and blood of Christ that, according to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, occurs in the Eucharist and that is called in Greek μετουσίωσις (see Metousiosis).

Sorry for the confusion!

The first time I ever tasted alcohol was in church. I was raised UMC who serve grape juice instead of wine. When I worked in a Lutheran church, I didn't realize that they served real wine at communion.

Once when I was younger, the communion stewards used Hawaian(sp) bread. It was so good the children wanted seconds.

MOW

Cynthia
Transubstantiation actually works if you take the symbolic view of the Eucharist.

If you view John, the author of Revelation, and Ezekiel eating the scroll, and eating the flesh of Christ and drinking the blood of Christ, all as symbolic representations of eating and drinking the wisdom and teachings of the anointed, (Christ is a transliteration of the Greek word 'Cristov', it is not the last name of Jesus. It means ‘the anointed’) you actually become the anointed. You are anointed with the experiential knowledge, incite and wisdom of Christ. Eating the bread and wine is not the real Eucharist. It is merely a symbolic representation of it.

The question is, “What did Jesus teach”? According to the Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus, there are between 200,000 and 400,000 errors, some deliberate, some accidental, in the New Testament. That is more errors than there are words. Furthermore, according to the Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar, a think tank of over 100 Bible scholars, 84% of the Acts of Jesus are pure fiction. So, we still have the problem of sorting out what Jesus actually taught and what others say he taught. We really don’t know.

One place to start "eating and drinking" to become Christ (the anointed) is with the Gospel of Thomas which has lain in the desert untouched for 1700 years.

BobD

How are there more errors than there are words?

I stopped taking communion after attending synagogue for several years. There the drinking of the wine and eating of the bread had some real meaning based on historical understanding of the ancient practice.

I don't agree with what is said during the ceremony thus do not participate in the ritual. I have heard a different version/meaning of what is said while taking communion but it is not used at my church.

I would guess based on the addition of words (like the two longer endings of Mark).

McKenna

Professor Erhman is talking about errors over time. He explains in his book how these errors occurred, how we corrected many of them and how some can never be corrected because we don't have the original texts of the original authors.

BpbD

I like my answer better

It seems a bit deceptive to say there are more errors than words when looking at all the errors in all the manuscripts but not looking at all the words in all the manuscripts.