Note 5 — Chapter I · THE BEGINNINGS

In its first traceable historic form Christianity was simply a phase of Judaism, being the creed of a small number of Jews and Jewish proselytes who believed that the long-desired Messiah had come in the person of one Jesus, who had been so slain as to constitute an atoning sacrifice. Such believers were wont to meet at simple religious banquets, of a kind common in the Greco-Roman world, where they ate and drank in a semi-ceremonial way. A sacrificial banquet of this kind was one of the most universal features of ancient religion, being originally the typical tribal ceremony; and though among the Jews it had been to a remarkable extent superseded by sacrifices without communion, the usage was once as general with them as with the Gentiles. If grown rare in their life, the idea was abundantly preserved in their sacred books. The presumption is that such a banquet was connected with the Semitic God-name Jesus or Joshua before the Christian era; otherwise we must conclude that a sect of Jesuists, starting from the bare belief in the sacrificial death, adopted arbitrarily a kind of rite which was identified with the heathen worships of the surrounding Gentiles, and adopted also the Gentile sun-worshippers’ practice of assembling by night. Paul’s Corinthian converts are described as frequenting indifferently the table of Jesus (“the Lord”) and the table of “dæmons”—that is, of heathen Gods or Demigods. As the less orthodox Jews had long5 dabbled in similar “mysteries,” there is every probability that private “Holy Suppers” had been practised even in Jewry by some groups long before the Christian period, whether or not in connection with the name of Jesus “the Saviour.” The gospel phrase “blood of the covenant” points to a standing usage, the original form of which was probably the mutual drinking of actual human blood by the parties to a solemn pledge. In the Hebrew system some such covenant was held to be set up between the Deity and the worshippers on the one hand, and among the latter themselves on the other, when a sacrifice was partaken of. But it is further probable that the idea of a mystical partaking of an atoning or inspiring “body and blood” was of old standing in the same kind of connection. Such a practice was certainly part of the great Asiatic cults of Dionysos and Mithra; and as the ancient idea of a sacrificial banquet in honour of a God usually was that in some sense the worshipped power was either eaten, or present as partaker, it is more than likely that any banquets in connection with the Syrian worships of Adonis and (or) Marnas (each name = “the Lord”) carried with them the same significance. In early Christian usage the ministrant of the eucharist spoke in the person of the founder, using the formulas preserved in the gospels; and as the priest in the cult of Attis also personated the God, there is a strong presumption that the same thing had been done in Jewry in the pre-Christian period, by way of modifying a still older usage in which a deified victim was actually slain and eaten.