Breaking Bread

What’s the difference between eucharist and agape? And how did each come to be?

The liturgies of early Christians are often obscure and variegated in the historical record. This is especially true of the eucharist, where the basic practice of communal eating is difficult to disentangle from other contemporary meals, whether Greco-Roman or Jewish practices—or the ill-defined agape meal.

In Breaking Bread, Alistair C. Stewart cuts through scholarly confusion about early Christian eating. Stewart pinpoints the split in agape and eucharist to the shift in celebrating the eucharist on Sunday morning, leading to the inception of agape as an evening meal. The former sought divine union, the latter, communal harmony. In the final chapter he explores a breadth of Syriac, Greek, and Latin primary sources on a variety of local eucharistic traditions, tracing their development into the familiar prayers and distribution of token amounts of bread and wine, which emerged in the third century.

Nuanced and well-researched, Breaking Bread clarifies the development of the blessed sacrament and its lesser-known counterpart. Theologians and historians of early Christianity will find Stewart’s work foundational in approaching a topic of enduring scholarly interest but elusive consensus.

Table of Contents

Preface

Eucharistic Hymn

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: The Transfer of Christian Worship from Evening to Morning and Its Implications for the Eucharistic Liturgy

2. From Eucharist to Agape: Hunting an Elusive but Not Illusive Phenomenon Through Allusive Texts

3. Changing Course: The Hypothesis of the Separation of the Eucharist and the Agape and Its Recent Critique

4. Two Roots or a Tangled Mess? Going beyond Lietzmann in the Search of Eucharistic Origins

Conclusions: Historical, Theological, and Pastoral

Bibliography

Indexes