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Seminar 10:
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The connection between the Eucharist and meals is clear – but often ignored, beyond the obvious link with a Passover celebrated by Jesus before his death. Yet meals have meanings, as anthropologist Mary Dougles puts it, that are "implicit" – you can tell a lot about someone from the way they eat. What can we learn about the earliest Christian communities from the ways they ate together? Considering early Christian meal gatherings as precisely that, we find a surprising diversity of practices and perspectives. The forms and foods of the ancient Eucharistic meals reflected not merely adherence to a command from Jesus (if at all), but complex interactions with pagan and Jewish customs, and struggles concerning gender, violence, sexuality, and politics. In this seminar, the scholar of ancient meals and liturgy, Andrew McGowan, provides a "sampler" of issues concerning Eucharistic origins in recent scholarship.
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