Origin of the Eucharist

Some Christian denominations place the origin of the Eucharist in the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, at which he is believed to have taken bread and given it to his disciples, telling them to eat of it, because it was his body, and to have taken a cup and given it to his disciples, telling them to drink of it because it was the cup of the covenant in his blood.

The earliest extant written account of a Christian eucharistia (Greek for 'thanksgiving') is that in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (around AD 55), in which Paul the Apostle relates "eating the bread and drinking the cup of the Lord" in the celebration of a "Supper of the Lord" to the Last Supper of Jesus some 25 years earlier. Paul considers that in celebrating the rite they were fulfilling a mandate to do so. The Acts of the Apostles presents the early Christians as meeting for "the breaking of bread" as some sort of ceremony.

Writing around the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr gives the oldest descriptions of something that can be recognised as the rite that is in use today, according to K.W. Noakes. Earlier sources, such as the Didache, 1 Clement and Ignatius of Antioch provide glimpses of what Christians were doing in their Eucharists. Later sources, Tertullian and the Apostolic Tradition, offer some details from around the year 200. Even before the Church "went public" after the conversion of Constantine the Great in the second decade of the fourth century, it was clear that the Eucharist was a central part of Christian life and worship.

Scholars seeking to understand Christian practice debate whether Jesus meant to institute a ritual at his Last Supper; whether the Last Supper was an actual historical event in any way related to the undisputed early "Lord's Supper" or "Eucharist" and have asked if the Eucharist had its origins in a pagan context, where dinners to memorialize the dead were common.