spin

That's a weird question Ben C.

Judging the body in the context of 1 Cor 11 seems obvious to me, especially when Paul writes in parallelisms here "examine yourselves and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup for all who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment against themselves." Some Corinthians come to the meal, stuffing themselves and getting drunk, not discerning what they are doing, ie gratifying the body and not entering into the meal with respect. If you are only interested in eating and drinking for the body's sake, "Do you not have homes to eat and drink it?"

I don't think Paul's text is obscure at all. It is patently obvious to me. It has been rendered obscure by the interpolation of the eucharist, causing the further interpolation.


spin

Ben C Smith

(Lots of things are obvious to you and few others. )

Okay, I do think I see what you are saying now. It is kind of like when Paul says that he disciplines his body and makes it his slave. In this case, the Corinthians are not disciplining their own bodies (their bellies).

I can see that.

I wonder if you can see that I do not regard the eucharist as originally having been a sip of wine and a bite of bread. I tend to think that the Jewish meal came first, without any real connection to the death of Jesus (see the Didache, for example), but that the last supper stuff was added onto that; in such a case, the last supper would be just that, a supper, just as Luke says it was. I think it was so for Paul (or for the interpolator, if you prefer). IOW, I do not regard this passage as a full meal flanking a purely symbolic sip and bite in the middle; I think it is a full meal all the way through, and this is the peculiar fittingness of the Lucan version to this Corinthian context: Luke emphasizes that the ritual spanned an entire meal (the bread during supper, the cup after supper), which is the antidote to the Corinthian practice of eating first and then celebrating the ritual only after some were filled and drunk without waiting for the others.

Ben.

spin

Yes, I would think that the eucharist somehow developed from the Jewish ritual meal, be it as shown in the gospel or not. Whether it was the whole meal as you assume or not, I'm not sure, but it's not what the synoptic tradition indicates, though this may just be brevity.

That is not how I view what was happening, though it helps you to make sense of 1 Cor 11 as it is now. The meal is prepared, then people arrive and hoe in before everyone else is there, robbing some of the ability to participate. There is no sense of a eucharistic act involved in the meal as I see the evidence. Paul's interest is in how people participate and interact with each other.


spin

Ben C Smith

All I can say is that 1 Corinthians 11 makes more sense as it stands than Changing of the Guards by Dylan does.

Ben.

spin

(I did listen, but once was enough. It didn't make me want to make sense out of it. Just think, while Dylan was grinding that out, Steely Dan, had made Royal Scam and was producing Aja.)


spin
music critic extraordinaire

Ben C Smith

Thanks for the tip on The Royal Scam. I actually like it! (Had never heard it before.)

(Aja I could probably live without, however.)

Ben.
Music hack.

spin

[crud]When these guys went for exquisite studio productions, it's sad to hear how the compression robs Royal Scam of its texture. Great guitar solo by Larry Carlton. But when I referred to the Royal Scam I meant the whole record. It was what the guys were doing in 1976 when Dylan was still chopping out the same chords in Changing of the Guards he was playing in the 1960s. Other songs on Royal Scam include "Don't Take Me Alive" (an amazing guitar solo by Carlton) and Kid Charlemagne, oh and Haitian Divorce!! It was a concept album dealing with the underbelly of society, criminals, illegal immigrants, drug pushers, a bank robber.... Aja was the follow-up record, which was much more restrained in tone, but musically far more adventurous. Lyrics just as biting and provocative.[/crud]

Clivedurdle

I understand - and I am sure that I have been preached at to this effect - that discerning the body means discerning the body of Christ - and that means not just Christ's body but the congregation as well - each other.

I would seriously explore this ritual meal as an early egalitarian socialist type happening that got lost in formal religionese about bodies and bloods later on.

Is the xian way of doing it different to the Jewish way? Like Hezbollah does now, was the social side of the organisation actually very important?

Ben C Smith

I think spin has a good point here. The emphasis in this verse should be on judging the body, that is, your own body. The contrast between the body here and the body of the Lord in the alleged interpolation might induce a scribe to clarify things, as it were.

I do not think this is enough to demonstrate the interpolation of the entire dominical supper part, but it is a good observation.

Ben.

gstafleu

It may well be that in certain traditions the Eucharist gets set in the environment of a communal meal--after all both share the communal eating. But the two differ in their essence: modern day Catholic communion, for example, can hardly be called a communal meal, nor can a Sunday pancake breakfast in the church basement be called a Eucharist.

Gerard Stafleu