Dangerous Eating?

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size This article emerged from a longer study, “The Meals of Jesus and the Meals of the Church: Eucharistic Origins and Admission to Communion,” in, Maxwell E. Johnson and Edward Phillips (eds.), Studia Liturgica Diversa: Essays in Honor of Paul F. Bradshaw (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 2004), 101–115. Notes R. J. Karris, Luke: Artist and Theologian (New York: Paulist, 1985), 70. From Richard Fabian and Scott King, “Richer, Not Dumber! The Key to Participation,” Colloquium: Music, Worship, Arts 1 (2004): 111; cf. Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 102–8. Although with greater emphasis on the canonical text and its theology; see Francis J. Moloney s.d.b., A Body Broken for a Broken People, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), 7–13; quote from p. 190. Particularly given the difficulty of knowing the precise relation of New Testament texts to liturgical practice; see Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47–72. The Anglican Church of Australia, A Prayer Book for Australia (Alexandria, NSW: Broughton Books, 1995), 126. Brendan Byrne makes an important link, for Luke's Gospel at least, between this motif and the wider sense of God as host: “The marginalized one [i.e., Zacchaeus] who has given hospitality to Jesus finds himself drawn into a much wider hospitality, the hospitality of God.” The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke's Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 4. See Jacob Neusner, “Two Pictures of the Pharisees: Philosophical Circle or Eating Club?” Anglican Theological Review 64 (1982): 525–38. Dennis Smith and Hal Taussig suggest that “as much as one can reasonably affirm about the historical Jesus on [the] question” of eating is that he “probably attended banquets”; see Smith and Taussig, Many Tables: The Eucharist in the New Testament and Liturgy Today (London: SCM, 1990), 45–8 (quote from p. 47); cf. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 208–9. See Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre, 1945), 48–70; but cf. Paul Bradshaw, “Did the Early Eucharist Ever Have a Sevenfold Shape?” Heythrop Journal 43 (2002), 73–76. See John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 293–98, 364–5; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 119. For how one might consider the historical questions, see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 2.950–967. Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology (London: Epworth, 1971), 130–31. See Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 53–56. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew McGowanAndrew McGowan is director of the theological school and Joan F. W. Munro Lecturer in Theology at Trinity College, University of Melbourne. A historian of the early church, he is the author of Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).