The Last Supper Traditions of the New Testament in the Ancient Church

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The project examines the reception of the New Testament Last Supper traditions, particularly of the so called “words of institution”, in the literature of the ancient church from the second up into the fourth century.The guiding heuristic assumption is that the ancient church’s reception of the Last Supper traditions was in no way restricted to references to the Eucharist: not every recourse to these texts is functionally oriented towards meal theology or the ritual of the Eucharist. Besides “eucharistic” uses, we find countless other thematic complexes that make use of the Last Supper traditions and to which these texts are adapted in different ways, e. g. ecclesiological and Christological discourses, ethical and parenetic contexts, antiheretical or apologetical debates, and many others. In numerous sources, the “eucharistic” backdrop has been presupposed either without sufficient reasoning or in an undifferentiated manner. This has obstructed our view of the diverse semantic potentials that is constitutive of the reception of the Last Supper tradition in the ancient church. Hence, the objective of this project is to lay open the diversity of the reception and to chart it systematically. Against this backdrop, the project intends to write a history of the development of the semantic potential of the Last Supper traditions in the ancient church especially regarding their relation to the ritual of the Eucharist. The project design, therefore, has two aspects:(1) The research data is “mined” via digital text corpora and by using a purely lexical heuristic approach that can access the source material in a broad yet precise way. As a tool for collecting and systematically organizing the sources, the project uses a digital database that allows for the efficient evaluation and processing of the data in a recursive back and forth between data collection and theory development. The research database will be available for subsequent use.(2) The project’s centerpiece is a history of reception study on the semantic potentials of the Last Supper traditions in the ancient church that is building upon the broad collection of research data described under (1). This study aims at a comprehensive understanding of the various semantic potentials and their formation by correlating them with different discourses in the ancient church and systematizing them. Being much broader than questions of dogmatic or ritual history, the reception is expected to cover thematic fields that have not yet been recognized in their plurality and depth. From a synthetic perspective, the study poses, thus, the question of the theological place of the Last Supper tradition between the 2nd and 4th centuries—i.e. before the formation of the liturgies of Late antiquity—and so tries to overcome a central desideratum between New Testament and Late ancient meal theology.