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" The eucharist in the “Didache”: Ritual and history "
Jonathan David Schwiebert
P. K. Fredriksen, Helmut
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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54511
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| Doc. No
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TL24465
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| Call number
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3171216
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| Main Entry
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Jonathan David Schwiebert
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| Title & Author
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The eucharist in the “Didache”: Ritual and history\ Jonathan David Schwiebert
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| College
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Boston University
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| Date
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2005
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2005
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| Page No
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284
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| Abstract
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This dissertation examines the ritual dynamics and historical impact of the eucharistic tradition preserved in Didache 9–10. It divides into two parts. The first part seeks to clarify what is distinctive about the Didache's ritualization of cup and bread, how the ritual operates and what it attempts to do. To that end, this part maps out and then compares the ritual logic of (a) the supper tradition common to Paul and Mark and (b) the Didache's prayers. The ritual analysis concludes that the tradition common to Paul and Mark links the death of Jesus with the arrival of God's kingdom; by contrast, the Didache's ritual has been constructed to inculcate in the celebrants a sense of dependence upon God as Father for knowledge made available through Jesus, his prophet. The second part of this study seeks to locate the Didache's eucharistic practice historically, first in its original milieu and then in the subsequent history of the Jesus movement. The working assumption throughout is that this constitutive ritual would have left its imprint on its practitioners' religious conceptions. The examination first evaluates possible affinities with the ritual's distinctive logic in Jewish and early Christian materials, and concludes that the Didache's prayers arose within a group of Jewish followers of Jesus who particularly prized the sayings of Jesus, in a form close to what is found in Q. Finally, this work seeks to estimate the impact that this ritual may have had upon second- and third-century Christian communities. The surviving evidence, consisting mostly of prayer texts, suggests that while the Didache's Eucharist evidently continued to be practiced in certain early Christian communities in Egypt and Syria, individual elements from the Didache's ritual were more often removed from their original context and subsumed within rituals oriented by very different eucharistic conceptions. This second phenomenon, traceable in Rome, Asia Minor, and Egypt, can be linked with trends in formative Christianity to define the movement's central institutions in the face of ritual and doctrinal rivalry. An awareness of meaningful diversity in ritual practice emerges as a desideratum for historical research.
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| Subject
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Philosophy, religion and theology; Social sciences; Christian; Didache; Eucharist; Ritual; Bible; Religious congregations; 0330:Religious congregations; 0321:Bible
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P. K. Fredriksen, Helmut
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Boston University
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