“. . . the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, ‘This is my body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’”

However, in reality these are not the words of Jesus but of the apostle Paul, who wrote them in 1 Corinthians 11: 23-25 around 53-54 CE, over 20 years after Jesus died. Virtually all biblical scholars agree that this is the earliest account of what Jesus said at that last meal with his disciples. However, Paul was not present at that meal, and he himself explicitly states that he got this wording directly “from the Lord” during one of the numerous visionary experiences he had of a heavenly voice speaking to him some years after Jesus died. In modern times many Christian scholars have attempted to change Paul’s account by saying that he actually got those words from Peter and/or James during a visit he made to Jerusalem, since they were actually present at the supper with Jesus and therefore would have known what he said. However, there are several serious problems with the claim that the words Paul wrote were given to him by James and/or Peter:

1. Paul explicitly stated that “his gospel” was “from no man”(Galatians 1:1) and that his Eucharistic language was directly “received from the Lord.” By his own testimony, then, Paul, who never met Jesus in the flesh, was a person who repeatedly experienced mental states in which he was spoken to by an invisible heavenly “Christos” figure, and he even claimed to have traveled into paradise itself on several occasions. Paul, of course, was not from Jerusalem but was a diaspora Jew from Tarsus, the major city of the Roman province of Cilicia (now in Turkey) which was the thriving center of the Greco-Roman mystery religions that were flourishing at that time. Paul undoubtedly would have been familiar with those mystery-religion rituals that often involved bathing in the blood of a sacrificial bull and the symbolic eating of their gods. It does not seem unlikely that such a person might well have added body-blood language to a simpler ritual like the one found in the Didache (see 2 below) which he encountered while persecuting the Jerusalem followers of Jesus.

2. Other than Paul’s words, the earliest account we have of a ritual based on a final meal with Jesus is that found in the “Didache,” or “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” This document was only rediscovered in 1873, but scholars now date to the 1st century, and it was likely written at the same time as some of the books of the New Testament (it had supporters for inclusion in the canon, but “didn’t make the cut).” Didache appears to have been an instruction manual for church practices that came out of the early Jerusalem church that included Jesus’ own disciples, among them Peter and James (James, Jesus’ brother, was the leader of the Jerusalem church until he was executed by the Romans in 62 CE). In spite of the attempt by the scholars mentioned above to say that Paul got his wording from Peter and James, it is particularly notable that the Didache eucharistic account say nothing about Jesus’ body, blood, or even his death in the memorial language it gives to be spoken over the wine and bread. The Didache language, therefore, is strong historical evidence that Jesus’ immediate followers did not interpret his death as a blood atonement for sin.

3. Scholars generally acknowledge that there are textual difficulties in the account of the eucharist found in Luke’s gospel, including his curious remarks about a “cup after supper” (the “second cup problem”). It appears that the author of Luke was aware of two different eucharistic traditions: one that did not have “body and blood” language and one that did, (likely the one from Paul) and was somewhat awkwardly trying to combine them.

4. A distinctive, long-standing, and explicit Hebrew dietary restriction of the Torah was God’s requirement that his people not ingest blood (Deut. 12:23, Lev 17:10-12). This is the reason for kosher preparation of meat, which drains the blood from meat before it is eaten to make it kosher for human consumption. Given this dietary restriction, it seems quite unlikely that Jesus, a Jewish rabbi (whatever else he was), would have asked his Jewish followers to eat his body and drink his blood. In addition, the so-called Noahide Laws forbade any person, Hebrew or gentile, from consuming blood.

5. Finally, Jesus himself seems to have said nothing in his public ministry about his death being a blood atonement for sin. When the tax-collector said to Jesus that he would return fourfold any money he had acquired by cheating, Jesus said to him “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:8-9), and when the lawyer asked Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus told him “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind; and your neighbor as yourself; do this, and you will live”(Luke 10:27-8).

In summary, a strong, case can be made that the doctrine of Jesus’ broken body and shed blood as a necessary atonement for the sins of humanity was a creation of Paul, but was not a teaching of Jesus himself.