Introduction
“Where do you want us to go and prepare, so that you may eat?” the disciples ask Jesus according to Mark 14.12. Of course, I passed over the object at stake, namely ‘the Passover meal’.Footnote 1 In this paper, I am interested in the place where Jesus’ Last Supper is supposed to have happened. While Matthew sends the disciples to a surprisingly anonymous host (ὁ δεῖνα) who provides for them the place for the meal (Matt 26.18), in Mark and Luke, Jesus instructs them to move into the city where they should follow the first person with a water jug into the house he will enter.Footnote 2 The owner of this place (οἰκοδεσπότης) knows a guest house (κατάλυμα) with an upper room (ἀνάγαιον) appropriately furnished (ἐστρωμένον).Footnote 3 The kind of furniture is not mentioned, yet most interpreters assume dining couches. A kitchen would also be needed as the disciples prepare the Passover meal.Footnote 4 However, the description of the concrete locality that accommodated the dining group remains vague and obscured in the narrative of the three Gospels.
Why is the account so strikingly imprecise when it comes to the location of the meal? How can one explain that the place where Jesus’ Last Supper once occurred seems to have been thoroughly forgotten?Footnote 5 Does place matter at all to the performance of early Christian meals?
Based on recent theoretical reflections on the links between space and rituals, I argue that place was indeed an essential factor in the formation and performance of the tradition of Jesus’ Last Supper. But the memory of this specific meal does not refer to a house or pilgrim place inside the city of Jerusalem but to the tombs and cemeteries beyond the city wall.
As a short form for the tradition cited in 1 Cor 11.23–5 and Mark 14.22–4, I borrow from Paul the designation ‘Lord’s Supper’. This text, also known as ‘Sayings about the Bread and the Cup’, ‘words of institution’, Deuteworte (‘interpretative words’) or ‘the Eucharist’, encapsulates the essence of a ritual.Footnote 6 I argue that a closer look at possible places where early Christ groups met may shed new light on the meaning and performative practice of a meal celebrated with these words in early post-Easter time.Footnote 7
First (1), I will summarise research on meeting places inside the city, the so-called house church and the Greco-Roman banquet as its most prominent meal form. Second (2), I will introduce the less well-known space beyond the city walls in which tombs of the rich and the poor intermingle with all kinds of other facilities alongside the incoming and outgoing streets. Third (3), I collect what can be known about meals in this context. In the fourth part (4), I discuss the genre of the Lord’s Supper tradition before I propose in my fifth part (5), as its most likely Sitz im Leben in early post-Easter time, the mortuary cult practice at the cemeteries in the city’s suburb. In conclusion (6), I will ask whether and how a given place, inside or outside a city, could be transformed into a representational space for a lived experience of Christ’s presence at this specific meal.
1. Early Christians’ Meeting Spaces inside the City
Wayne Meeks was not the first but one of the most influential among New Testament scholars to call the household the ‘“basic cell” of the Christian movement’.Footnote 8 Many New Testament social historians followed him in identifying the οἶκος (house) as the formative entity that structured internal and external relationships of early Christ groups. With the husband and his legal wife, children, slaves, freed persons and clients, the upper-class households seem to provide the necessary ‘degree of intimacy and stability of place’ for the movement to expand through existing networks among patrons, clients and business contacts. Moreover, the οἶκος (house) seems to represent power structures in terms of patriarchy, as reflected in the so-called household codes in post-Pauline literature.Footnote 9 For Meeks, however, the household model still leaves several aspects of the formation of Christ groups unexplained, most prominently its ‘ritual processes and central symbols and beliefs’.Footnote 10
In the 1990s, the house was imagined as a profane, religiously neutral space.Footnote 11 As Meeks’s student L. Michael White argues, only in the third century were Christian houses transformed from the domus-ecclesia into religious buildings, like the house church in Dura Europos. Earlier, however, in the first and second centuries, the οἶκος (house) was primarily a social space that shaped meal practices, with manifold conflicts over food distribution and leadership roles.Footnote 12
Connected to the house is the Greco-Roman banquet.Footnote 13 Upper-class houses provide a specific space for a group of nine to twelve diners, the triclinium. Meals celebrated in these triclinia shared a homogenous pattern: the reclining of (more or less) all participants while eating and drinking together for several hours in the evening.Footnote 14 A libation, or praying and blessing over a cup or κρατήρ of unmixed wine marks the transition from the first course, the eating (δεῖπνον), to the second, the drinking party (συμπόσιον), expressing festive joy with speeches, singing and alike.Footnote 15
The socio-cultural approach to early Christian meals introduced by Dennis Smith and Matthias Klinghardt claims that all groups, including Christians, met at such forms of ritual banqueting.Footnote 16 And indeed, Paul’s and Luke’s Lord’s Supper tradition follows this pattern when Jesus blesses the cup ‘after the meal’ (μετὰ τὸ δειπνῆσαι, 1 Cor 11.25; Luke 22.20). However, the function of the Lord’s Supper tradition itself remains unclear. As Dennis Smith states, ‘It cannot be read as a script for liturgical action unless one can imagine someone in the community acting out the part of Jesus in some kind of divine drama, which seems unlikely.’Footnote 17 So the key to its early performance is the question of who might have performed Jesus’ words in the Lord’s Supper tradition at a Christ group’s meal.
That early Christ groups met ‘almost exclusively’ in private houses has been disputed in more recent years.Footnote 18 Only Acts narrates conversions of a ‘whole house’, namely those of the Philippian prison guard (Acts 16.33) and the leader of the synagogue, Crispus (Acts 18.8); neither of them became the meeting place of the respective local ekklesia. On the contrary, the Philippians of Acts gather in the house of Lydia (Acts 16.40), while those in Corinth in the house of a certain Titus Justus (Acts 18.7).Footnote 19 Other groups meet in a three-storey upper place (τρίστεγον) at Troas (Acts 20.9),Footnote 20 on the estate (χωρίον) of the first citizen of Malta (Acts 28.7), in a rented apartment (μίσθωμα) in Rome (Acts 28.30) and the σχολή of Tyrannus in Ephesus (Acts 19.9). The latter might be understood as an ‘apsidal recess’ or a ‘semicircular bench’ known from sanctuaries and tomb architecture.Footnote 21 Contrary to the academic popularity of the house church, neither Acts nor Paul identify private houses as the most prominent meeting space. Moreover, as Georg Schölgen observed already in the 1980s, Paul’s ecclesiology metaphors are body, temple, planting (φυτεύω, 1 Cor 3.6–8; 9.7) and building (οἰκοδομέω, 1 Cor 8.1, 10; 14.4, 17; 1 Thess 5.11) – not οἶκος. Only the second-century Pastoral Epistles use οἶκος as an ecclesiological metaphor (1 Tim 3.15).Footnote 22
Only upper-class elite villas would provide enough space for the about fifty people greeted in Rom 16.1–16 to gather.Footnote 23 Most interpreters are sceptical about placing members of early Christ groups among those highest elite circles. Some argue that gathering in tenement houses seemed more likely.Footnote 24 Others suggest several house-based groups at Corinth, which would gather only for major events as a ‘whole assembly’ (1 Cor 14.23).Footnote 25 Recently, alternative meeting places have been brought into the discussion, like rented upper rooms, street corners (vici), clubhouses of associations,Footnote 26 workshops,Footnote 27 gardens,Footnote 28 cellars, shops, barns, warehouses, inns and burial sites.Footnote 29 For most of these places, actual evidence is meagre. Burial sites, however, are well known for meetings of second- to fourth-century Christians among the graves of the martyrs.Footnote 30
2. Meeting in Suburbs and Cemeteries
For Domitia Dione, his mother … and for Domitius Beronicianus, his father … Domitius Beronicianus, Roman Equestrian, he made [the tomb] for his most venerable parents. He also will give the three shops (tabernas n. III) that are joined to the right and left of the tomb, with the garden that is enclosed between and the residences that are above the shops (cum horto qui est intra concluso et (h)abitationes quae sunt super tabernas). Likewise, he will establish burial spaces for freedmen and freedwomen and their descendants as long as our original name pertains to them…..Footnote 31
On rented land at the via Salaria, the Roman equestrian Domitius Beronicianus founded a representative tomb for his mother, father, his freed persons and their descendants with a garden, three tavernas, apartments and shops. Such expanded funerary plots are exceptional, yet not unknown along the incoming and outgoing streets in a given city. The rich parvenu Trimalchio in Petronius’ satire plans his garden tomb:
My tomb complex has a frontage of one hundred feet and is two hundred feet in depth. I want to have all kinds of fruit trees growing round my ashes and plenty of vines. It is quite wrong for a man to decorate his house while he is alive, and not have trouble with the house when he must make a longer stay … I am appointing one of the freedmen to be caretaker of the tomb and prevent the common people from running up and defiling it.Footnote 32
Exaggeration and funny details are characteristics of satire. The idea of representing one’s significance through grave architecture and the habit of using gravesides for other needs seem to be common in the Greek or Roman world. As Allison Emmerson showed, what has been earlier called the ‘street of the tombs’ (Gräberstraßen) should be seen as an ‘interweaving of structures for the living and the dead in urban zones outside the city proper’ that must be called ‘suburbs’.Footnote 33
Ancient lawgiving, like the twelve tables at Rome, excluded burying the dead inside the cities. It would be a misunderstanding, however, if this was explained by fear of pollution caused by death or the wish to separate the dead from the living.Footnote 34 On the contrary, graves lined the major roads leading towards the city wall, intermingling with gardens, villas, shops, factories, recycling facilities, tavernas, housing, inns, amphitheatres and sanctuaries.
The space around the city wall was contested. Growing cities needed space for their industries, farming, the living and the dead. Grave spots immediately beyond the city wall and at the intersections of major roads were the most prestigious.Footnote 35 Benches and exedras invite persons to rest and read grave inscriptions. Here, the visitor is introduced to the most eminent families and people. Affluent newcomers and freed persons display their success and merit through grave architecture, a self-representation from which they were excluded in the city’s centre. The mausolea of the elite families and upcoming rich often provide burial spots for deserving members, including freedmen, freedwomen and some slaves. Large columbaria are set for hundreds of burials, with niches for urns or bodies preinstalled.Footnote 36 Belonging to such an elite household granted some members of these larger families a burial place – however, often without their name.Footnote 37 Associations erected grave structures to bury some of their members.Footnote 38 At Rome, one can observe a change of taste from a few extravagant tombs to a more standardised rectangular house type in the time of Augustus, a temple type reappearing in the second century (which celebrated the deification of some elite family members, and from the third century onward), and later to underground galleries and catacombs, not only inhabited by Jews and Christians.Footnote 39
The majority of the not-so-well-offs received simple graves, with or without grave steles in the back rows or beside and beyond the representative tombs. More or less unmarked ash urns were placed directly in the ground. Whether the poorest were only discharged in mass graves or buried by their loved ones in unmarked graves of nondurable material remains disputed.Footnote 40 Yet what might strike modern observers is that the rich and the poor seem to have come nowhere else as close as in the burial areas of the city’s suburbs.Footnote 41
Ancient cemeteries were not quiet. On the contrary, they were ‘part of vibrant, living districts’.Footnote 42 Travellers and goods must pass to enter or leave the city. Walls of tombs are used to spread important messages like this:
If anybody lost a mare with a small pack-saddle, November 25, let him come and see Quintus Decius Hilarus, freedman of Quintus Decius, or … [the name is illegible], freedman of Lucius, on the estate of the Mamii, this side of the bridge over the Sarno.Footnote 43
Many others send greetings to hopefully bypassing friends, some also as prostitutes. At night, tombs seem to have provided hidden places to share intimacy between lovers.Footnote 44 However, prostitution in and among graves is mocked in Martial’s epigrams, Horace’s satire, and in fictive ego-documents of prostitutes.Footnote 45 Beggars could appease their hunger by the offerings left for the dead. However, the space outside the city wall was not only tombs, workshops for dyers and tanners, bathhouses, arenas and brothels but also the place of the major philosophical schools: Plato’s Academy, Epicurus’ Garden and Aristotle’s Lyceum, and the Procession Street to the sanctuary of Eleusis.Footnote 46
Besides all this in- and outgoing traffic, one has to imagine constant funerary processions.Footnote 47 Family members, clients, enslaved people, relatives and friends went out of the city along the outgoing streets to commemorate their dead and celebrate banquets at certain days of memory and death festivals.Footnote 48
3. Meals at the Graves
Many readers of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5.1–20) imagine graveyards polluted with demons and ‘unclean spirits’.Footnote 49 Only violent, psychotic outsiders seem to reside in tombs. As we have already seen, this assumption is wrong. First of all, it is not the human being (ἄνθρωπος) but the spirit (πνεῦμα) who is ‘unclean’ (ἀκάθαρτος; Mark 5.2).Footnote 50 While according to Num 19.11–16, entering the temple would be impossible because of the possible pollution from a corpse of a recently deceased person,Footnote 51 the biblical Joseph makes his brethren promise to carry his bones from Egypt back to Israel.Footnote 52 So a corpse causes purity problems; graves and bones do not.Footnote 53 For the rabbis, the corpse loses its potential to cause pollution as much as it loses its personhood.Footnote 54
The care for the dead is obligatory, and what concerns Greeks, Romans and Jews alike is the proper treatment of the deceased. Negligence would be punished by haunting.Footnote 55 There are several wandering stories of haunted houses, inside and beyond the city wall, in which a sage or philosopher can solve the problem by talking to the revenant and re-establishing the destroyed gravesite.Footnote 56 Jesus meeting with the Gerasene demoniac expands, among other features, this motif.
While funerary and grave-cult practices among the Greeks, Romans and Jews differ, as they do among people of different genders, status, region and time, some visual representations became strikingly globalised.Footnote 57 The most ubiquitous representation is the imagery of the so-called Totenmahl (meal of the dead). It shows a reclining male, often with a drinking vessel in his hand and a table in front. A woman sits to his left on a chair. Sometimes, additional small figures, children or slaves serve food and drink.Footnote 58 A few examples depict reclining females or a group of males and females together on the same couch.Footnote 59 At graveyards in Ostia and Pompeii, permanent bi- and triclinia were installed before the graves. Those banquet facilities serve not only the needs of the graveyard banqueters but also present the deceased as the symposiarch (president) of their meal.Footnote 60 From the second century, so-called stibadium scenes are painted inside the graves, columbaria, or catacombs.Footnote 61 Although painted inside, they show outdoor banquets on a semi-circular bench under a canopy and garlands. Strikingly, both pagan and Christian examples depict six to seven diners reclining around a table with bread, wine and fish.Footnote 62
The meaning of these reliefs, paintings, sarcophagi and dining facilities before, in or around graves is debated. Interpretations can be clustered into three paradigms:
1. The prospective-eschatological model: the scene depicts a meal of the deceased in the otherworld.Footnote 63
2. The ritualistic and cultic model: the scene depicts a funerary banquet with the de- ceased.Footnote 64
3. The socio-historical paradigm: the scene depicts either a meal the deceased took part in during his/her lifetime or his/her actual or aspired status represented by such a banquet.Footnote 65
Most scholars, however, currently agree that images and installations are semantically open, and observers are free to interpret them ‘according to their cultural predispositions or their individual preference’.Footnote 66 For some, images and installations reflect their dining with or in front of the deceased.Footnote 67 Cooking pots, plates, drinking vessels and leftover food prove that some offerings or meals must have occurred among the graves. Urns, sarcophagi and coffins contain tubes or pipes to let down liquids and libations to the corpses or their ashes.Footnote 68
Jews shared many rites in mortuary practice.Footnote 69 Hellenistic and early Roman rock-cut monumental tombs around Jerusalem resemble the tomb architecture elsewhere.Footnote 70 Perfume bottles, cooking pots, bowls, jugs, lamps and storage jars prove that Jews visited their dead regularly.
In an ideal typology, three forms of mortuary meals can be distinguished: First, the perideipnon (περίδειπνον) was held in classical times after the funeral or at the end of mourning in the home of the deceased.Footnote 71 According to Artemidorus’ handbook on dream interpretation, a dream in which one is prompted by one’s enlarged family (συμβιωταί) and cult group (φράτορες) to receive them for a meal announces danger, because ‘it is customary for companions both to visit the home of the dead and to dine there, and the reception is said to have been given by the deceased’.Footnote 72 Sometimes, a corpse seems to be present, as in Petronius’ Satyricon, where the guests at a ninth-day funeral feast,…. were forced to pour half of the drinks over the poor bones of the diseased.Footnote 73
Second, a meal that is held at the graveyards with or without offering goods to the deceased.Footnote 74 However, besides the material representations discussed, Greco-Roman satire is our primary source for this custom. In one of Lucian’s satires, the underworld ferryman, Charon, is guided by Hermes through the world on a sightseeing tour that ends at a cemetery. Here, Charon asks:
“Why is it, then, that those people are putting garlands on the stones and anointing them with perfume? There are others also who have built pyres in front of the mounds and have dug trenches, and now they are burning up those fine dinners and pouring wine and mead, as far as one may judge, into the ditches.” (Hermes): “I don’t know what good these things are to men in Hades, ferryman; they are convinced, however, that the souls, allowed to come up from below, get their dinner as best they may by flitting about the smoke and steam and drink the mead out of the trench.”Footnote 75
Lucian also mocks that a corpse without friends suffers from hunger as they get no libations or offerings at their tombs (Luct. 9) and that people ‘drench the stones with myrrh and crown them with wreaths, and then they themselves enjoy the food and drink that has been prepared’ (Merc. cond. 28, trans. Harmon).Footnote 76 The educated distanced themselves from such mortuary cult practices.Footnote 77 But strikingly, Christian writers like Tertullian and Cyprian not only criticise but also welcome the feeding of the dead.Footnote 78
The place where Jesus’ body was left after crucifixion remained unknown to his followers. A burial by the prominent councillor Joseph of Arimathea in a (Mark 15.42–6), or his (Matt 27.60), unused (Luke 23.53) mausoleum or in a rock chamber tomb in a garden (John 19.41) closed by a rolling rock might be explained as a pious act by a Jew, who did not want to leave a dead body on the cross.Footnote 79 However, it contradicts the tradition that Jesus was buried by those who accused him before Pilate (Acts 13.29).Footnote 80 And no veneration of Jesus’ tomb is known earlier than the fourth century ce.Footnote 81 However, even without knowing where Jesus’ corpse had been laid down, the group of Jesus followers around Mary Magdalene likely visited the cemeteries in Jerusalem’s suburb. Multiple accounts narrate the care for Jesus’ corpse, and his appearance to the women among the graves refers to mortuary cult practice.Footnote 82 In my view, the early post-Easter performance of the Lord’s Supper tradition originated in this context.
4. The Meal Inscribed in the Lord’s Supper Tradition
The two earliest versions of the Lord’s Supper tradition are preserved in First Corinthians and the Gospel of Mark. Because it lacks any specific elements of a Passover meal, like the unleavened bread, lamb and bitter herbs, most scholars agree that it originated independently of its current context in Mark. Moreover, it doubles the preceding scene, which announces that Jesus will be handed over by one of his disciples.Footnote 83 Paul states that he received the tradition ‘from the Lord’ and transmitted it to his friends at Corinth at an earlier visit (1 Cor 11.23).Footnote 84 Both versions refer to the same scene, but their literal correspondence is limited to a few words: ἔλαβεν ἄρτον, ἔκλασεν καὶ εἶπεν· τοῦτό μού ἐστιν τὸ σῶμα, ποτήριον τοῦτο and διαθήκη (he took bread, broke it and said: this is my body; cup, this, and covenant). According to a widely shared consent, it is impossible to reconstruct one original from.Footnote 85
Most scholars identify the tradition as an aetiology.Footnote 86 Other suggestions are anecdote, ‘interpretive reflections or catechesis’,Footnote 87 exemplum,Footnote 88 a rubric (instruction for a praxis) or cultic norm,Footnote 89 a cult legendFootnote 90 or a ‘cultic formula’.Footnote 91 Those who speak of an aetiology doubt that it was performed at banquets. Instead, Paul uses it as an authoritative text for his critique of Corinthian praxis.Footnote 92 Its argumentative thrust is, however, debated. Does it call for unity (1 Cor 10.17; 11.33),Footnote 93 for social justice (1 Cor 11.21),Footnote 94 to start the banquet at the same timeFootnote 95 or to imitate Paul and Jesus?Footnote 96 Is the tradition used to limit the allowed foodstuff to bread and wine (only),Footnote 97 or to distinguish a sacred meal from an ordinary one,Footnote 98 or a Christian meal from the sacrificial banquets of the idolators (cf. 1 Cor 10.21)Footnote 99 or to establish the whole meal as a sacrament?Footnote 100 The link between the tradition and the concrete problems Paul identifies in Corinth, like divisions, hunger and drunkenness, illness and early death, alongside the lack of discerning the body of Christ and patience to wait for each other, remains opaque.
Historians of liturgy question any performance of the Lord’s Supper tradition before the fourth century when it appeared for the first time in eucharistic prayers.Footnote 101 Yet the ‘innovation’ refers to written text, not necessarily oral forms of praying that likely existed in great plurality.Footnote 102 Some meal prayers from the second and third centuries allude to the wording of the Lord’s Supper tradition.Footnote 103 Likely, several forms of meal gathering existed from the very beginning.Footnote 104
An aetiology (αἰτιολογία, ‘statement of a cause’) aims to understand the origin of a phenomenon. Thereby, it establishes continuity from the present to the past.Footnote 105 In antiquity, questions about a cause (αἰτία) are raised by philosophy, medicine, historiography and mythography.Footnote 106 The Hebrew Bible contains several aetiologies. Jacob’s fight at the Jabbok explains why a particular place is called Peniel and why ‘the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket’ (Gen 32.32 NRSV). The Lord’s Supper tradition does not explain why and how a particular meal is celebrated but presupposes its context.
Mark inserts his tradition into a passion account without placing it within the Passover context. Paul identifies the speaker with the introduction: ‘Our Lord, on the night…’. To whom the Lord has spoken is not stated. Both texts show a dense sequence of briefly sketched actions followed by a direct first-person speech in which bread and cup are identified with the body and a covenant or the blood. From a distance, it becomes obvious that only our long-standing familiarity with the Gospels’ passion accounts makes this intelligible.Footnote 107 If one would find the Lord’s Supper tradition on papyrus without context, one would likely identify it as a tense highpoint of a storyline, with a short alternation of acts and direct speech. However, one would hardly understand what had happened before or will happen afterwards. In other words, the Lord’s Supper tradition is not a story, not an aetiology, but only a story fragment.
Paul expects Corinthian knowledge of a passion account. Their eating and drinking imitates the Lord’s last meal and, simultaneously, is an event that proclaims Jesus’ suffering and death (1 Cor 11.26). The Lord’s Supper itself contains features known from ancient mortuary cults. Jesus’ request, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’, appears in testamentary decrees establishing mortuary banquets.Footnote 108 In the Bible, bread and cup are the most prominent elements of a meal, shared at the grave or as the final point of mourning and lamenting, or both.Footnote 109 Jesus’ advice to ‘do this in remembrance of me’ is part of Paul’s, Luke’s and Justin Martyr’s form of the tradition.Footnote 110 All five versions preserved change the tradition’s exact wording. Matthew adds to his Markan Vorlage two imperatives: take and ‘eat’ (φάγετε, Matt 26.26) and ‘drink’ (πίετε, Matt 26.27) from the cup. Luke’s version resembles Paul’s tradition in 1 Cor 11.23–5 instead of that in his Markan Vorlage, elsewhere in his passion narrative.Footnote 111 Marlis Gielen observes that Paul’s first quotation in 1 Cor 10.16 describes a collective enactment: ‘the cup of blessing that we bless’ and ‘the bread that we break’.Footnote 112 This constant change in the exact wording makes oral performance likely. The space outside the city helps to understand who might have performed the words in the early post-Easter period.
5. The Lord’s Supper Tradition and Ancient Mortuary Meals
Call the mourning women, let them come, and send for the skilled women … Do hear, oh women,… teach your daughters a dirge and a woman to her companion a lament.Footnote 113
In the Bible and everywhere in antiquity, singing laments and mourning songs is typically a woman’s task. Literature reflects this fact but preserves only a few allusions to original songs, laments and dirges.Footnote 114
As a reader of the Gospels, one might think of the individual psalms of lament, as verses from Psalms (42.6, 12, 43, 5; 22.19, 8–9, 2 and 69.22) formed Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane and the crucifixion scene.Footnote 115 However, while more recent scholars presume individual, communal or cultic performance of psalms,Footnote 116 there is no evidence for psalm singing in Jewish mortuary cults. Rewritings of biblical stories sometimes put laments or prayers into the mouths of the endangered heroes, like Daniel in the lion’s den or Joseph thrown into the pit by his envious brothers.Footnote 117 At least, these narrators imagine psalms as a medium to invoke God, not to forsake the lamenter.Footnote 118 And, from the fourth century ce onward, some Christians introduced psalms into the cult of the dead, either to oppose traditional lamenting and dirges or as its most appropriate form.Footnote 119
While some psalm verses might have had a prehistory of or are influenced by some Jewish laments or dirges, the allusion to Psalms in the passion narrative more likely reflects the ‘work of the early community, as it searched for a theological context, in which the suffering of Jesus might be placed’.Footnote 120 However, as demonstrated earlier, the Lord’s Supper tradition is no original part of Mark’s passion account. Regardless of whether it renders some memory of a last meal with Jesus, it alludes to laments and mortuary meals of which it is, in my view, a dense fragment.Footnote 121
Three genres in classical literature reflect dirges and laments: the epic, the drama and the epigram.Footnote 122 None of these genres preserved actual laments but at least gave some impression of possible contents and ways of their performances. The most extended laments preserved are those sung by Trojan women at the laying out of Hector.Footnote 123 Hector’s wife, Andromache, blames Hector for leaving her alone and envisions her and her son’s horrible future. His sister Helena praises the character and life of the hero. His mother, Hecabe, focuses on the very moment of his cruel death by Achilles, who not only killed him but, as she reports, ‘with the long-edged bronze often he dragged you about the mound of his comrade, Patroclus, whom you slew’.Footnote 124 In between the three songs of the nearest kinswomen, the epic repeats the line: ‘So she spoke tearfully, and to it the women added their laments.’Footnote 125 This points to the typical antiphonal structure of the lamenting.Footnote 126 Already, Jeremiah observed that lamenting is a collective effort (Jer 9.20).
In Aeschylus’ drama Seven against Thebes, the two choirs of Antigone and Ismene lament the death of their brothers who killed each other:
You struck after being struck./You were killed after killing./You killed with the spear./You died by the spear./Having striven grievously/Having suffered grievously/You lie dead./You have killed./Let lamentation flow./Let tears flow.Footnote 127
Here, the two voices echo each other, focusing again on the very moment of dying. Often, the chorus joins the antiphonal discourse with a given speaker.Footnote 128 However, again, Greek tragedy aims to moderate this expressive and sometimes politically destructive practice and transforms laments in manifold ways into mixed genres.Footnote 129
The third genre that contains reflections of actual laments are epigrams preserved in literature and on gravestones.Footnote 130 One example is the cenotaph of Philadelphos, a fallen soldier, found in Aphrodisias.
This tomb, Philadelphos, I labored for you with pain when you died, I, Helenis, your mother. On your tomb [or: for you], this I inscribed once. How did you die? In what places? Whose follower were you? Seeking the soul of my child, who has died, for this, my child, even of my own free will I shall descend to the house of Hades and with you I shall lie, wretched in eternity.Footnote 131
This monument documents Helenis’ mourning in skilful metric Homeric language. ‘Since inscriptions were often read aloud, the lament was re-enacted whenever a passerby read the epigram.’ So, every reader becomes Helenis’ co-mourner in her search for the truth about her son’s death. The function of the epigram is to evoke this emotion.Footnote 132
In about a third of grave-epitaphs, the dead person speaks with his or her own voice.Footnote 133 One example is the epigram of Cleumatra:
Do not bring anything for me to drink, for I drank when I was alive, and it does no good: nor anything to eat, I need nothing. All that is nonsense. But if for the sake of remembrance [ἕνεκεν μνήμης] and the life we had together, you bring saffron or frankincense, then, friends, you are giving appropriate gifts to those who have taken me into their keeping. These things belong to the gods below; dead men have nothing to do with the living—Cleumatra’s tomb.Footnote 134
This epigram from the Greek island Astypalaia reflects three possible forms of an ancient death cult: visiting the graves, offering to the dead and sharing food with them. The scepticism is not unique and appears similarly in several epigrams.Footnote 135 Other epigrams refer more positively to the grave cults and invoke its readers to pour some wine into the grave.Footnote 136 Visiting Cleumatra’s tomb preserved her memory (ἕνεκεν μνήμης), at least. First-person speech of the deceased was likely the oldest form of grave epitaph and remained prominent until late antiquity.Footnote 137 Every reader of the grave epitaph re-enacted the speech of the desceased.
A second example is the famous Iustus inscription from Beth-Sheʿarim in Galilee:
I, Iustus, Leonteides (= son of Leontius) … lie dead, who, having plucked the fruit of all wisdom, have left the light (and) my wretched parents who are in perpetual mourning, and my brothers too, alas! in Besara (Beth-She’arim), and having gone down to Hades, I, Iustus lie in this place with many of my kindred since powerful Fate willed it so. Courage, Iustus, no one is immortal.Footnote 138
Again written in metric verse and Homeric wording, this epigram includes a short dialogue. After reviewing his life and death, including the mourning of his parents, the speech act changes, and the reader of the inscription comforts Iustus with a popular formula: ‘Courage, Iustus, no one is immortal.’ This latter is standard in many pagan and Jewish inscriptions, often but not always addressed to the deceased.Footnote 139 Iustus’ tomb engages in a dialogue between the dead and the living.
A graffiti from Jason’s tomb in Jerusalem reads, ‘Celebrate, you brothers, who are living, and drink together! No one is immortal.’Footnote 140 Another graffiti inside Catacomb 20 in Beth-Sheʿarim reads: ‘Courage, pious ancestors! No one is immortal.’Footnote 141 In these two cases, the deceased person comforts the living with the formula ‘be of good courage’. On the same wall in Catacomb 20 a graffiti wishes: ‘Good luck for your resurrection.’Footnote 142 This looks again like a little dialogue between the dead and the living.
The relationship between inscriptions and lament is debated. Some argue that the grave epitaph mirrors the funeral speech,Footnote 143 others that it evokes lamenting or represents its mimetic repetition.Footnote 144 At least, one could say that first-person epigrams engage their readers in dialogues with the dead and raise again the absent voice.
Therefore, I assume that the Lord’s Supper tradition is likewise a dense, short form of laments once sung among tombs in the Jerusalem suburbs by Mary Magdalene and her friends. It is embedded in the memory of Jesus’ suffering and dying. Recounting the passion stories engages those present, likely emotionally, with dirges and laments. The condensed story fragment of the Lord’s Supper tradition retains the moment when the deceased raises his voice.
Roman history narrates a similar scene from Caesar’s funeral. In the words of the Roman historian Appian,
When the speech was over, other dirges accompanied by singing were chanted for him by choruses according to the national custom; and once again, they recited his deeds and his sad fate. Somewhere from the midst of these lamentations, there was an impression that Caesar himself spoke and named the enemies he had treated well. Concerning the murderers themselves, when he added, as if in amazement, “To think that I saved these very men who were to kill me!” the people could take it no longer.Footnote 145
While Caesar calls for revenge on his murderers, Jesus comforts his bereaved friends by providing them with food and drink.Footnote 146 Perhaps it is precisely this kind of epiphany Paul has in mind when he comments on the Lord’s Supper tradition: ‘For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Cor 11.26). With ‘until he comes’, Paul might envision not only the Lord’s second coming but also his summoned presence by the collective, antiphonal recounting of his passion and dying. At least the dense story fragment I called throughout this paper, the Lord’s Supper tradition encapsulates its decisive moment. The moment in which the memory of suffering and bereavement is comforted by the presence of the risen one in a shared meal.Footnote 147
6. Conclusion
I hope to have shown that place matters for reimagining the meal practice of early Christ groups. The urban house is the space where formal Greco-Roman banquets take place. The politics of invitation, the seating of guests and the choice and distribution of food and drink communicate the hierarchical or antihierarchical character of the meal and negotiate its inclusive or exclusive character. The conflict at Antioch (Gal 2.11–21), or on eating idol meat or the clash between meat eaters versus vegans (1 Cor 8–10; Rom 14) can be envisioned in this meal setting.
Recent research emphasises that elite and sub-elite houses in Greek and Roman cities are filled with shrines for ancestor worship, statues of deified emperors and gods and daemons to protect its inhabitants against curses and the evil eye. Christ groups met in those houses imprinted by the presence of other gods and had to negotiate their cultic practice in this already religiously marked space. Whether and how their rituals created a new sacred space and introduced a distinctive discourse of sacrality is currently under debate.Footnote 148
The Lord’s Supper tradition includes ritual action. As argued in this paper, the tradition, or more exactly, the story fragment, carries the imprint of the mortuary cult of the cities’ suburbs.Footnote 149 Among gardens, shops, workshops and the graves of famous and ordinary people, rich and poor, some early post-Easter Christ groups gathered to share their meals. Again, one should not romanticise. As Trimalchio says in Petronius’ satire, quoted earlier, ‘It is quite wrong for a man to decorate his house while he is alive and not have trouble with the house when he must make a longer stay.’Footnote 150 A grave is a house of the dead, and larger grave houses, mausolea or catacombs are inhabited by households and by those who hoped to receive at least here some post-mortem fame.Footnote 151 Both cemeteries and cities represent social stratification, house structures and hierarchies. Only some centuries later, the household structures of the Greco-Roman elites were indeed transformed into Christian cultures in which the graves of the martyrs became the nucleus of new household-like commemorative communities.Footnote 152
Nonetheless, in my view, some earlier post-Easter communities remembered the death of Jesus in the vicinity of the graves of other people at the cemeteries that line the major roads into the city. Here, ritual enactments of the Lord’s Supper tradition were originally at home. Laments would be the most natural form to remember one’s beloved and Jesus’ suffering and dying. Here, communication and antiphonal dialogues occur between the living and dead. Here, the dead speak to the living through gravestones, a genre that reflects earlier dirges and lamenting in one way or another. Here, the sharing of food and drink can comfort those bereaved. Here, the message that he is risen is not only an abstract message but transforms into a lively experience. Here, text, oral memory, and ‘places and objects can function as sites of cultural transmission’.Footnote 153 Among the tombs in the suburb, ‘ritual actions and monuments together form a “landscape”,’Footnote 154 a network of meaning to maintain and facilitate the memory of events.
At the end of his reminder of the dense story fragment he himself received and handed down to the Corinthians, Paul states his own understanding. He envisions that this story fragment could retain and revitalise the proclamation of the Lord’s death, and he trusts its transformative capacity to make any place a representational space for a lived experience of Christ’s presence.
And this is my hope for this SNTS General Meeting at Melbourne. Place matters to experience. We are grateful to be welcomed to Naarm, the land of the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nation, and we pay respect to their elders, past and present. We acknowledge and honour the unbroken spiritual, cultural and political connection they have maintained to this unique place for over two thousand generations. We pay our respect to this land and all its inhabitants. We hope to learn about this land and remember its people’s suffering, which still has to be lamented. We are excited to be surrounded by this land’s richness and beauty, its manifold traditions and nations. We are here, and not there, in central Europe or North America, where we usually meet. We hope the Society will become enriched and transformed by this new spatial experience. May this conference imprint our memory and lead our Society towards new horizons in engaging the global perspectives of New Testament studies.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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