The Lord's Supper and the passover ritual

By Gustav Bickell

Subjects: History, Early Christian Liturgies, types of Christ, eucharist antecedents, Rites and ceremonies, Passover, Lord's Supper

Description: This book attempts to demonstrate how the Passover celebration of the Jews provides a helpful framework by which the Christian Lord's Supper is to be understood. This is a book of inestimable value, however, due to the PREFACE, written by the translator, W.F. Skeen, in which he unties many New Testament knots by demonstrating--long before the field of Second Temple Judaism and its influence upon early Christianity, became overpopulated--how familiarity with Jewish practices, prejudices and presuppositions can deliver readers from their all-too-ready tendencies to treat texts as revolutionary introductions by Christ, or sacerdotal imperatives, or mysteries destined to be controverted forever. For example, the authority conferred upon the Apostles in declaring what is binding or what is loosed, is the conferral of that authority claimed by the scribes and teachers of the Law. The binding/loosing language is common in rabbinic literature. Also of interest is Skeen's brave observation (only recently seeming to pick up support here and there) that the officers of Acts 6 were not deacons but elders. Altogether stimulating--enough so to merit being a booklet apart from the book it introduces.