Modern people often have an unrealistic view of “development” in the early Church, thinking that ideas such as the divinity of Christ or practices such as the celebration of the Mass were products of early Church life rather than things received directly from Jesus. Joe Heschmeyer, author of The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, helps debunk some myths about where the Mass came from.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host, and delighted to get to talk with Joe Heschmeyer this time about actually quite an important subject that many people are quite unclear on. Where did the Eucharist come from? How did this thing that we do now, the Mass, develop? How closely is it connected to Jesus? How much of it is innovation on the part of the early church and the later church? And is what we do now anything like what they did in the earliest days of Christianity?
Joe Heschmeyer, of course, the author of The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, among many other books, and a very fine apologist here at Catholic Answers. Joe, welcome.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Thanks. It’s good to be here.
Cy Kellett:
First of all, we’re recording this two days after the Super Bowl, so congratulations on the Kansas City Chiefs winning the Super Bowl.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Thank you. I’m still glowing and trying not to gloat.
Cy Kellett:
You’re not succeeding at all in the trying not to gloat department.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So I hear. I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s an Eagles fan, so-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, that’s tough.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… it was, I think, a painful day for him.
Cy Kellett:
Well, all right, so the Eucharist. Let me give you a theory of the Eucharist. All right?
Joe Heschmeyer:
All right.
Cy Kellett:
And I think it just kind of floats around there in the zeitgeist, I suppose, a word that I don’t actually know the definition of and the-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Spirit of the age. Geist is ghost.
Cy Kellett:
I was only kidding. I knew exactly what it meant. Spirit of the aged.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Very, very close.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So I think a lot of people would say… It goes along with the general theory of the Jesus of history is a little bit lost to us, which I think is what a lot of people think, which is kind of weird because we have a lot of history of Jesus. But let’s just start there.
If you kind of accept that, “Well, the historical Jesus is sort of lost to us,” then the Eucharist is a thing that developed over time by the early church and kind of got settled on hundreds of years in. The Catholic view would be what? Or maybe I shouldn’t even say the Catholic view. Maybe I should say a more historically accurate view would be.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, a more historically accurate view would be that that is incorrect. It’s based on a lot of stereotypes and myths about early Christians. And so there’s this idea that the original Eucharist, whatever that was, was maybe just more a commemoration, but then, superstitious Christians turned it into something that felt more magical and felt more ritualistic. So either they were legalists, or they were superstitious. There’s some kind of story about how you get from A, what Jesus did, to B, which is what the Christians did.
And that story is being imposed on the historical evidence. It’s not being drawn out of the historical evidence. You’re not seeing that in the data. You’re not seeing that when you read the early Christians. They don’t seem to be deviating from what they received. They seem to be almost fanatically devoted to passing on what was received.
And you see this, particularly with the Eucharist. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11, says, “I pass on what I received from the Lord.” That there is this strong emphasis not on deviation or innovation, but on keeping the tradition, on keeping what was passed down and handed down.
Now, that doesn’t preclude something like having a new prayer or something like that added to the order of the service. But the core structure, not just the Eucharistic sacrifice but even the movements of the Mass, where you have the readings and the homily and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, all of that stuff goes back as far as we can find.
Cy Kellett:
So I suppose some of the question would come down to the question of the divinity of Jesus that… I mean, if you really don’t believe Jesus is the Divine Son, then you wouldn’t have a view of what actually happened that would be much similar to the person who does believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
And I think, for this reason, that if you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, then you know that the Eucharist is not accidental, it’s not tangential to what He was doing, but that He knew exactly what He was doing, He knew exactly how to transmit it, and He knew exactly how to… And the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit, can make sure that what He did is followed through on perfectly.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Whereas in contrast, if you don’t believe Jesus is divine, you don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, you’re basically forced to believe that the earliest Christian witnesses are wrong or lying.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Or nuts.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. And treating any historical event that way. If you said, “Well, the people who were at Gettysburg were all delusional. We can’t trust that any of the battle went down the way they said they did,” then history just falls apart. If you approach it with such an incredible skepticism of eyewitnesses, of the earliest recorded evidence, then you’re left with nothing.
And that’s not just true of Christian history. That’s true of all history. The vast majority of history, we don’t have a ton of physical evidence. Well, a lot of what we know, we know from the testimonial evidence. And so if you just decide out of hand that you’re not going to accept that, you aren’t left with something else except your imagination, I suppose.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So then, from a perspective that’s fairer to history, you could kind of, I suppose, identify stages in the gift of the Eucharist being given. One of those stages would be the entire history of the Jewish people.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
And then there would be the life and preaching of Jesus, distinct from the passion of Jesus. So you have the entire Jewish history, the life and preaching of Jesus, the passion of Jesus, to include the first celebration of Eucharist and then the Church.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So…
Joe Heschmeyer:
We can even go back if you want a little further than that.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, tell me how.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You can go back to Eden. So think about the whole story in Genesis 2. And there’s different ways people understand it in terms of how historically literal that should be taken, but it’s clearly referring to some kind of primordial event, some kind of early event at the beginning of the human story. And this is a story of this paradisial garden and then sin happening through a food, that they eat from the fruit. And then this is where sin enters the world.
Well, read in that light, a lot of what’s happening in the New Testament, a lot of what’s happening with Jesus’ mission, is the undoing or the healing of the fall. And so you’ve got St. Paul refers to Christ as a “new Adam” or “the last Adam.” He’s born of a virgin, just as Eve was formed from the side of Adam. So that you have these kind of miraculous births in both cases.
You have the fruit of the tree, and then you have the fruit of Mary’s womb. You have the tree of the cross and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. You have the Garden of Eden and the garden of Gethsemane. And there’s all these parallels. Well, read in that light, the fact that you eat the fruit in Eden actually has a parallel to eating the fruit of Mary’s womb in the Eucharist.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Wow. And I suppose, though, the tree that Jesus is hung upon, there’s a tree parallel as well.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
That there’s a tree of death that brings death, and then the tree that brings life.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And St. Paul says, “Cursed is everyone who hangs upon the tree,” showing that Christ fulfills even the wrath of the law, so to speak, the curse of the law, by the hanging on the tree. Now, he refers to the cross as a tree. Now, this has been sometimes misread, for instance, by Jehovah’s Witnesses because, “Oh, it must not have been a real cross, and it must have just been a straight pole.” But that’s not what he’s doing. He’s drawing you back to this Edenic imagery.
And you see this in other places too. For instance, in John’s Gospel, he famously begins, “In the beginning,” just as Genesis begins, “In the beginning.”
Cy Kellett:
“In the beginning.” Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But less famously, if you look at the preaching of John the Baptist, it then says, “The next day, the next day, the next day, on the third day” between John 1, about midway through, to beginning of John 2. And if you track that, that gets you to day six of this new creation. And what happens on day six? You have the wedding feast of Cana.
And so, just as you have man and woman being created in Genesis, you have the wedding, the restoration of the dignity of man and woman, at the wedding feast of Cana-
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… in which Christ raises us to a sacrament. All that’s to say the Eden and Christian parallels are… This is not just an incidental one-off thing. So if you understand that kind of parallel, then the fact that you eat the fruit is actually significant because it’s how you commune, in this case, with sin and, in the case of Christianity, with Christ.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So then we move into history, as given to us, the history of the Hebrew people in the Hebrew scriptures. First of all, is there any history of any people that involve bread and wine so much? I mean-
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s true.
Cy Kellett:
It’s a constant theme from Melchizedek, through the Exodus, and then the manna coming from heaven. All throughout, you have bread images and, frequently, wine images as well. But this imagery of bread all throughout Jewish history is, in fact, preparation for the Eucharist.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is. Bread and wine, there are special prayers for. In the Jewish prayers, there are special prayers just for bread, just for wine because they were so much staples of the Jewish diet for one, but also, they were just seen as divine sustenance. “This is the way God cares for His people.” And so it’s an important kind of backdrop to understanding.
Because you’re right. Melchizedek is this mysterious figure. He’s the king of Salem, so the king of peace. And Abraham tithes to him, treats him as a superior, and Melchizedek blesses him. And he doesn’t seem to have any genealogy. He seems to be this very, again, mysterious figure. And the New Testament draws on that to present him as a sort of Christ figure.
And so, read in that light, the offering of bread and wine is really significant because a sacrificial bread and wine offering, the Eucharistic parallel there, I think, is pretty clear. And there’s a reason we refer to it in the Mass. And so, read in that way, you do see this stuff all over the place.
So one of the objections people sometimes raise to the Eucharist is, “Well, although you see bread and wine everywhere, you don’t see communion in blood.” In fact, under the Mosaic Law, you weren’t allowed to drink blood. You weren’t allowed to even eat meat with the blood in it.
And the reason is very explicitly laid out, that this is communion, because it would be communion with the animal. And the way that the old law puts it is, “The life of the thing is in its blood.” So to receive an animal’s blood, symbolically at least, would be to commune with that animal’s life. And so it was forbidden because this is beneath you, beneath your dignity as a human being. All of that’s true and explains, in some part, why people are so shocked when Jesus says that you have to drink His blood-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… first in John 6-
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Yes.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… and then at the Last Supper. But if you understand that blood is a communion, the same reason why you wouldn’t want to commune with an animal is the reason you would want to commune with God.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. Okay. So in the life and preaching of Jesus then, again, themes already developed of bread and wine. I mean, changing water into wine is His first miracle. His constant reference to bread and the bread of life and multiplying loaves, again and again, and again. He’s preparing, at least He’s setting a kind of ground of images so that the Eucharist can be given its full meaning.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So I think one of the obvious places you see that, of course, is in John 6.
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And there, Jesus draws on a few of the other Jewish images we haven’t even talked about yet. First, it’s set at Passover time. And so you’re already thinking of the Passover in which you kill the lamb, and you eat its flesh as a sacrificial offering. And this is a clear Christian foreshadowing. 1 Corinthians 15, St. Paul described Jesus as “our Passover lamb.” And so the connections to Christ are already given to us in the New Testament.
Well, Jesus presenting His Eucharistic teaching on Passover and saying that we have to eat His flesh, this is significant. It’s striking. And the other thing He connects it to is the manna because He’d just done the multiplication of the loaves, and people then ask for more heavenly food. And this leads to a conversation of the manna, the Old Testament bread from heaven. And Jesus says He is the true bread from heaven.
And so it’s a twofold kind of drawing on Jewish history, both with the manna and with the Passover and applying it to Himself in a way that prefigures the following Passover because one year after John 6 is the Last Supper.
So it’s this really important point where he’s tying together these threads of the Old Testament, showing they have something to do with Him, but the full meaning is still, to His listeners, I’m sure, not clear. They’re confused and scandalized by His words because He seems to be saying, “You have to eat His flesh and drink His blood,” and they don’t yet have the Eucharist to kind of make sense of how they can do that.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned St. Paul’s reference to what we would call the Eucharistic prayer, I suppose, but the… Okay, so Paul’s writing the first letter to the Corinthians in which this appears-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Mm-hmm.
Cy Kellett:
… maybe three decades after Jesus, maybe less than three decades after the life of Jesus.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Mm-hmm.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. What he’s doing there is giving a formula that every one of his readers will already recognize. So this is already a well-established practice.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, it’s interesting, the very formulaic kind of language. I don’t mean that in a negative way.
Cy Kellett:
No. Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But I mean that in a way that if someone said, “Well, four score and seven years ago-
Cy Kellett:
Then you know what… I know exactly. Yeah. Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… every American… Exactly. You recognize the language. You recognize kind of the pattern of the words, and you can apply that right away. And so, St. Paul says, 1 Corinthians 11:23, “If I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when He’d given thanks, He broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, also the cup after supper saying, ‘This cup is a new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.'”
So what’s striking there is that Paul is saying that he got this from Jesus. Because he’s not one of the 12. He wasn’t around during Jesus’s ministry. And there’s some question about what he means here. He appears to be saying that he got this by a special revelation. He would’ve clearly known about the events of the Last Supper, but maybe the pattern and the form of the words is what he was given by Jesus, like a way to describe this event and this very formulaic-sounding language.
Then you’ll notice the same kind of verbiage wherever you look that Jesus “takes,” He “blesses,” He “breaks,” and then He “gives.” That kind of language is all over the place, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul’s descriptions of the Last Supper, but also in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s descriptions of the multiplication of the loaves. That language or language alike it, you just find it all over the place.
The other place you find it is on the road to Emmaus, in Luke’s gospel. And I think this would actually be maybe a good place to kind of tie these things together because Jesus has the institution of the Eucharist, is clearly important enough that Paul claims to have gotten a special revelation related to it, and it’s something that’s very central. And he’s using this language that, as I said, sounds very much like the road to Emmaus.
On the road to Emmaus… This is Luke 24. It’s on Easter Sunday. Jesus is walking with two unknown disciples. Cleopas is one of them. This may be Jesus’ uncle. There’s some historical evidence, Hegesippus in the 2nd century. And the other person walking with him is unnamed. They seem to live together, which has led to some speculation that it might be Cleopas’ wife, which would be Mary, the wife of Clopas.
In any case, he’s walking with them, and they’re downcast because they had been following Jesus, and now He’s died, and they’re trying to make sense of all of this. And they say, “Some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning, did not find His body.” And they came back saying, “They’d even seen a vision of angels that said that He was alive.” So they haven’t seen the risen Jesus, but they’ve seen the empty tomb, and they’ve seen this angelic message.
And if this Cleopas is Clopas, and his wife is Mary, she was actually one of the women who was there, which is why that’s an interesting kind of detail.
Cy Kellett:
Oh. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So he may be recounting without calling her out. Well, “My wife tells me…”
Cy Kellett:
I see. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Because it would explain how he already knows what the women at the tomb were talking about. In any case, they’re trying to make sense of this. And Jesus then begins with Moses and all the prophets and interprets to them in the scriptures all the things concerning Himself. So He’s got, if you will, the Liturgy of the Word, as they’re walking. He takes the Old Testament, and He preaches on it. And they don’t recognize Him still.
When they do recognize him, it’s when they get to the second half. They arrive in Emmaus, and they invite Him in. And it says in verse 30, “When He was at table with them, He took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them.” The same verbs again. “And their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him, and He vanished out of their sight.” And they then go back to Jerusalem and find the Eleven, and they tell them what happened on the road and how He was known to them in the breaking of the bread.
And it’s such a strong, beautiful Eucharistic image. So you have the Liturgy of the Word. You’ve got Jesus opening the scriptures. You’ve got the Liturgy of the Eucharist. They gather, and then Jesus consecrates the Eucharist. And then you have this dismissal, “They’re sent out proclaiming.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh. Right. I didn’t-
Joe Heschmeyer:
What’s happened is kind of proclamation.
Cy Kellett:
… notice that part, Joe. Very well said, yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That there’s a dismissal. Even the word Mass comes from the dismissal. This is something that you’re nourished so as to be sent, and we find this kind of sending, that they realize what they have to do is go and proclaim this. And that’s what they do, and they proclaim how He was known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Well, what makes this even more obvious, in some way, is that the breaking of the bread is how Luke, who also writes Acts, describes the early Christian Eucharist. That’s his phrase for it. So he is clearly wanting you to understand this as a Eucharistic kind of event.
Cy Kellett:
Sure. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And all that’s to say, when we talk about the Liturgy of the Word and Liturgy of the Eucharist, those words in that order are not in the Bible, true enough, but the things they’re describing, that you have the readings and the preaching, and then you have the Eucharistic part, that’s there. It’s there in a pretty obvious way in the road to Emmaus. It’s there in a different way at the Last Supper. And so that pattern, that form, that kind of write, if you will, is there, including the very ritual-sounding language of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving.
Cy Kellett:
And so much so, right from the beginning, that this is clearly… Paul is using language, like you said, that everybody who’s a Christian would have recognized. So can we say of Jesus’ life and passion then that it’s all centered on the Eucharist, the Eucharist in its connection to the cross of Jesus, and that Jesus, in forming a Church, in preparing the apostles, was preparing to leave a Church that was itself centered on the Eucharist? He did all the things Himself. These are not things that other people invented, but He Himself prepared a Church that could do this and instructed the Church in how to do it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. The line in the Eucharistic liturgy, where he says, “Do this in remembrance of me,” is very controversial because people say, “Ah, remembrance.” And that’s an interesting debate. It misses the whole context of memorial offerings, and it takes remembrance in a modern, kind of American context instead of a Jewish one.
But what’s missed there is the, “Do this,” that He’s actually giving instructions to act in His name and His person. And so when you see the priest at the altar, he’s able to say, “This is my body. This is my blood” in speaking in the words and in the person of Jesus Christ. He can’t do that by his own strength. He can only do that by divine commission. And that divine commission is, in two words, “Do this.”
Cy Kellett:
So the earliest church, then, let’s just say, even the church… Paul probably undergoes his conversion, what, 3, 5, 7 years after the events-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I mean, all the dating is… I’d be guessing.
Cy Kellett:
But somewhere in there.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So let’s say even what we might call the primordial church, although I don’t think that that… It’s more like the embryonic than the primordial church because everything is there in it. So in those early years, the first decade, say, what do you think the Church does? What do you think happens as far as this-
Joe Heschmeyer:
We’re told in Acts 2:42, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” And so, even in that very short list of the things they do, there’s four things that were given by Luke. First, they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. Second, they devote themselves to fellowship. Third, to the breaking of the bread. And fourth, to prayer.
And so the breaking of the bread is a significant enough event that it’s separated out from other forms of prayer and other forms of fellowship. This is something unique and special in the life of the early church that deserves special mention, that they are not just praying together, they’re not just having fellowship together, they’re actually offering the Eucharistic liturgy together.
Cy Kellett:
And do you have any clue what that liturgy looked like?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, so we have some clue what that liturgy looks like, both from the biblical evidence and from history. I mean, we have to jump forward, to get a really detailed description, to the 100s. You can find little descriptions. So, for instance, the 1st century Didache has a little description of what the liturgy is like, and it’s certainly consistent with the Mass. It even has prayers that are said and all those things.
But Justin Martyr, in St. Justin Martyr writing, in 160, in the First Apology, goes into much greater depth, where he just outlines… Because Justin is writing in response to the Roman emperor, telling the emperor why he’s wrong. This is how he got the title Justin Martyr instead of Justin Who Died Quietly in His Bed.
Cy Kellett:
Which is, in some ways, the name he probably preferred.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. So Justin has to explain the Eucharist, and he does. I’m going to give you just little chunks of what he says. He gives a lot more. He says, “On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits.” I like that even then, he was like, “As long as people will kind of stand it, you do as many readings you can get away with.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. “I’ve got a quarter in the meter.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. “After the readings comes a homily, so the presider verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.” So you have the Liturgy of the Word, and you have preaching on it. You got the readings and the preaching. And then he says, “We all rise together and pray.”
And then, he goes into depth, talking about the different parts of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. He even mentions the kiss of peace, the presentation of gifts, the Eucharistic prayers, the distribution of communion.
So I’m just going to read one part here. He says, “Having ended the prayers, we salute one another with kiss. There is then brought to the president,” the presider that is, “of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water.” Now, notice even the detail that there’s water in the wine. This has an important role in the Mass, that you put a little bit of water in the wine to signify Jesus’ humanity and divinity and also signify our participation in Christ.
Cy Kellett:
Is that related to the blood and water that flowed from His side as well?
Joe Heschmeyer:
It is as well. You’re right. It is very rich in imagery. There’s a prayer you say while this is done. So he mentions even the small details, the cup of wine mixed with water. “And he,” the presider, “taking them, gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and offers thanks at considerable length for our being counted worthy to receive these things at his hands. And when he has concluded the prayers and thanksgivings, all the people present express their assent by saying Amen.”
And then he explains what the word amen means in Hebrew, so be it. “And when the president has given thanks, and all the people have expressed their assent, those who are called by us deacons give to each of those present to partake of the bread and wine mixed with water over which the thanksgiving was pronounced, and to those who are absent they carry away a portion.”
Now, when you read that in English, you miss a little detail, which is that the “thanksgiving having been pronounced…” The word Eucharist means thanksgiving. So he’s saying the eucharistized bread and wine, in other words.
And he even is very clear because he goes on to say, “This food is called among us Eukaristia, the Eucharist, and not as common bread and common drink do we receive these but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”
So it’s all right there. That’s 160. This is not some crazy later innovation. You see all the parts of the Mass. Now, the particular prayers, you might say, may vary not just from century to century but even from day to day. You have different prayers. You pray during Advent, during Lent, during Easter, during ordinary time.
But the core structure of you’ve got the Liturgy of the Word, and this is what it looks like, you’ve got the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and that’s what it looks like, that core structure, it stayed the same for the entire history of the Church. We see it very clearly in Justin. We see it sort of lived out in a certain way on the road to Emmaus. You see it lived out in a certain way at the Last Supper. It’s all there.
And finally, I’d just say, if you think about it this way, this idea that early Christianity was non-liturgical, non-ritualistic is totally ahistorical. And if you want a single way to show that, consider the fact that Eucharist is instituted at the Last Supper, which is Passover, which has a whole liturgy connected to it.
Many of the same evangelical Christians who loathe the idea of Christian liturgy will celebrate a Seder meal to help restore the kind of Jewish liturgy. And it’s like, “Yeah, if only Jesus had taken the Seder and made a Christian version of that like He said He was going to do.” And it’s like, what would that look like? Well, it would probably be pretty liturgical, ritualistic, just like the Seder itself is, but with a clear Christian dimension to it. Or something that both recalls what’s happening in Judaism but also fulfills it and points us in a higher direction.
Cy Kellett:
It’s a odd thing to have a Christianity that thinks that God spent 1500 years preparing the Jewish people to receive the Messiah, and what He prepared for Himself was a completely liturgical people. And then the idea was the Messiah would come and destroy all of that. What was… That makes no sense.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. No, It’s true. There’s this idea that, basically, Jesus made Judaism as hard as possible, so people would want Christianity. And nobody says it that way, but the idea is like, “Oh, well, He made it so legalistic, it was unlivable, so they would know they needed the gospel.” It’s like, that’s a really weird plan. It’d be like if I hate vegetables, which, full disclosure, I kind of do, I wouldn’t spend my entire life being a vegetable farmer and just be like, “Well, now I better throw these away because I hate these.” Likewise, God’s not going to spend thousands of years preparing people to offer Him worship and sacrifice that He doesn’t like. It doesn’t make sense.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Yeah. That doesn’t make sense. But it does fit with a different kind of story, which is that there’s Christianity, and within a hundred years out of that Christianity, some people who just don’t get it form the Catholic Church. Do you understand that theory of history?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I do. I know that theory of history. That theory of history doesn’t work very well. So, in my book, The Early Church Was the Catholic Church…
Cy Kellett:
What is that about, by the way?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, it’s a good question. You’ll have to read it to find out. I don’t want to give anything away.
Cy Kellett:
All right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’ll say vaguely, it might be about the early church and whether or not they were the Catholic Church, and you can guess which side I come down on. But it’s looking at Christians from the first 200 years. And when you read the actual writings they have, they just sound like Catholics.
Sometimes you’ll find somebody who isn’t a very clear writer, and you don’t know what they believe, but the really good writers are just clearly Catholic. And nobody is just clearly a Pentecostal or a Methodist or anything. You don’t find that at all. You don’t find someone who’s just like, “Catholics are clearly wrong.”
And so you’d imagine, if this was a true version of history, a hundred years in, some poorly-formed Christians formed the Catholic Church, or maybe some well-trained disciples who go rogue and embrace heresy formed the Catholic Church, you’d expect to find a lot of outcry. You’d expect to find people say, “This is not what you received.”
And the fascinating thing is when this does happen, when Orthodox Christians become gnostics, we find that outcry. So St. Irenaeus of Lyons is trained by St. Polycarp of Smyrna. Polycarp, in turn, was a disciple of the Apostle John’s.
Well, Polycarp has another student, Florian, I believe his name is, or Florinius, who becomes agnostic. And Irenaeus writes him a letter that basically says, “Look, buddy, we both learned Christianity from Polycarp, and he didn’t teach agnosticism, so where you getting this stuff?” And that’s what you would expect to find.
You find nothing like that where people say, “Hey, where’s this Pope idea coming from? Where’s transubstantiation coming from?” No, those things are taken for granted. Those things are just assumed to be the case or are just explicitly mentioned as a universal belief of the Church. And nobody says, “That’s not my belief.” Nobody speaks out-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. “Wait, what are you talking about?”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. “Where did that idea come from?” The example I like to give is, if Bob Jones University decided to become Catholic tomorrow and just have a high Mass or something like that, pledge their fealty to the Pope…
Cy Kellett:
If you pledge your fealty to the Pope, you can’t have a high Mass anymore.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Touché. We won’t… That’s not this episode.
Cy Kellett:
Sorry.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But in that situation, I imagine there’d be a little bit of an outcry. I imagine some parents at Bob Jones would say, “I don’t want my kids going to that.” And some students would have an outcry. And so the idea that in early Christianity, something like that happens, and everybody’s just like, “Ah, whatever.”
Cy Kellett:
“Whatever, we’ll just go along. Guess we’re doing this now.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
“I guess, let’s go along with this now.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. Because you mentioned the word transubstantiation, I want to tackle that. I think a lot of people will say… You know that medieval, kind of, “All right, we’ve brought in this…” And I’m using the word medieval loosely, but this is the what-
Joe Heschmeyer:
So do they.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. So that medieval… We started using the Aristotelian language or whatnot, and this is totally disconnected from what the early church believe. Or there’s the alternate, which is… Look, St. Paul, just to use a guy we’ve been talking about, he didn’t have the word transubstantiation, but if you had explained it to him, he would’ve said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.” Which one do you favor?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Clearly, the second one, because, you see, even the bit that I read earlier from St. Justin Martyr, he talks about “our bodies being transmutated by the Eucharist.” Now, we haven’t even talked about this dimension, but the early Christians are really emphatic that there’s a connection between receiving the Eucharist and bodily resurrection. And they’re getting this from Jesus in John 6, “And if you eat His flesh and drink His blood, you’ll rise again at the last day.”
And they explain it by saying, “Basically…” And I’m going to add my own language here. Gregory of Nyssa is one who, I think, is very clear on this, and actually, in my upcoming book on the Eucharist, I talk about this. As yet unnamed, but it might be named The Eucharist Is Really Jesus.
Cy Kellett:
What’s that one going to be about? Well, you’ve got these mysterious titles, it’s so hard to decipher.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You know, I could have just been, like, Eucharistia, and then, like, “You got to find out.”
Cy Kellett:
“You got to find out.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
“What does that word mean?” Probably still a little too easy. But yeah, the idea is that Jesus turned bread and wine into His body and blood normally throughout His entire life, through metabolism, which I think is a really cool point.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, that’s right. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Think about it. We just said earlier, “Bread and wine are staples of the Jewish diet in the 1st century, so much so they have special prayers.” The question is not, did Jesus turn bread and wine into His body? He did that all the time. The question is, did He do it in a special way at the Last Supper?
Cy Kellett:
Oh, Joe. What a great point.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Well, I’m stealing it from Gregory. And it’s like, “Oh yeah, that makes sense.” Because then it shows that the miracle is building upon nature and not against nature. Now, we could go really down a rabbit trail here.
Cy Kellett:
Let’s not. Because we’re so late. But give us-
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’ll just say, the miracles of Jesus build upon nature. He turns water into wine. A grape turns water into wine.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. A grape and a vintner. But yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, true. But it follows nature in a supernatural way as opposed to the devil trying to get Jesus to turn a stone into bread.
Cy Kellett:
Ah, yes.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Or a fairytale saying a stagecoach from a pumpkin. That those things are anti-natural. Jesus’ things are supernatural. The Eucharist is supernatural. It is doing supernaturally what is similar to something that happens in nature.
Cy Kellett:
Wow, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. See, I had to include that at the end.
Cy Kellett:
That’s not a rabbit hole. That’s wonderful.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I mean, that could be an entire episode.
Cy Kellett:
Sure it could.
Joe Heschmeyer:
- S. Lewis has an entire book called Miracles in which he explores this theme. So then the kicker then is that when we receive the Eucharist, we are then metabolized into the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians 10, “We are one body because we partake of the one loaf.”
Cy Kellett:
And that body lives forever.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. Which is why this is tied to eternal life. That is transmutation is the way that this is described by the early Christians. That’s really similar to the language of transubstantiation, both in wording and what’s trying to be expressed, that something at the level of reality has been transformed, even though the outward appearances of bread and wine remain the same.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer, what a great, great conversation. Thank you.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, my pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
I really appreciate that. We took a lot of time, I mean, more than we usually do, but I just think it’s so profitable to listen to all that and be reminded of it and be encouraged to have confidence in the Eucharist as given to us by Christ through the Apostles with complete fidelity, like you said, almost fanatical fidelity so that we can have confidence in what we do today.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Amen.
Cy Kellett:
Thanks. Thank you, Joe. Thanks to all our listeners. We love it that you take the time to be with us. If you want to send us an email, send it to focus@catholic.com, focus@catholic.com. If you’d like to support us financially… We do need that financial support, and you can do that by going to givecatholic.com.
And as always, I will ask you for that five stars and a few nice words in your review. That helps to grow the podcast. And the podcast is growing. We’re grateful for your help in doing that. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers’ Focus.