Hello and welcome again to Catholic Answers Focus. I'm Cy Kellett, your host.

And we're going to take a look at the early church in this episode and in some coming episodes with

Tim Staples director of apologetics and evangelization here at Catholic answers.

Hi Tim.

Hey Cy Kellett how are you buddy? I am very well and what were you doing in the years of the early church? I know you're very old.

Yeah, I was a fired up Pentecostal preacher back then brother.

Yes, well that's a problem.

We'll talk a little bit about that, but that's kind of contradicting what we're going to talk about though.

Exactly it is.

But what we want to talk about today is the Eucharist because not all

Christians today share what the church teaches on the Eucharist. Most Christians do. Those would be Orthodox and Catholics of every kind

would agree with what the church has always taught about the Eucharist, but there's a large

post-reformation part of Christianity that does not accept what the

church has always taught from its beginning starting with its founder about the Ucharist and I don't say those things lightly or to be provocative but that's what we believe that from the foundations of the church

Christ taught the eucharist and it has been taught in an unbreaking manner all the way down the years. I want to start Tim with a couple quotes from Ignatius of Antioch, who in the 19th century was a very controversial figure because many people, many scholars said, oh those things that are ascribed

to the Bishop of Antioch, who was the third Bishop of Antioch after Peter and then

Eurybius, and then you see be excuse me evodious and then himself Ignatius

there was this sense of all it's all baloney it was all made up these are forgeries

later forgeries because they're so

catholic in the 20th century a general consensus arose that Ignatius these letters of

Ignatius are the authentic letters of a man who knew St. John certainly may have known

St. Peter and was the third Bishop of Antioch. And around the year 100 he writes that there are people in the early

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