Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

now an Orthodox priest serving at St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia.

At the beginning of chapter 13 here.

Now, I'm going to note what we are about to read is going to be St. John's account of what we call the Last Supper, the Mystical Supper.

And one thing that's interesting about St. John's account,

unlike the other three Gospels and unlike St. Paul in First Corinthians,

is he makes no mention of the Eucharist in the context of the Last Supper or the Mystical Supper.

Now, there are a number of reasons people have offered for this.

A fellow named Rudolf Boltman, who's very famous if you're a theology nerd like me,

argued that this is because the community from which the gospel according to St. John came didn't celebrate the Eucharist.

Now, that's a plausible theory, I guess, if you just look at the text.

But we simply have no historical evidence that there were any early Christian communities that didn't celebrate the

Eucharist.

It's pretty much everywhere.

We have documents for the first century, the beginning of the second century that all

talk about the Eucharist and its importance.

So that seems kind of hazy.

It seems to be much more likely that what we have here is the exact opposite, is that

as we mentioned before,

St. John is writing last. So the other three Gospels already are out there. St. Paul's

epistles already are out there. And as we've seen as we've been going through on several occasions,

...