So last night we talked about the last supper as the founding of a new covenant.

So the fulfillment of the old covenant, what God revealed through Moses above all, and how Jesus

reconfigured that covenant in his blood, and therefore gave the sacrament of that new covenant,

which he said we should do in memory of him.

Much more, of course, could be said about the scriptural, there are many, many more scriptural riches

that we aren't approaching right now. Now, our task in this conference is really to turn to some

early Christian reflection on the Eucharist.

And you could investigate early Christian sources on the Eucharist in a variety of ways.

You could, and they're all important.

You could read, for example, the Dedeke, which gives a kind of early account of the Christian liturgy.

Or Justin Marger, who describes the liturgy.

He describes basically the mass.

We could look at other early accounts that talk about the Eucharistic change and the reality of that change.

So that is the belief that the bread and wine used in the Christian liturgy are really changed into the body and blood of Christ.

Now, there will be much dispute about this later in the history of Christianity

and therefore clarification of exactly how that, how we understand that,

how that happens, as it were.

And because it's denied by some later in the history of Christianity,

sometimes one goes back to these early texts to see the reality of the belief in this true presence of Christ.

But that's not principally what I'm interested in talking about in this conference, although

you'll see some of that in the text that you're going to look at, and I hope that you have

the handout that goes with this talk, which doesn't have the title to talk on the top of it, unfortunately.

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