Historical Context — The Greco-Roman Meal and the Lord's Supper

The Question

When Paul writes to Corinth about the Lord’s Supper in 1 Cor 11:17-34, what is he actually describing? A wafer and a thimble of grape juice? A short ritual with bread and wine? Or a real, full communal meal?

The short answer: a real, full communal meal, embedded within the social conventions of a Greco-Roman dinner — and going wrong in exactly the ways such a dinner could go wrong. The wafer-and-thimble form most modern Western Christians know is a much later development. Paul himself, in v. 34, is the first nudge toward separating ordinary eating from the ritual moment.

This page lays out the historical evidence in two parts:

What the Greek and the early Christian sources show about the meal at Corinth.
The Greco-Roman dining background that explains why this particular abuse happened.

Part 1: The Supper Was a Full Meal

Internal evidence from the text itself

The passage’s own vocabulary forces a full-meal reading.

v. 20 — ἴδιον δεῖπνον (idion deipnon, “his own supper”). Deipnon is the standard Greek word for the main evening meal of the day — the substantial dinner, not a snack and not a ritual taste. When Paul says “this is not to eat the Lord’s deipnon,” he is contrasting it not with a ritual but with a dinner that has lost its Lord’s-ness. The very category “Lord’s deipnon” (kyriakon deipnon) presumes a dinner.

v. 21 — “one is hungry, and another is drunken.” You don’t get drunk on a sip of communion wine; you don’t get hungry on a wafer. The Greek is concrete: ὃς μὲν πεινᾷ, ὃς δὲ μεθύει — some are hungry (substantive hunger, not metaphor), some are drunk (μεθύει, the standard verb for intoxication). This is a real meal where substantial food and substantial wine are being consumed.

v. 22 — “have ye not houses to eat and to drink in?” The contrast is to the household dinner. Paul’s correction is: if you want to eat and drink as you would at home, do it at home — not here. This presumes the gathering currently involves eating and drinking comparable to a home dinner.

v. 33 — “tarry one for another.” The verb (ἐκδέχεσθε) means receive together / wait for each other to arrive. Only meaningful if people are arriving at different times for a real meal that has a beginning, middle, and end.

v. 34 — “if any man hunger, let him eat at home.” Paul redirects the hunger-satisfaction function off the gathering. This is the textual hinge between the Supper as full meal (which the Corinthians are doing) and the Supper as ritual-distinct-from-meal (which the early church will gradually move toward). Paul does not yet separate them entirely — but he is pointing in that direction.

The cumulative force of these five textual signals is unmistakable. The Lord’s Supper at Corinth in c. 55 AD was a real communal dinner, with the institution moment (bread broken with “this is my body,” cup taken with “this cup is the new testament in my blood”) embedded within that meal.

The early Christian sources: the meal evolves

The early sources let us watch the meal and the ritual gradually separate. By Justin Martyr’s time (c. 155 AD), the eucharistic ritual is fully distinct from any meal. The arc:

Didache 9-10, 14 (c. 50-120 AD)

The earliest non-canonical Christian liturgical text we have. Provides actual eucharistic prayers — and they presume an actual meal:

“Now concerning the Eucharist, give thanks thus: First, concerning the cup: ‘We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David thy servant, which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant…’ And concerning the broken bread: ‘We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant…’ But after ye are filled, thus give thanks: ‘We give thanks to thee, holy Father, for thy holy name which thou hast caused to dwell in our hearts…’” — Didache 9-10 (translation: Apostolic Fathers)

The phrase “after ye are filled” (μετὰ δὲ τὸ ἐμπλησθῆναι, meta de to emplēsthēnai) is decisive: there is a real meal in between the prayers over cup and bread and the prayer of thanksgiving. The eucharist of the Didache is still a full meal.

Pliny the Younger to Trajan, Letter 10.96 (c. 112 AD)

The Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus writing to the emperor about how to handle Christians. His description shows the meal-and-ritual already in some process of separation:

“They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds… when this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food — but food of an ordinary and innocent kind.” — Pliny, Ep. 10.96 (translation: William Melmoth)

Note the two meetings: an early-morning meeting (hymn, oath), and a later meeting for “food, ordinary and innocent.” Whether this reflects local Bithynian practice, or a broader pattern, or a response to Pliny’s earlier ban on hetaeriae (associations), is debated. Either way, by 112 AD in this region, the ritual moment and the communal meal can be at different times.

Justin Martyr, First Apology 65-67 (c. 155 AD)

The earliest detailed description of a normalized Sunday Christian gathering. The meal is gone:

“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; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons.” — Justin Martyr, First Apology 67 (translation: Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1)

Bread, wine, and water — distributed, prayed over, eaten as a ritual portion. No meal. Within a hundred years of Paul, the ritual and the meal have decisively separated for the gathering Justin describes (Rome, mid-2nd century).

Tertullian, Apology 39 (c. 197 AD)

By the late 2nd century, the meal still exists in some communities — but now under a different name, the agape feast, and as a separate occasion from the Eucharist proper:

“Our feast explains itself by its name. The Greeks call it agape, i.e., affection. Whatever it costs, our outlay in the name of piety is gain, since with the good things of the feast we benefit the needy… We do not recline at it till we have first tasted of prayer to God. We eat and drink only as much as suffices our hunger, and drink as becomes the chaste.” — Tertullian, Apology 39 (translation: Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3)

So: by 200 AD the eucharistic ritual (bread + cup with words of institution, at the Sunday gathering) and the community meal (the agape, with care for the poor as a central purpose) are two separate occasions. They share theological roots — both derive from the meal Paul describes at Corinth — but they have split.

Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 25-29 (c. 215 AD)

The split is now formally codified. Hippolytus prescribes the eucharistic liturgy in one section, the agape in another, with different rules and different officiants. The Corinthian situation — full meal with eucharistic moments inside it — is gone.

What changed?

Several pressures, working over a century:

Paul’s own correction. v. 34 (“let him eat at home”) begins the separation by removing the hunger-satisfaction function from the gathering.
Growth of the assemblies. A house-church of twenty can have a real shared meal. A regional gathering of a hundred or two cannot — not without enormous logistics. As the church grew, the ritual moment was easier to scale than the meal.
Roman legal pressure. Trajan’s restriction of hetaeriae (private associations) made anything that looked like a banquet politically risky. Pliny’s report (above) explicitly mentions that the Christians stopped some meal practices after his edict.
Theological reframing. As the Eucharist’s ritual meaning developed (Ignatius already calls it the “medicine of immortality” c. 110 AD), the meal-context receded.

But Paul was working in c. 55 AD, before any of this. For him, the Supper is a meal, with the dominical institution words said within it.

Part 2: The Greco-Roman Dining Context — Why Corinth Failed

The decisive insight that transformed modern reading of 1 Cor 11 came from the German scholar Gerd Theissen in 1974: Paul is describing a standard Roman wealth-stratified dinner going wrong in a Christian setting. Once you see the Greco-Roman dinner conventions Paul is presuming, the whole passage clicks into place.

The shape of a Greco-Roman formal dinner

A Roman dinner (cena) had a standard structure:

The triclinium — the dining room, with three couches arranged in a U, holding nine reclining diners (three per couch). The host took the central couch.
First-class guests — closest friends, social equals, the amici — ate in the triclinium with the host.
Second-class guests — clients, freedmen, dependents — ate either in an adjacent atrium or at a later “second sitting” in the triclinium. They received different food and wine, often visibly inferior.
Slaves and the very poor — ate scraps if anything, or were excluded entirely.
Order of arrival — the wealthy could arrive earlier (they controlled their own schedules); working clients arrived later (they had to finish the day’s work).

This stratification was not a glitch in Roman dinner culture. It was the point. The dinner was a public display of social hierarchy: the patron’s standing was visible in who reclined where, who ate what, who arrived when.

The Greco-Roman complaint literature

Multiple Roman authors complain about exactly this pattern. Paul’s correction at Corinth is recognizable as a Christian instance of a critique already current in pagan Rome.

Pliny the Younger, Letters 2.6 (c. 100 AD)

“It would be tedious to give the details (and they do not matter much) of how I, who am not at all intimate with him, was dining with a man who fancied himself elegant and economical, but in my view extravagant and stingy. He served some elegant dishes to himself and a few others, while serving cheap and meagre fare to the rest. He had moreover put the wine in tiny little flasks, divided into three categories — one for himself and us, the next-best for his less-distinguished friends (for he has friends in grades), and the third for his and our freedmen.” — Pliny the Younger, Ep. 2.6 (paraphrased; cf. Melmoth 1746 and Radice’s Loeb edition for the standard translations)

Pliny finds it distasteful — but distasteful as a taste issue, not a moral abomination. The system itself is normal. Pliny does press the point further in the letter: he tells the recipient (Avitus) that he himself serves everyone the same wine and food, because his guests are companions, not subordinates. This makes Pliny mildly counter-cultural for a Roman senator — but it also confirms that the normal practice was stratified, and that the egalitarian alternative needed to be defended.

Martial, Epigrams 3.60 (c. 90 AD)

“Since I am asked to dinner… why is not the same dinner served to me as to you? You take oysters… I suck a mussel through a hole in the shell… Why do I dine without you, although, Ponticus, I am dining with you?” — Martial, Epigrams 3.60 (translation: Walter C. A. Ker, Loeb)

Same complaint: different food at different tables.

Juvenal, Satire 5 (c. 100-127 AD)

An extended satire on the patron-client dinner. The client Trebius eats coarse bread while the patron Virro eats white bread; bad wine versus good wine; cheap oil versus the patron’s. Juvenal’s bitter conclusion: better to be openly excluded than to be humiliated by being included in this way.

Plutarch, Table Talk (Quaestiones Convivales) 2.10 (c. 100 AD)

A philosophical dialogue on the question πότερον δεῖ μερίδας διανέμειν ἢ κοινὰ τὰ δεῖπνα ποιεῖν — “whether [the host] should serve individual portions or make the dinners common.” Plutarch’s interlocutors disagree: individual portions allow honor-by-grade (better cuts to higher-ranked guests) and tidy hospitality; common dishes are friendlier and more equal but harder to manage. The dialogue does not pose the question explicitly as “equal vs. stratified” — but stratification is what individual portions permitted and common dishes prevented. The very fact that this was a debated topic in elite philosophical circles shows that the practice of grading portions was current, was sometimes critiqued, and was not universally accepted.

Part 3: The Jewish Meal — The Tradition Christianity Inherited

A natural question presses here: were stratified meals universal in the ancient Mediterranean? Did Jewish dinners look like Roman dinners, just with different food? If so, the Greco-Roman background would be the background of every meal in the Pauline world, and the Corinthian abuse would just be a normal dinner brought into church.

This is a serious question and the answer matters. Briefly: the Jewish meal-tradition, in its rabbinic-pharisaic-sectarian-Jesus stream, was structurally different from the Greco-Roman cena — and Christianity inherited the Jewish form, not the Roman form, even in Gentile congregations. The Corinthian abuse was not “the universal ancient dinner doing what it always did.” It was the Greco-Romanization of a meal that was supposed to be (and from Jesus and Paul’s Jewish formation, had been) different in shape.

What Jewish meal-tradition looked like

Several streams converge on a recognizable Jewish meal pattern, structurally distinct from the Roman cena:

1. The household Sabbath meal. Friday evening: the household gathers — the head of the household, his wife, children, household servants, any guests. Wine is blessed (kiddush: “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who createst the fruit of the vine”). Bread is blessed (ha-motzi: “Blessed art thou… who bringest forth bread from the earth”). The meal is eaten together. After the meal, the birkat ha-mazon (grace after meals) is recited. The household — including servants and children — shares the same blessing over the same food; whether all sat at one table, or whether women served and then ate, varied by household and class.

2. The Passover paradigm. The Mishnah codifies what was already old practice: at the Passover seder, “even the poorest man in Israel must not eat unless he reclines” (m. Pesachim 10:1). Reclining was the sign of free citizenship; in Roman culture, only the host and his social peers reclined while inferiors sat or stood. The Passover instruction reverses the Roman code: every Jew, no matter how poor, reclines on this night, because every Jew is freed from Egypt. Slaves of Israelite households are explicitly included. Women and children are obligated in the four cups, the matzah, and the telling of the haggadah (b. Pesachim 108a-b) — though the rabbinic tradition itself debates whether women reclined (the Gemara on Pesachim 108a says a woman with her husband need not recline because she is in awe of him, while “an important woman” does). So the Passover is anti-stratifying in obligation and in principle; the precise seating and posture of women is a point the sources themselves do not present uniformly.

2a. Women, the Passover, and the Last Supper — what we can and cannot claim. The honest picture is mixed. The Hebrew Bible’s hospitality scenes often show women preparing food but not at the meal with male guests (Sarah baking the cakes inside the tent while Abraham serves the three visitors, Gen 18:6-10; Vashti’s separate banquet for the women in Esther 1:9). On the other hand, women are present at family meals (Hannah and Peninnah with Elkanah at Shiloh, 1 Sam 1:4-7), and Jesus’s circle clearly includes women at table — Mary anointing Jesus’s feet while Lazarus reclines (John 12:1-3), Martha serving while a meal is in progress (Luke 10:38-42), the woman who anoints at Simon’s house (Luke 7:36-50). The Last Supper itself is the sharpest case: the Synoptics describe Jesus with “the twelve” or “the twelve apostles” (Mt 26:20; Mk 14:17; Lk 22:14), naming no women at the meal. Tradition has speculated (e.g. that Mary the mother of Jesus was present at the upper room) but the gospel text does not place women at this particular meal. So the load-bearing claim of this study — the Christian Supper inherited a Jewish anti-stratifying meal-form rather than the Greco-Roman cena — does not depend on a uniform “everyone at one table” picture in 1st-century Judaism. It depends on the structural fact that the inherited form was inclusive in obligation, organized around shared blessing rather than stratified portion-grading, and was radicalized further by Jesus’s table fellowship.

3. The havurah (table-fellowship circle). Pharisaic and proto-rabbinic Judaism organized meals through havurot — voluntary table-fellowship groups in which members ate together at the level of priestly purity (haver status) regardless of their socioeconomic position outside the meal. Stratification within the havurah was by Torah-learning, not wealth. (Stratification between the havurah and the am ha-aretz — common people — existed, and this is what Jesus repeatedly broke; see below.)

4. Sectarian communal meals. Josephus describes the Essene communal meal: members enter in fixed order of seniority, dressed alike, served the same food by priests, eating in silence (War 2.129-133). Philo describes the Therapeutae of Egypt similarly (De Vita Contemplativa 64-89). The Qumran community’s communal meal is regulated in 1QS 6 — order by seniority of community-rank, not wealth. These are hierarchical-by-sectarian-rank meals, but they are emphatically not stratified-by-wealth meals.

5. Jewish meal blessings as the structural seed of Christian eucharistic prayer. The Didache 9-10 prayers — “We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David…” — are structurally Jewish berakhot, not Greco-Roman libation formulas. The vine-of-David language echoes the kiddush over wine; the bread-prayer echoes the ha-motzi; the post-meal thanksgiving echoes the birkat ha-mazon. The Christian Eucharist as preserved in the earliest non-canonical liturgy is recognizably a Jewish meal-blessing tradition, not a Roman dinner.

Jesus’s table fellowship as Jewish meal radicalized

Within Judaism, Jesus’s table practice was scandalous — but not because Jewish meals were Greco-Roman-stratified. They were not. Jesus’s scandal was that he broke purity stratification (the inner-Jewish hierarchy between haver and am ha-aretz, between observant and notorious sinner) at the table.

“This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them” (Luke 15:2) — the complaint is purity, not class.
“He is gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner” (Luke 19:7, of Zacchaeus) — same.
“Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?” (Matt 9:11) — same.

Jesus’s specific anti-stratifying meal teaching — sit in the lowest place (Luke 14:7-11), invite the poor and crippled (Luke 14:12-14), the great banquet for those off the highways (Luke 14:15-24) — works within the Jewish meal-form. He is not telling them to abandon the Sabbath meal or the Passover. He is telling them to take the egalitarian logic of those meals seriously and extend it to the people normally excluded.

The Last Supper itself, whether read on the Synoptic Passover chronology or the Johannine preparation-day chronology, was a Jewish meal: bread, cup, blessing, table fellowship of the rabbi with his disciples (cf. Pesachim 10 for the seder structure; Berakhot 6-8 for general meal blessings). The institution words (“this is my body / this cup is the new testament in my blood”) were pronounced over Jewish ritual elements — almost certainly the matzah (unleavened bread) and the cup of blessing — within a known Jewish meal frame.

What the Hellenized Jewish elite did

A historical honesty point: not all Jews in the Second Temple period kept the simpler Jewish meal-form. Hellenized Jewish elites — the Tobiads in the 3rd-2nd centuries BC, the Hasmonean court, the Herodian aristocracy, segments of the Alexandrian Jewish elite — held banquets in the Greco-Roman style, including stratified seating and grading by rank. Ben Sira (Sirach 31-32) gives dinner-etiquette advice to a Hellenized Jewish reader navigating Greek symposium conventions.

So there were stratified Jewish banquets in the Hellenistic-Roman world — but they were the practice of the Hellenizing elite, the same circles the Maccabees fought against and the Pharisees critiqued. The Pharisaic-rabbinic-sectarian stream — which is the Jewish stream Jesus, his disciples, and Paul came from — pushed against this drift.

The implication for Corinth

This sharpens the Corinthian situation considerably. The Christian meal at Corinth had two possible default-cultures available to its mostly-Gentile membership:

The Greco-Roman cena — the meal form most of them had grown up with, the form their patron-friends still held in non-Christian settings, the form the city’s social code rewarded.
The Jewish meal-tradition — the form they had inherited from the apostolic teaching (paradosis) about how Jesus had instituted the Supper, structurally egalitarian, modeled on Sabbath and Passover, expanded by Jesus’s anti-stratifying table fellowship.

The Corinthians defaulted to the cena. That is the failure. Paul’s correction — wait for one another, share with those who have not, treat the body as one — is functionally a re-Jewishization of the Christian meal, even though Paul never names it as such. He does not write “act more like a Passover seder.” He writes “discern the body.” But the form of the meal he is calling them back to is the form his own Jewish heritage and Jesus’s table fellowship had given the church.

This is why “maybe they all would do that sort of thing” is the wrong frame. Some did — the Hellenized Roman elite, certainly. But the Jewish stream that gave Christianity the Supper specifically did not. The Corinthian crisis is the crisis of a Jewish-rooted Christian meal being colonized by Greco-Roman social default. Paul’s correction is to recover the inherited form.

Part 4: The Corinthian Abuse, in Roman Dress

Now re-read 1 Cor 11:17-22 with both backgrounds in view — the Greco-Roman cena that the Corinthians were drifting into, and the Jewish meal-tradition that the Christian Supper had inherited from:

v. 18 — “divisions among you” (σχίσματα). Not theological factions yet — social divisions. The patron-client structure is reproducing itself at the Christian table.
v. 21 — “every one taketh before other his own supper.” ἴδιον δεῖπνον is the Roman host’s portion — separate from what the lesser guests get.
v. 21 — “one is hungry, and another is drunken.” The early-arriving wealthy have eaten their fill and started drinking; the late-arriving workers are still hungry. Standard Roman dinner sequence — only here it is happening at the Lord’s table.
v. 22 — “despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not?” The word kataischynete (shame, humiliate) is the technical term for what a stratified Roman dinner did to its lower-class guests. The “them that have not” (τοὺς μὴ ἔχοντας) are precisely the working-class Christians — slaves, freedmen, day-laborers — who arrived later with nothing to bring.

The shocking Christian claim, against the Greco-Roman cultural grain, is that this cannot happen at the Lord’s Table, because the body of Christ has no patrons and clients. The Roman cena and the Lord’s deipnon are not merely different in scale or food — they are different in kind. To eat as if it were a Roman dinner is to “not discern the body” (v. 29), because the body — both Christ’s eucharistic body and the church as Christ’s body — does not have a hierarchy of who eats first.

This reading does not foreclose other things v. 29 may mean (see The Health Question and Movement C). But it makes Paul’s correction land with terrible specificity. He is not just saying “be reverent.” He is saying you have made the Lord’s Supper into a Roman dinner, and you must stop.

Key Sources

Primary — Christian

Didache 9-10, 14 (c. 50-120 AD) — eucharistic prayers (structured as Jewish berakhot); “after ye are filled”
Pliny the Younger, Ep. 10.96 (c. 112 AD) — Roman governor’s report; two-meeting pattern
Justin Martyr, First Apology 65-67 (c. 155 AD) — Sunday gathering with eucharist (no meal)
Tertullian, Apology 39 (c. 197 AD) — the agape feast as a separate occasion
Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition (c. 215 AD) — eucharist and agape formally separated (chapter numbering varies by edition; cf. Botte, Dix, or Bradshaw-Johnson-Phillips)

Primary — Greco-Roman dining

Pliny the Younger, Ep. 2.6 (c. 100 AD) — wealth-stratified dinner complaint
Martial, Epigrams 3.60 (c. 90 AD) — different food at different tables
Juvenal, Satire 5 (c. 100-127 AD) — patron-client dinner humiliation
Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 2.10 (c. 100 AD) — debate on individual portions vs. common dishes

Primary — Jewish meal-tradition

Mishnah Pesachim 10 (codified c. 200 AD; preserves 1st-c. practice) — Passover seder structure; “even the poorest in Israel must not eat until he reclines”
Mishnah Berakhot 6-8 — meal-blessing structure (kiddush, ha-motzi, birkat ha-mazon)
Josephus, War 2.129-133 (c. 75 AD) — Essene communal meal
Philo, De Vita Contemplativa 64-89 (c. 25 AD) — Therapeutae communal meal
1QS (Community Rule) 6 (Qumran, 1st c. BC-AD) — sectarian meal regulated by community-rank, not wealth
Ben Sira (Sirach) 31-32 (c. 180 BC) — dinner etiquette for the Hellenized Jewish reader

Modern scholarship

Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Fortress, 2003). The landmark study; reads the Lord’s Supper inside the Greco-Roman banquet tradition.
Andrew McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Baker Academic, 2014). Accessible and well-sourced; covers the meal → ritual evolution.
Bruce W. Winter, After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change (Eerdmans, 2001). Roman social customs in Corinth specifically.
Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (Fortress, 1982; German originals 1974). The foundational essay “Social Integration and Sacramental Activity” is here. The starting point for all modern social-historical readings of this passage.
Hal Taussig, In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Fortress, 2009). A more revisionist take, but useful for understanding the range of meal practices in the Pauline period.

What This Establishes for the Rest of the Study

The Supper at Corinth was a real meal. Modern wafer-and-thimble forms are a later development; reading the passage as if Paul were talking about that form will distort it.
The Christian Supper was a Jewish-rooted meal — structurally egalitarian, modeled on Sabbath and Passover, prayed with berakhot-form blessings, expanded by Jesus’s anti-stratifying table fellowship. Not all ancient meals looked like Roman cenae; the form Christianity inherited was a different form.
The Corinthian abuse was the Greco-Romanization of that inherited meal — a recognizable Roman social practice colonizing a Jewish-rooted Christian one. Paul’s correction is functionally a recovery of the inherited form, even though Paul never names it that way.
The meal → ritual separation was already beginning, in Paul’s own correction (v. 34) and through the 2nd century. By Justin (c. 155) the ritual is distinct; by Hippolytus (c. 215) the separation is formal.
“The body” in v. 29 must be read with chapter 12 in view (one paragraph away). The eucharistic body and the church-body cannot be cleanly separated in Paul’s vocabulary — and the Corinthian failure is precisely a failure to honor both.

Movement A: The Problem at Corinth (vv. 17-22) — TBD; will draw heavily on this page
The Health Question (v. 30) — the v. 30 crux
Back to the passage