The Lord’s Supper

To be brief, Matthew, Mark and Luke are often referred to as the “Synoptic Gospels” because they have a lot of passages that are nearly word-for-word the same. Additionally, those that study these things say that Mark was actually written first, and it is likely that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source for what they wrote, explaining a lot of this similarity. I have also been told that Paul probably died before these gospels were written. One day when I noticed that Luke differs from the other two Synoptics in the Lord’s Supper (The cup gets passed twice) I remembered that most of the Lord’s Supper rituals I had participated in included readings from a passage from Paul that concluded with “in remembrance of me,” so I looked it up to compare them.

More recently, I acquired a copy of the American Bible Society’s Synopsis of the Four Gospels, which lays the gospels side by side, passage by passage showing similarities. When looking up the Lord’s Supper for this essay, I noticed it also contains Paul’s 1 Corinthians 11:23-25 which is clearly the passage I heard in Church. Below is an image of that book, with electronic highlights of the relevant similarities.

Now the part of all of this that I find significant enough to write about is Paul’s opening words, “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you” because if Paul predates the gospels, and they got so much of their tradition for such an important event from him, it is important where he learned about it.

In Galatians 1:11&12 Paul seems to explain just what he means by this when he says “I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” Showing that when Paul says he "received from the Lord” he means he didn’t get the tradition from the living disciples who were at the Last Supper, but claims it was revealed to him directly from Jesus. 2 Corinthians 12 goes into more detail, talking about “visions and revelations of the Lord” when having been “caught up in the third heaven” 14 years earlier, although he engages in some weird, repetitive, humble-bragging, speaking in the third person when explaining all of this.

Which means that according to the Bible, these critical words of Jesus are sourced from the hallucinations of someone who wasn’t even there.