In its first traceable historic form Christianity was simply a phase of Judaism, being the creed of a small number of Jews and Jewish proselytes who believed that the long-desired Messiah had come in the person of one Jesus, who had been so slain as to constitute an atoning sacrifice. Such believers were wont to meet at simple religious banquets, of a kind common in the Greco-Roman world, where they ate and drank in a semi-ceremonial way. A sacrificial banquet of this kind was one of the most universal features of ancient religion, being originally the typical tribal ceremony; and though among the Jews it had been to a remarkable extent superseded by sacrifices without communion, the usage was once as general with them as with the Gentiles. If grown rare in their life, the idea was abundantly preserved in their sacred books. The presumption is that such a banquet was connected with the Semitic God-name Jesus or Joshua before the Christian era; otherwise we must conclude that a sect of Jesuists, starting from the bare belief in the sacrificial death, adopted arbitrarily a kind of rite which was identified with the heathen worships of the surrounding Gentiles, and adopted also the Gentile sun-worshippers’ practice of assembling by night. Paul’s Corinthian converts are described as frequenting indifferently the table of Jesus (“the Lord”) and the table of “dæmons”—that is, of heathen Gods or Demigods. As the less orthodox Jews had long5 dabbled in similar “mysteries,” there is every probability that private “Holy Suppers” had been practised even in Jewry by some groups long before the Christian period, whether or not in connection with the name of Jesus “the Saviour.” The gospel phrase “blood of the covenant” points to a standing usage, the original form of which was probably the mutual drinking of actual human blood by the parties to a solemn pledge. In the Hebrew system some such covenant was held to be set up between the Deity and the worshippers on the one hand, and among the latter themselves on the other, when a sacrifice was partaken of. But it is further probable that the idea of a mystical partaking of an atoning or inspiring “body and blood” was of old standing in the same kind of connection. Such a practice was certainly part of the great Asiatic cults of Dionysos and Mithra; and as the ancient idea of a sacrificial banquet in honour of a God usually was that in some sense the worshipped power was either eaten, or present as partaker, it is more than likely that any banquets in connection with the Syrian worships of Adonis and (or) Marnas (each name = “the Lord”) carried with them the same significance. In early Christian usage the ministrant of the eucharist spoke in the person of the founder, using the formulas preserved in the gospels; and as the priest in the cult of Attis also personated the God, there is a strong presumption that the same thing had been done in Jewry in the pre-Christian period, by way of modifying a still older usage in which a deified victim was actually slain and eaten.

For such an ancient Jesuine eucharist (revived, perhaps, as old mysteries were apt to be among the Jews, no less than among other ancient peoples, in times of national disaster) a new meaning may have been found in the story of an actually slain man Jesus, whose death took a sacrificial aspect from its occurrence at the time of the atoning feast. In the earliest written teaching, certainly, Jesus is not a God; he is merely the Jewish God’s “holy servant.” The eating of his symbolic body and blood, however, was on a par with the rituals in which Pagans mystically partook of their deities, and it thus lay in the nature of the eucharist that he should become divine if he were not so originally. The expression “Son of God,” once of common application, would in his case come to have a special force, in terms of the ancient Semitic doctrine that the great God Kronos or Saturn or El had sacrificed his “only begotten Son.” Abraham undertakes to do the same thing in the legend in Genesis; and Abraham and Isaac as well as Jacob were presumptively ancient deities. On the other hand, the evolution of a fabulous hero from man to demigod, and thence to a status among the highest Gods, is a common phenomenon in the ancient religions (Herakles and Dionysos being typical cases), and among the recognized Syrian worships there was already one of a Theandrios or God-man. Even for the Jews the name Jehovah was applicable to the Messiah. It lay, too, in the nature of the religious instinct that the man-like and man-loving God should gradually take the foremost place in a cult in which he was at first subordinate, as happened in the worships of Dionysos, Mithra, Herakles, and Krishna. Some such tendency is seen in the worship of Demigods among the earlier Hebrews (Deut. xxxii, 17; Heb.).

It is not necessary to suppose that the Christian cult arose solely by way of a mystic sacrament. There may have been a blending of the usage of quasi-commemorative banquets, the simpler Agapæ or love-feasts of antiquity, with that of a special “mystery”; and in the case of the latter there may have been many varieties, as there were later in the matter of liturgies. The humble Corinthian banquets appear to have combined the features of Agapæ and Eucharistia, and in the former aspect they were anything but solemn; some of the members sleeping, some drinking too much—a pathetic picture of the dim yearning for communion among a heavy-laden caste. But the nature of the eucharist proper, the claim to present an immortal “body and blood” for regenerative eating and drinking, involved a striving after sacro-sanctity; and as soon as a regular ministrant was appointed by any group he would tend to develop into a priest of the Christist mysteries, magnifying his office.

The great feature of the Jewish Feast of the Passover being the eating of a lamb “before the Lord,” that usage would in Jewish circles be preferred to, or at least combined with, the sacrament of bread and wine, “Ceres and Bacchus,” which was perhaps commonest among the Gentiles. In the legend of Abraham and Melchisedek, priest of the Phœnician God El Elyon, there figures a sacramental meal of bread and wine (Gen. xiv, 18); and in the non-canonical book of Ecclesiasticus there is a passage (l, 15) which suggests a use of wine as symbolical of blood. The “shew-bread,” too, seems to have had a measure of sacramental significance. But while such a rite would seem to have flourished in the background of Judaism, that of the Passover was one of the great usages of the Jewish world, and the first Jesuists clearly held by it. It is indeed one of the hierological probabilities that the paschal lamb was anciently “Jeschu” or Jesus, the springtide symbol of a Sun-God so named; for in the book of Revelation, which is markedly Judaic, “the Lamb” figures as the known symbol or mystic name of a Son of God “slain from the founding of the world,” and identified with a mystic Jesus who is one with Jehovah—this apparently long before the Christian cult in general had arrived at such a doctrine. There is a mythological presumption that such language had reference to the fact—dwelt on by later Jewish writers—that the date of the Passover fell at the entrance of the sun into the constellation Aries in the zodiac; and the rule that the paschal lamb must be roasted, not boiled, tells also of the sun-myth. Yet again, the lamb is the animal latterly substituted in the myth of Abraham and Isaac for the sacrificed only-begotten son Isaac, whose name in the Hebrew (Yischak) comes somewhat near to the common form of the name Jesus (Yeschu), and who is mythologically identifiable as a Sun-God. In any case, “the Lamb slain for us” in the Apocalypse implies a recognized sacrament of lamb-eating, such as that of the Passover, which was anciently the time for sacrificing first-born sons (Ex. xxii, 29), and which is explained even in the priestly myth as a commemoration of the sparing of the first-born of Israel when the first-born of Egypt were divinely destroyed. To such a national precedent the Hebrew Jesuists would tend to cling as they did to the practice of circumcision.

But mere poverty on the one hand, and on the other the then common ascetic instinct (which in some cases put water for wine), would tell among Gentiles against the eating of actual flesh even when the pretence was to eat flesh and drink blood. In some early Christian groups accordingly the sacrificial food took the shape of a model of a lamb in bread6 (a kind of device often resorted to in pagan worship with a special form of animal sacrifice), while others actually ate a lamb and drank its blood, as did some of the Mithraists and some of the Egyptian worshippers of Ammon. The Pauline phrase, “Our Passover also has been sacrificed, Christ”—which may or may not be an interpolation—would square with either practice. But that Jews who had been wont to make much of a paschal lamb, and who held Jesus to have represented that lamb, should pass at once to a sacred meal of simple bread and wine or water, is unlikely; and the gospels themselves indicate that a dish of another kind preceded the bread and wine formality in the traditional Supper.

Light is thrown on the original nature of the Jesuist rite by the Paschal controversy in which the Eastern and Western churches are found embroiled towards the end of the second century. It turned nominally on the different accounts of the crucifixion in the synoptics and the fourth gospel. Whereas the synoptics make Jesus take the Passover with his disciples in due course, and die on the cross on the first day (the Jewish day being reckoned from evening to evening), the fourth gospel makes him sup informally with his disciples on the day before the Passover, and die at the very hour of the paschal meal. The idea obviously is that implied in the Pauline phrase already quoted—that he is henceforth the substitute for the lamb; and in actual fact the Eastern Christians of the second century are found breaking their Easter fast on the Passover day, while the Westerns did not break it till the Sunday of the resurrection. Evidently the Eastern Christians had all along preserved an immemorial usage of eating their eucharist on the Passover. They did not do this as orthodox Jews, for they called their meal one of “salvation” in a Christist sense, and their opponents did not charge them with Judaizing; but they argued that they must take the eucharist at the time at which Jesus took it with his disciples; while the Westerns contended that the time for rejoicing and commemoration was the day of resurrection. The explanation is that the story of Jesus eating with his disciples is a myth of the kind always framed to account for an ancient ritual practice; that the Jewish circumstances naturally gave the story a form which made Jesus obey a Judaic ordinance; and that the Westerns, coming newly into the cult, either recoiled from the procedure of a banquet on the very eve of the Lord’s betrayal, or followed an Adonisian or Attisian usage, in which the original sacrificial banquet, though perhaps not abandoned, had been overshadowed by the “love feast” on the announcement that “the Lord has arisen.”

In the nature of the case, the controversy was insoluble by argument. The Easterns had always taken the Holy Supper at the time of the Passover, and they had the gospel story telling them to repeat it “in remembrance” of the Lord who so supped at the Passover. The Westerns had the fourth gospel as their evidence that Jesus actually died at the time of the Passover, thus constituting a universal substitute for the Jewish sacrifice; and as in this gospel there is no use of bread and wine, but merely the nondescript meal which precedes the ritual in the synoptics, and in which the only symbolic act is the giving of a “sop” to the betrayer, they were left to practise the traditional eucharist in the way most conformable to their feelings or to their pre-Christian usages. All theory was finally lost sight of in the historic church, with its daily celebration of the “mass,” which is the annual sacrifice turned into a weekly and daily one; but from the whole discussion there emerges the fact that the sacrifice is the oldest element in the cult, antedating its biographical myths. And as the symbolic eating of bread and wine as “body and blood” in the pagan cults is a late refinement on a grosser practice of primitive sacrifice, so it was in the Christist. As the wafer in the Catholic ritual is the attenuated symbol of the bread of the mystic supper, so that bread was in turn an attenuated symbol of an earlier object.

When Christianity comes into aggressive competition with Paganism, one of the common charges of its Roman enemies is found to be that the Christians were wont to eat the body of an actual child in their mysteries. There is no good reason to believe that this horror ever happened among them; though the language of the rite tells of a pre-historic practice of human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism, such as actually took place among the early Semites and the pre-Christian Mexicans, and was said to have been in use among the Druids about the beginning of the Christian era; but it is probable that in some Christist groups there was a usage of eating a baked image of a child, as had been done in the Dionysian mysteries. The manipulation of the Abraham and Isaac legend, taken with other data in the Pentateuch and elsewhere, makes it clear that child-sacrifice had been practised among the early Hebrews as among the Phœnicians, and that the sacrifice of a lamb or kid became the equivalent, as it was perhaps the prototype. When it was permitted to substitute a dough image for the actual lamb, the mystical principle could be further served by a dough image of the child that the lamb itself typified. Under the veil of secrecy, which was as much a matter of course with the early Christians as with the pagan initiates of the Eleusinian and other mysteries, such variations of the cult were possible to an indefinite extent. It was only when there grew up an ecclesiastical organization, in the spirit and on the scale of the imperial system itself, and when the compiled gospels had become a recognised code for the Church in general, that they were reduced to the norm of the pagan sacrament of bread and wine.

The only other primary Christian rite, that of baptism, is shown even in the gospels to have been pre-Christian; and the anti-Judaic John the Baptist may have been a historic figure among the Jews, though his connection with the Christos is a myth, seen in the gospels in different stages of its development.7 The presumption is that it was framed at the stage at which the Jewish Christists, faced by the Pauline and Gentile opposition to circumcision, hitherto held binding among the Jesuists, decided to substitute baptism (which already had a Jewish vogue) and thereby maintain a Jewish primacy. But baptism too was a common Gentile usage, as was the use of holy water, later adopted by the Christian Church.

With these Christist rites, it is clear, there was originally associated a fixed belief in the speedily-approaching end of the world, that being the notion which most completely pervades every book in the New Testament. The rites then, like the similar mysteries of the Pagans, were regarded as the way of entrance into the future life, whether that were conceived as the apparition of a supernatural New Jerusalem on earth, or as a transformed existence in a material heaven in the skies. For the Pauline period, the approaching catastrophe was evidently the supreme pre-occupation; and to the fear of it the whole of the early Christian propaganda appealed. There is no reason, however, to believe that the Christians at Jerusalem ever “had all things in common,” as is asserted in the Acts of the Apostles, where other passages confute the claim. Such communities indeed had arisen in antiquity, and there was a kindred tradition that Pythagoras had centuries before, in Italy, converted by one discourse a multitude of hearers, who adopted a communal life. But the narrative in the Acts, especially as regards the fable of Ananias and Sapphira, seems to have been framed in the interest of some of the Christian communist groups which arose after the period in question, and whose promoters needed at once an apostolic precedent for their ideal and a menace against those who temporized with it. In the Pauline epistles the Gentile converts, so far from cultivating community of goods, are seen going to law with each other before heathen judges.

It is probable that the use of the sign of the cross, as a mark of membership and a symbol of salvation, belonged to the earliest stages of the cult; at least the sign in question figures as the mark of a body of religious enthusiasts in Jewry as early as the Book of Ezekiel (ix, 4; Heb.); and in the Apocalypse (vii, 2, 3) the “seal of the living God” appears to have been understood in the same sense as the sign prescribed in the prophecy. The Hebrew letter tau, there specified, is known to have represented at different periods different forms of cross; and the oldest of all is believed to have been the crux ansata of the Egyptians, which was a hieroglyph of immortal life. Thus the historic form of the crucifix was determined, not by the actual manner of normal crucifixion (for in that the arms were drawn above the head and not outspread), but by previous symbolism. In the Egyptian ritual of Osiris a spreading of the arms on the cross was in remote antiquity a form of mystic regeneration; and in some amulets the stauros or tree-cross of Osiris is found represented with human arms.