It has been necessary to consider at such length St Paul's account of the Eucharist, both because it antedates nearly by half a century that of the gospels, and because it explains the significance which the rite had no less for the Gnostics than for the great church. The synoptists' account is to be understood thus: Jesus, conscious that he now for the last time lies down to eat with his disciples a meal which, if not the Paschal, was anyhow anticipatory of the Millennial Regeneration (Matt. xix. 28), institutes, as it were, a blood-brotherhood between himself and them. It is a covenant similar to that of Exodus xxiv., when after the peace-offering of oxen, Moses took the blood in basins and sprinkled half of it on the altar and on twelve pillars erected after the twelve tribes, and the other half on the people, to whom he had first read out the writing of the covenant and said, "Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words."
But the covenant instituted by Jesus on the eve of his death was hardly intended as a new covenant with God, superseding the old. This reconstruction of its meaning seems to have been the peculiar revelation of the Lord to Paul, who viewed Christ's crucifixion and death as an atoning sacrifice, liberating by its grace mankind from bonds of sin which the law, far from snapping, only made more sensible and grievous. This must have been the gist of the special revelation which he had received from Christ as to the inner character of a supper which he already found a ritual observance among believers. The Eucharist of the synoptists is rather a covenant or tie of communion between Jesus and the twelve, such as will cause his life to survive in them after he has been parted from them in the flesh. An older prophet would have slain an animal and drunk its blood in common with his followers, or they would all alike have smeared themselves with it. In the East, even now, one who wishes to create a blood tie between himself and his followers and cement them to himself, makes under his left breast an incision from which they each in turn suck his blood. Such barbarisms was alien to the spirit of the Founder, who substitutes bread and wine for his own flesh and blood, only imparting to these his own quality by the declaration that they _are_ himself. He broke the bread not in token of his approaching death, but in order to its equal distribution. Wine he rather chose than water as a surrogate for his actual blood, because it already in Hebrew sacrifices passed as such. "The Hebrews," says Robertson Smith (_op. cit_. p. 230), "treated it like the blood, pouring it out at the base of the altar." As a red liquid it was a ready symbol of the blood which is the life. It was itself the covenant, for the genitive [Greek: tês diathêkês] in Mark xiv. 24 is epexegetic, and Luke and Paul rightly substitute the nominative. It was, as J. Wellhausen remarks,[11] a better cement than the bread, because through the drinking of it the very blood of Jesus coursed through the veins of the disciples, and that is why more stress is laid on it than on the bread. To the apostles, as Jews bred and born, the action and words of their master formed a solemn and intelligible appeal. It belongs to the same order of ideas that the headship of the Messianic _ecclesia_ in Judea was assigned after the death of Jesus to his eldest brother James, and after him for several generations to the eldest living representative of his family.